Excited face
Perma-bored stone fox Padma Lakshmi, 38, has signed a development deal to star in her own NBC sitcom about a woman in the culinary world. Single Serving is a possible title, which sucks, but, to be fair, it could be so much worse. I’m skeptical that this will last long, not just because Emeril was such a spectacular bomb that it lasted approximately one episode, but because shows in this genre that have lasted are generally starred in by comic actors, and Padma can’t even convincingly play herself on Top Chef.
Still, this is a huge important deal to me, as an American desi. Growing up, there were zero Indians in the media, no Indian models in magazines. Margaret Cho had just her prostitutes on M*A*S*H, I had nuthin’. Visibility matters to me in a way that I have trouble explaining to folks who’ve never checked the “other” box under race. So, for me to read that a crappy sitcom, is being built around an Indian star, feels good. The un-stereotypical role feels good too. Reading comments from mouth-breathers on the internet who rip it to shreds on it’s presumed lack of merit and the star’s slurred torpor is something to behold. It’s like a scene from post-racial America.
gross, Burger King
This image has been making the rounds, called “the ‘most overtly blow-jobby ad’ I’ve ever seen” by Copyranter. Burger King’s response to the many complaints they’ve received for the ad, created for the Singapore market? That it “did not run in the U.S. or any other markets…and generated positive consumer sales.”
Basically “You weren’t supposed to see this, and also, sex sells so fuck you, customers” Still, Burger King, along with Hardees/ Carl’s Jr., and Jack in the Box have been running overtly sexual ads in the U.S., most featuring women writhing around with meat, plus the oddly sex-organ themed “name our holes” ad from Hardees. What makes this different from the one where Audrina Patridge licks her fingers, or the one where Padma Lakshmi hitches up her dress so the dribbling sauce doesn’t land on it, is that the objectification here is wholly unambiguous. The woman is made to look like blow up doll, glassy-eyed and without hunger. The burger is supposed to represent the virility that’s often associated with meat.
Can p.r. people at least stop saying “sex sells” and say something more accurate like “the sexualized bodies of women are used to sell things to women and men because women are the sex class and centuries of their erasure from intellectual and artistic spheres leads to their bodies embodying the concept of desire, itself. Men could not be shown as being desired in the same way because desire, and subjectivity is a masculine attribute, that would remove their subjectivity and make them objects. Plus it would be totes gay”
