Macaroni and Macarons
Mars and Venus. While it’s not quite Lady and the Tramp (1955), you have to feel sorry for Sienna Miller and Salma Hayek (in December 2016 and April 2017 respectively). Being the butt of an in-joke while being caught unaware is one thing, but it’s quite another if it’s in front of an audience of millions. While many types of food have been used as euphemisms, it’s fascinating that a Japanese specialty has been ruined by the use of a word being used to described a different act of splashing. This was to be expected coming from a cultural tradition where they think nothing of cuisine being consumed on the body of a naked woman. It’s called nyotaimori, but if you’re going to do it on a man then it’s called nantaimori.
After the box office success of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973), Warner Brothers got it into their heads that they should collaborate with a Japanese film company to make The Yakuza (1974). That film was a flop but it would have been a hit had they introduced the concept of literally treating a woman like a piece of meat. It would have added a delightful variation on the term, pleasures of the flesh. Such a scene was included in a film co-starring Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon - Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991). This was also released by Warner Bros. and was also a flop. Rising Sun (1993) was a similar film but was a big hit, as was Black Rain (1989) - both films were made by different companies. In his final months, Bruce was said to have visited a Japanese restaurant in Hong Kong but nothing has been said about whether he was familiar with what I like to call the human trough.
Having Madeline Smith lying on a bed surrounded by garlic would have made for a more appropriate sight gag had it been included in an earlier film of hers - The Vampire Lovers (1970). When you look at the cultural appropriation of having sumo wrestlers at a Chinese banquet in Enter the Dragon (something that Bruce Lee should have questioned), it’s a wonder that the film-makers didn’t include nyotaimori considering that the film was already going to have sexual elements. God forbid the Westerners who found themselves working in Hong Kong since the Cantonese population have so many creative metaphors for the pleasures of the skin, as I detailed on Medium for an article called Adrenalized Chemistry.
Associating appetite-whetting with women as much as food is as old as time itself. The woman on the left below is an actress named Geene Courtney. The photo was taken in 1955 when the Zion Meat Products Company selected her to be the Queen of National Hot Dog Week. While she is wearing a bra, Jacqueline Joyce didn’t wear one when she was crowned the new Queen of the Salami in March 1951. Geene Courtney’s previous (and first) acting credit was in 1945 whereas her next (and final) acting credit was in 1963. In 1949, her pose with a fishing rod near Lake Michigan made it easier to visualize her as a dominatrix. It redefines what it means to be suckered in hook, line and sinker.
As for the woman on the right, this is a German actress named Lotte Rausch. Her film career slowed down considerably after this photo was taken in October 1957. The world’s first sex shop opened in Germany circa 1962, following which Lotte’s career continued. Like the Italians with their spaghetti Westerns, the Swedish rivalled the Americans with their p*rn*graphy. It would appear that the Swedish were ahead of the curve in 1944. A few days after she turned 21, a figure-skating actress by the name of Maj-Britt Rönningberg was photographed with huge salamis during the making of a film called Fattiga Riddare (1944). This made it pretty clear that she was fair game in the eyes of hungry men with however they chose to aim their gumption.
As for the right photo on the below mash-up, I can imagine an uproar from feminists of the time seeing these women participate in what was a salami competition based in New York (the same competition that Jackie Joyce had won in 1951). One particular feminist who would have been up in arms over the whole thing was Alice Paul, since she shared the same name as the woman who can be seen kneeling upwards. The 1950s marked the end for the Golden Age of New York City delis. There was a salami shortage in New York that resulted in a black market. There’s only so much salami that a woman can eat, so it begs the question as to what else they were doing with those salamis. It would have been a shame to have it all go to waste regardless of the degradation, so they were either fed to the dogs or the homeless.
To look at the history of Hollywood is to analyze the history that went along aside it. In the 1940s and ‘50s, women had more power in Hollywood than in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Once the Hays Code came to an end in November 1968, the liberation of the male imagination naturally led to the stagnation of female development. April 1968 marked the release of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where there is a transition shot from a bone to a satellite. When you think about what happened between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, there is no reason why Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022) couldn’t have done something similar with the transition from an apple to the digital apple. It’s something to consider when you look at the number of people who bemoan how that film began.
When you look at the below left photo, it’s easy to see the attraction behind a woman participating in bobbing apples. It gave men a good idea about what she would look like if she was willing to be compared to a roast pig i.e. the hog-tied experience a.k.a. spit-roast. By the time that we get to Kim Basinger being photographed in December 1987 for Esquire, the name of the magazine speaks for itself. The apples being mostly red is a reference to what the snake had offered in the Garden of Eden. From 1994 to 2001, the Hollywood Women’s Press Club presented the Golden Apple Award to entertainers usually for their conduct than their product. All four leads of The Golden Girls attended the ceremony on December 14 in 1986.
In Latin, mălum means evil whereas mālum means apple. Regardless of the chicken and egg dilemma, it doesn’t matter what the forbidden fruit was because it was a symbol for sex. If an orange symbolizes a woman’s nether regions then melons emphasize how tantalizing that a woman is in a way that’s less forbidden to censors. This is why so many actresses have posed with melons. For example, Hilary Duff, Liza Goddard, Salma Hayek and Christina Applegate. It doesn’t help the bible that a part of a man’s throat is called the Adam’s apple. This leads to two brands that use a bitten apple as their logo.
The apple cord in the Ann Summers logo is vertical like the cross in the Venus symbol where the cord in the Apple Inc. logo is diagonal like the spear in the Mars symbol. For many, there would be something spine-tingling about sisters going to an Ann Summers event together, but that happened with two of the Winstone sisters in December 2008 i.e. Lily and Jaime. Today marks the release of a film called Forbidden Fruits. It’s about a sisterhood of witches named Apple, Cherry, Fig and Pumpkin. The actress who plays Fig is biracial - half white and black. That may seem racist but then you have to consider nicknames for intercourse with a group of black men: blackberry jam and slam jam.
A brown-skinned woman dressed in green goes down really well in Dubai because it’s reminiscent of pistachio chocolate. Actress Chloe Bailey is one such example as she attended the opening of a hotel called Atlantis The Royal. The photos were taken on January 21 in 2023 but the hotel actually opened on February 10. Out of all the actresses that were chosen, it had to be her because of a sex scene that she had participated in for the pilot of Swarm (which was going to air in March). Also dressed in green at that January event were two white celebrities - model Leonie Hanne and actress Rebel Wilson.
With fruit, you don’t get any more Freudian than bananas. This is why it’s become socially awkward to eat one unless you decide to chop it up into individual pieces that you can then consume in a bowl of ice cream or cereal. A strawberry has been used to subliminally communicate the idea of a man’s glans being touched, hence the below left photo of an actress who was so provocative that she was cast in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). If you’re a woman who wants a man to post his pecker in your posterior, asking him if he carries cellophane is a discreet reference to a condom when you see how a cucumber is covered.
The context of the photo depicting Brooke Shields chewing on a cherry was that Jay Leno wanted to remind her of something that she had said in the May 1995 issue of a magazine called Details. Coincidentally and ironically, the actress on the cover is someone who had less clout but similarly participated in underaged nudity (but to a more severe degree). The woman whom I’m referring to is Traci Lords. Anyway, Jay was referencing the following question: “What’s something you’re good at that is totally useless?”
It’s not a coincidence that Brooke Shields and Traci Lords were featured in the May 1995 issue of Details. They both had CDs to advertise. Traci had her debut album, 1000 Fires, whereas Brooke was on the cover of an ensemble cast recording that she had contributed to. It is titled Grease! The Newest Broadway Cast Recording. One of the tropes in storytelling is the use of grapes to signify desirability. The trope is called grapes of luxury, and you see it in depictions of ancient Greece and Rome. About the latter, it’s fitting that one of the last things that Malcolm McDowell says as the titular Caligula (1979) is scrotum.
Stanley Kubrick could have directed Caligula to compensate for not being able to do a film about Napoleon. Besides having already directed Malcolm in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Kubrick specialized in making films about sexual deviancy whether it be Lol!ta (1962) or Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Lol!ta was shocking for being about the wrong type of age gap relationship. The iconic poster depicts the title character sucking on a lollipop, something that Teddy Salavas got away with turning into a trademark for his detective character - Kojak (1973 - 1978). Sucking a lollipop is meant to be a symbol of innocence but then you get someone like Shirley Temple doing the lollipop music number in Bright Eyes (1934) where she sucks on a straw and has her face shoved in different foods.
A 1982 Madonna made it worst by participating in a photo shoot where she held a lollipop while blowing chewing gum - simulating a schlong and a condom. Social etiquette dictates that some things can’t be said out loud in fear of being heard by children or powerful people with authoritarian sense of punishment, this is why the best slang for condoms is ravioli due to how the pasta resembles a condom packet. The irony of rejecting Playboy and the like is that actresses will still end up being objectified in some form or other. If waiting for a child to turn 18 is like waiting for a plant to grow then Celine Dion is a fruit tree because she was 12 years old when her future husband met her. Rene Angelil, at the time, was 38 years old.
In 1940, an actress named Dorothy Henry could be seen wearing a bikini while she milked a cow on a Philadelphian stage. She only did one film: The Wives of the Prophet (1926). Having missing children displayed on milk cartons is disturbing when you see the vomit-inducing symbolism in Shirley Temple’s War Babies (1932). A priest talks about being lost and found but you wouldn’t want a priest to find a missing child.