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.
