Amuse-Biatch Armchair Psychology: A Further Excavation of the Possible Roots of Mike Isabella’s Misogyny

And the evidence just keeps adding up, possums. In the above video interview with Bella, he recounts his origin story:

“I grew up as a young kid in an Italian family, and, uh, my grandma was cooking, and, you know, when you grow up in a really Italian family, what you see is all the women cooking and stuff like that, but I always loved being in the kitchen.”

Ach so! Let’s play Dr. Melfi for a second, shall we? So, as a result of his New Jersey Italian background, he views cooking as an exclusively feminine domain, but one in which he loved to immerse himself, thus setting up the conflict and anxiety around the issue of his masculinity, the castration anxiety arising from the warm and womb-like kitchen itself. Indeed, he was complicit, for as he details, he used to help prepare the “gravy,” or red tomato sauce. And what could be more symbolic of castration and emasculation, in these culinary terms, than the crushing of those round, testicular tomatoes to make a sauce that will be poured over those phallic spaghetti, which go from being hard and long to being broken for immersion in the pot, from which they emerge soft and floppy?

So of course having this Seveech woman in the kitchen, going head to head with him, brought back these issues. (It might be beneath us to point out the too-perfect-for-words symbolism of the fact that they were competing in shucking, um, clams. You couldn’t write this stuff. Also, we wonder if he has any women working in his kitchen; if anyone knows, do drop us a line. Oh yeah, does he have a girlfriend? This, too, would be fascinating to know.)

It’s all there, possums—his association of cooking with femininity and castration, his memory of having a bar of soap stuffed in his mouth, his view of older women as castrating harpies or Venus flytraps, his attempts to butch up the kitchen, his penchant for those Ed Hardy shirts sported by Jon Gosselin (the poster boy for the castrated male trying to reassert his masculinity in hateful ways).

Makes sense to us. Bella, please get help.

Mike Isabella: Eve Aronoff Is “This Nice Little Woman, Coming from Michigan, or Something Like That…Whuh? Is There Food in Michigan?”

Amuse-Biatch Pages Dr. Freud to Treat Mike Isabella's Fear of Vagina Dentata

Possums, we had earlier theorized that a hate-fuck involving Bella and Seveech was possible. But watching this video, it looks like they might well soon make out in a Camaro parked off the Leah and Hosea Memorial Lovers’ Lane somewhere in Northern New Jersey.

But we were unprepared (and yet boundlessly delighted) to have our cheap Freudian theories further reinforced, as it were, out of the horse-ass’s mouth.

Seveech says that Robin “One Less Old Lady” Leventhal is in the hot tub in the boys’ room, and Bella jumps in, complete with hand gestures, to say that the “old lady” is lying in wait for the boys, “She’s gonna eat ‘em up, like a Venus flytrap.”

!?!?!?!?!

Wow, just wow. Who needs a DSM-IV when they make it so easy for you? Seriously, possums. You ask for vagina dentata, you get Venus flytrap. Oy, Sigmund, what are we to do?

We need health care reform, if only so that this jackass can get help.

Top Chef Armchair Psychology Shocker: Misogynist Named After a Woman!

Well, possums, could this have anything to do with it? It makes us want to call him Bella or Liz, instead of the Asshole of New Jersey.

And then, of course, in what caused much Austrian goatee stroking and cigar smoking in the television room at Withering Depths, he mentioned that the fish (hmmmm, interesting, revealing choice, nicht wahr?) on his dish was supposed to resemble the bar of soap (a nice touch) that his mother (natürlich) would stick in his mouth (ach so!) as a kid.

Was denkt ihr, possums? This couldn’t possibly have anything to do with why Bella says things like “One less old lady to deal with” and generally talks shit about women with his “foul mouth,” could it?

Nah, we didn’t think so either. He's just as asshole, pure and simple

The Love That Dared to Speak Its Nickname

We love this sexist, ageist, retrograde, epically unattractive sewer of arrogance poached, halibut-like, in insecurity and resting on a bed of braised self-loathing, whom we have dubbed, if only temporarily, the Asshole of New Jersey. Why? Because he provides the powerful opiate of immediate, visceral, justified hatred (which we sorely needed after the kind of Wednesday we had, and we suspect we aren’t alone in that). In so doing, possums, he performs a valuable service for society. In a more metaphorical sphere, he would one day die for our television sins.

Life's Ceviche and Then You Blog

Oh the thrill, possums, the thrill.

Jennifer Carroll worked at Le Bernardin for five years, and now heads another Eric Ripert restaurant, and she can’t pronounce ceviche?!? Oh the vapors, possums, the deliciousness of it all.

It made us think of that speech Anthony Hopkins recites in The Silence of the Lambs, about Jody Foster’s character wearing cheap shoes and being a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. We know nothing about the background of Jennifer Carroll—who, to our delight, described herself as “a freakin’ bitch in the kitchen” who’s “made enough boys cry”—but something about her gives off a whiff of the trailer park. Is it the accent, her admission that she drinks too much and does stupid things as a result? Is it the way she looks perennially unkempt, or drunk, or angry, or on the verge of tears? Whatever it is, we love this hot mess, and the woman can cook. Had this been last season, we would have pegged her as the one most likely to engage in drunken hate-sex with the Asshole of New Jersey, except that this isn’t the season of Leah and Hosea, and the Asshole of New Jersey doesn’t deserve so much as a hate ass-whoopin’, much less a hate fuck.

Make no mistake about it. She may be unfamiliar with a comb, but she can handle a spatula like a dream, and will make for entertaining television. And best of all, she might just take the whole thing.