slutburger

I meant to write a post about Padma Lakshmi's now-infamous "slutburger" ad for Hardee's/Carl's Jr. a while back, but somehow the chance to do so when it was still relevant slipped by me. So, I'm gonna do it now instead, when I haven't seen it on the air in weeks and no one cares. Awesome.


Still, here she is:



Anyone besides me want to help her lick barbecue sauce off her ankle now?

I consider my post-ad-watching desire to put my tongue in Padma's burger-filled mouth to be well within the realm of normality. However, it seems plenty of folks would rather call her a sell-out and accuse her of all manner of sexual indiscretion, rather than kiss her. And this, I both do not understand and find rather grotesque.

A few weeks ago, my mom sent me this little blurb about it from my hometown paper. It struck me as one of the most out-of-touch things I've encountered in a bit. First of all, it's author claims the slutburger ad is "the sort of thing you'd expect from a Paris Hilton" but not a "classy beauty" like Padma. Because only girls with porn vids running rampant through the corridors of the internet would dare flash cleavage while eating a burger, right? Certainly no one with goods enough to nab a preeminent novelist the likes of Rushdie would do that, right? Well, why the hell not?!

The blurb from The Tennessean's food blog wants to act like it's all indignant that this woman so often associated with schmancy food would dare lower herself to hawk fast food, but this surface argument that it's author is attempting to make holds absolutely no water. For Exhibit A to that effect, I bring you this behind-the-scenes video in which Padma explains her own personal nostalgia for shitty fast food burgers. And frankly, the idea that Padma Lakshmi, gosling-like goddess of the haute cuisine scene, has a big heart-on for a burger just makes perfect sense to me. I mean, I love labor-intensive, esoteric food as much as the next girl, but really? If you offered me a guacamole cheddar burger from Bobbi's Dairy Dip, a craphole ice-cream stand over on Charlotte in Nashville, I'd be on it so fast you'd think it was made of fuck-me shoes. Even the most committed gourmands among us still get all woody over the occasional junk food indulgence. It's not like that stuff doesn't taste good, even when we've gone to the trouble of refining our palates.

No, the problem with Padma's ad is not that she's eating a fast food burger rather than braised pork cheek on a bed of salsify and Jerusalem artichokes. It's that, as the food blogger says, she has a classy image and yet, in lending her fair countenance to Hardee's/Carls Jr., she's joined the ranks of other sluterific pop-culture-friendly ho-bags like poor Paris. Now, I've defended Paris before. I actually love that carwash fetish-girl burger ad. I think her vampy camera mugging almost makes up for her role as an unenthusiastic cunnilingus receiver in the aforementioned titty flick. She's sexy, she's clearly having fun with her well-heeled harlot image and she owns that ad. So the idea that it would be an insult to Padma to compare her to Paris is, well, insulting to Padma.

In reality, the import behind the rhetoric in that little newspaper post is the underlying assumption is that "classiness" and overt sexuality are incompatible. And to that, I ask, why can't Padma lick sauce from her fingertips and let us marvel at her stellar pecan-colored tits in that push-up bra and not still be a perfectly respectable food snob and ex-wife of a literary supernova? To use the term "tramp" (and mean it derogatorily) to describe Padma just reeks of the kind of advocacy for the compartmentalization of female sexuality that does no sexually comfortable woman any good at all.

Now, this is not to say that other Carl's Jr./Hardee's ads don't play on some problematic traditionally gendered behavioral stereotypes in which dudes become dim-witted, narcissistic cavemen and women become nagging harpies (although hot ones). But no one of either gender fares very well in those ads, and undoubtedly, only dumbasses who send email forwards like this one would think they're funny anyway. See Sarah Haskins' video commentary to that effect below. Haskins makes a worthy point regarding advertisers thinking they're clever in targeting the basest of aspects of culturally prescribed "manliness" and even goes on to demonstrate how Paris has talents for multitasking that exceed the norm:



However, Padma's ad isn't crass or puerile at all. It is, in fact, dreamy and nostalgic. And I continue to feel that her conflating of her sexual charisma with her foodie street cred seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Doing so is, most certainly, in keeping with her career trajectory thus far. I mean, it's not like she got hired on as the host of Top Chef because of her food knowledge. She got hired on because she knows food and because she's startlingly beautiful. (Some among us might argue that Tom Colicchio's smirking blue eyes don't hurt the show much either.) Even long before Top Chef, she put out this book. And if that cover doesn't draw a visual analogy between her body and all the luscious, juicy fruits of the world, I don't know what does.

It's hardly new news that food is sexy. There's also nothing revelatory about the idea that Padma Lakshmi is incredibly genetically blessed. So, saying she can't have her burger and make you want to fuck her too doesn't do much besides advocate the annoying cultural directive that women should lock their libidos in the bedroom and pretend they aren't all fuck-happy in their waking lives. I can't speak for Padma, but I do know that kind of compartmentalization is exhausting for me. And it also smacks of the kind of retrogressive restrictions on the behavior of women that, well, get us nowhere in terms of claiming our sexual personae as our own.

...Which is all just to say, if anyone wants to make me a guacamole cheddar burger with a good, black, crusty layer of carcinogenic char, I'll do my best Padma for you, all sexy-like.