In Mary Gordon’s novel Final Payments, the narrator Isabel Moore marks a new phase of her life by having drunk sex with her married boss in a car. Her father dead, her Catholicism withering, Isabel is now free to be pawed at by a sexist politician. She reports, “He handled my breast as if he were making a meatball.”
Carol J. Adams takes the sentence as a chapter epigraph in her 1990 feminist classic The Sexual Politics of Meat. The book argues that patriarchy animalizes women and feminizes animals, subjecting both to violent consumption by men. (Women eat meat, too, of course, but Burger King does not promise us that doing so will defend our femininity from tofu-wielding husbands.) Her 2003 follow-up, The Pornography of Meat, is a grim compendium of examples: a 1978 Hustler cover that shows a woman’s torso entering a meat grinder, strip clubs with names like “Beef,” and countless advertisements that depict chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows in pin-up poses, sporting human breasts and high heels. A famous hockey player advises, “If you can pick women, you can pick cattle. You look for good angularity, nice legs, and capacity.”
In Final Payments, when Isabel groans in disgust post-coitus, her boss misunderstands her. “You were dying for it, weren’t you?” he asks. It is a rhetorical question, as befits a character who takes little interest in Isabel’s world. He picks her like a cow. He treats her like meat. He, to use a vulgarized theoretical term, objectifies her. But suppose he had handled Isabel’s breast as if he were making bread. Or, rather, had handled a mound of dough as if it were a breast. Would he remain a sleazy cliché, or would he transform into something more intriguing?
In recent years a few men—sometimes referred to as “horny chefs” or “thirst trap chefs”—have developed life-changing social media followings by posting porny videos of themselves baking while shirtless (or nearly so). Anthony Randello-Jahn, co-proprietor of Levain Doughnuts in Melbourne by day, becomes @TheDonutDaddy by night: a dommy baker who spanks glute-shaped rounds of dough in his unusually dark kitchen. Having made his living selling brownie-topped donuts with peanut butter cores, Randello-Jahn understands that the people want to be overserved. He obliges, pairing his dangly cross earring with a cross necklace and labeling the crème pâtissière that oozes out of baked orifices “Daddy’s Sweet Cream.” (Jelly donuts are filled with “Daddy’s Crazy Berries,” in case you were wondering.) Switzerland-based Cedrik Lorenzen enjoys the finer things. When he isn’t heavy petting a vulvic halved fruit, he is shaping perfect quenelles and tweezing microgreens onto plates. Even if he appears fully clothed, he might still arrive carrying a huge wheel of alpine cheese over one shoulder to remind you that he works out. (Post caption: “He gave excuses, I gave Le Gruyère.”) Lorenzen would be the thinking woman’s horny chef, if a thinking person’s anything could exist in thirty-second clips. Despite receiving countless side-eye gifs–and worse–in his comment sections, Lorenzen remains unwaveringly committed to the bit. If he winks, he winks sexily. Samoan-New Zealander Daniel Rankin, on the other hand, is silly and funny and gay. His brand is kind eyes, a pink thong, and a costumed pug named Fraser who gets more eggbeater licks than he probably should, pancreas-wise. In his most popular video, Rankin prepares a coconut chocolate tart while lip syncing to Kelis’s “Milkshake.” Recipe steps include pouring milk over his impressive upper body and cracking an egg with a bicep curl. The antics bring plenty of girls to the yard. @iona.ash, a book lover from Sheffield, U.K. writes, “Not to be dramatic but I am actually severely allergic to coconut and if this man fed this to me I’d eat every last crumb.”
These videos are “porny” in several senses. Most obviously, they feature pantomimed sex acts that seem, for all their figurativeness, startlingly explicit (e.g., Randello-Jahn lowers his stand mixer head in front of him as if it is performing fellatio, Lorenzen thrusts two fingers into a coconut and makes it squirt all over his arm, Rankin slow-motion ejaculates olive oil from a squeeze bottle held in front of him, etc.). The videos all take place in that strange nowhereland Steven Marcus termed “pornotopia”: these monochromatic undecorated kitchens could be spinning around in outer space. (On the rare occasions you hear a horny chef speak, you are startled to be reminded by his accent that he, too, suffers from geopolitical situatedness.) Horny chef videos are also repetitive and predictable in the same way that hardcore pornography is. The ingredients Lorenzen and Randello-Jahn use might change, but you can expect to see something rubbed furiously, something spanked, something fingered, some squirting or oozing, and a lick that the chef takes off of the plate, chest to the counter, bed-center cunnilingus-style. The horny chef video even has its version of a money shot: most videos end with the chef taking a big bite of whatever dish has been prepared—a performance of satisfaction that proves the whole thing has been “real.” The videos’ porniness resides in their form no less than their content. They feature the frenzied editing that Franklin Melendez, in his essay “Video Pornography, Visual Pleasure, and the Return of the Sublime,” identifies as a key feature of the form, in which quick cuts and multiplying angles contribute as much to the viewing pleasure as the sex. Strictly speaking, a horny chef video is all editing, no sex. It is a visual game, which moves quickly and sometimes works itself up into abstraction. Gripped banana. Penis. Fondled pea. Clitoris. Eight glistening, shimmying egg yolks. Jiggling itself. Above all, the videos adhere to what film theorist Linda Williams refers to in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” as pornography’s “principle of maximum visibility.” According to this principle, the more you can see, the better–even if visibility comes at other aesthetic costs. Horny chef cinematography performs a porny laying-bare. You could never see cheesecake that clearly with your naked eye; it requires precise lighting and state-of-the-art camera lenses. Like hard core, horny chef videos promise to enhance the visual pleasure of acts that are hard to see clearly when you actually participate in them. They offer a viewer an optical fantasy: Have your cake and see it too.
If we allow that porn is a form and a sensibility—not mere nudity—then horny chef videos are that rare case: visual, as opposed to written, pornography made primarily for and consumed primarily by straight women in large quantities. Some of these videos receive tens of millions of views. An accidental glimpse can be enough to hypnotize. (One commenter, caught viewing a Lorenzen video in the wild, writes, “not my hair stylist telling me to let it play again while i’m getting my hair done [laughing-crying emoji].”) So what is the special appeal of the horny chef video? I won’t pretend to be one of the @iona.ashes of the world, but I sympathize. Yes, many women enjoy mainstream porn, but it would be as undialectical to insist that any porn women watch is entirely liberatory as it would be to go full Andrea Dworkin. Women, like everybody else, can be disciplined by content they enjoy consuming. Indeed, at their worst, purity brain and porn brain are quite alike. Each offers women a smorgasbord of self-punishment. Don’t have the kind of sex that interests you; do have the kind of sex that doesn’t. Be ashamed of your breasts; be ashamed of your breasts. Purge your sins through self-flagellation; purify your body with a painful wax. Take a penitent fast; go on a crash diet.
In an essay about Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace, Angela Carter detects this same residue of orthodox piety in pornographic norms, writing, “Like a postulant, Ms Lovelace [sic] shaves herself before she engages in these primal yet abstract confrontations. She has removed all traces of the animal from her body, so that it has the cool sheen, not of flesh, but of a mineral substance. She is not an embodiment but a crystallisation.” Perhaps Carter, who suffered for years from an eating disorder, perceives the hardness of hard core fantasy so acutely because she nearly died for hating the softness of her own body—nearly perished chasing that tantalizing mirage, “good angularity.” In a song about the horror of advanced anorexia nervosa, Nicole Dollanganger also suggests that pornographic fantasy converges with religious asceticism, singing that when she was locked in her bedroom, her hair falling out, she spent her time, “Praying in the night to the angels of porn / Nails in their wrists and knees on the floor.” It is not just that women cast in hard core tend to be slim and taut. The nature of the medium grants them an ethereality once reserved for levitating saints. Hard core porn, in its pursuit of maximum visibility, abandons the techniques common to visual art, where a two-dimensional surface is given the illusion of three-dimensional presence. In its obsessive investigation of the body, hard core paradoxically transforms three-dimensional bodies into two-dimensional surfaces, separating appearance from flesh, sterilizing it. It thus offers women the usual puritanical alienation from their own bodies, which are too real to ever be immaculate.
Were a genuinely subversive pornography possible, it might be one that weds the visible and tactile. In “The Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde crafts a memorable analogy for the erotic (which she distinguishes from the conventionally pornographic) by recalling the margarine of her wartime childhood. A cheap butter substitute, the white margarine came packaged with a tiny bullet of food coloring that Lorde describes as looking “like topaz.” Lorde and her family members would allow the margarine to warm before kneading the pigment into it, transforming the weightless, tasteless orange-brown crystal into a pound of yellow fat. This is a feminine eroticism: not embodiment turned into crystallization, but crystallization turned into embodiment. Through the magic of touch, the Lordes returned a dehydrated, non-perishable substance that exists only to be seen, to a fuller, messier glory. Embodied, the food coloring becomes more visible (its yellowness revealed) as it becomes more mysterious (impossible to isolate, and, therefore, to locate). Lorde offers the image of melting topaz as a metaphor for eroticism that, unrepressed, makes vision warm, soft, and fleshly.
Whether one finds horny chef videos hot or cringe, one probably won’t mistake them for straight male fantasies. Still, the source of their femininity is hard to pinpoint. Horny chef videos cater to none of the old truisms about female sexuality, which hold that women are less visual than men, that women require narrative to be moved, and that women want to view soft, romantic interactions. Nor can we explain the difference by claiming that horny chefs avoid objectifying women because—on the contrary—they take objectification to a new and literal extreme. Yet the women turned on by horny chefs report finding their hyper-visual, non-narrative, rough and urgent, womanless videos to be less threatening than conventional porn. I suspect that by surrogating the female body, horny chef videos circumvent two potentially alienating elements of hard core detailed by Williams. The first is hard core’s impatience with feminine self-possession. While soft core celebrates performers who pose and dance in self-conscious command of their bodies, “Hard core desires assurance that it is witnessing not the voluntary performance of feminine pleasure, but its involuntary confession.” And yet what of those women who share the desire to witness the involuntary confession of feminine pleasure while also resenting or distrusting the male audience’s insistence upon it? Horny chef videos manage such ambivalence by providing only the trappings of involuntary confession. When bodies jiggle, shake, leak, or squirt they supply the evidence of a pleasure received. By transposing these expressions from humans to food, our chefs coax bodies to confess without claiming to have triumphed over a real woman’s self-command. Second, horny chef videos avoid the trap Williams identifies in which, the more tenaciously the pornographer attempts to capture authentic feminine pleasure, the further that pleasure recedes behind male fantasy. Horny chefs amplify difference and decline the pursuit of authenticity by replacing women’s bodies with strange, decontextualized colors and textures that have no mystery to probe. They thereby build a reassuring epistemic humility into their videos—these are men who don’t need to possess absolute knowledge of the female body in order to activate its pleasures. As a result, the performances of horny chefs read as experiments rather than arguments. A woman who does not enjoy spitting (for example) can watch a horny chef spit on things without feeling pinned down against her will by a claim (“Women like to be spat upon”) or command (“Learn to like being spat upon”). Because feminine pleasure is the raison d’être of horny chef videos but not their object of investigation or even of documentation, they feel spacious in the places where hard core feels stifling.
My proposition that women could benefit from being the absent referent in food content returns us to the question that opened this essay. Why are the sexual politics of pastry so different from the sexual politics of meat? (For the record, Lorenzen does sometimes prepare flesh, but the comically tentative pats that he occasionally delivers to a filet of salmon are the exception that proves the rule. Horny chefs understand instinctively that meat is dangerous territory.) For one, slicing and grilling are macho in ways that icing and folding are not. The baking man always remains aligned on some level with femininity. And while meat can only ever shrink under heat, horny chefs’ creations expand in whipped foams and voluminous proofs. The baker’s ingredients are also less dead than the butcher’s, where meat will rot, picked fruit can ripen on a counter and certainly takes less violence to procure; one might imagine a gentle pluck by an outreached hand. Meanwhile, the item that receives the most attention from horny chefs literally lives and breathes. However hard you slap a well-made yeasted dough, it will start rising cheerfully, cheekily, back up. You just can’t keep a good loaf down. In Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot, Kyla Wazana Tompkins explains that yeast and gelatin (another baking staple), “act in uncannily agential ways,” and therefore defy classification as either subject or object. Horny chefs play up the uncanny agency of their ingredients, always showing them as bodies in motion: bouncing marshmallow, rising dough, squirting fruit, wobbling yolks, bubbling sauces, and melting chocolate. If faced in the end with a carefully decorated cake he dare not toss around, the chef will move the camera to and fro in a circle instead. The constant movement keeps creepiness at bay. Lively ingredients and dynamic perspective ensure that uncanny flattening never happens, even as the viewer is invited to be subject or object: ladies’ choice. Finally, baking ingredients (butters, yolks, gels, creams, fruits) and processes (squeezing, kneading, rolling, piping) emphasize tactility, which bears feminist significance. After all, Carter objects that it is a lack of “tactile immediacy” in Lovelace’s work that defangs it, that severs sex “from its function as language, its function as warfare.” Touch is what takes us out of the relative safety of watchful distance. It is inescapably reciprocal. One cannot touch without being touched back; one cannot be touched without touching back. And while it may be impossible for any of us, but especially women, to see ourselves through our own eyes, we can only touch with our own hands.
Upon first encountering horny chef videos I, like many, thought food was what made them stupid. If anything, it is what makes them smart—even moving. I confess, when Daniel Rankin stared out at me from the device I use daily to track my weight and calorie intake and admonished me not to participate in the viral trend of making substitute Biscoff cheesecake by putting cookies in yogurt, “Because that’s stupid, and you’re not stupid… If you want a cheesecake, make a proper cheesecake,” I felt the burn of a nascent tear in my vicious little eye. Haters will keep commenting “Stop sexualizing food” under these men’s work, but I hope they never do.
Elizabeth Greeniaus teaches in the English department at Skidmore College. She writes about aesthetics, religion, and nineteenth-century British literature. She lives in Troy, New York, with her husband and a jar of sourdough starter named Buffy, after the vampire slayer.
Article Illustrations by Carolyn Jao for Mid Theory Collective