i kind of want to write a post on gender roles as expressed in the Shapiro Family Lifestyle Channel, like normally Abby is the one who does domestic/tradwife stuff and Ben does politics crap, but now that it's time to cook a turkey Ben's pretending to be a chef https://twitter.com/bad_takes/status/1331694217190658056

the real question is whether abby is secretly cooking the turkey behind the scenes / managing the turkey cooking, or whether ben has actually drunk the flavor-aid and insists on roasting that fucker himself

anyways, cooking analysis from one frame of a video i refuse to watch: ben has got a series of tools laid out in front of him that are all inappropriate to the task at hand. they're there because they fit the image, not for any real purpose.

i can tell by looking that that turkey hasn't been brined, which is already a sign of disaster ahead. he could be using the knife to butterfly it, but that's probably too new-fangled for the tradlife grift he's got going on.

really what he's about to do is brush it in oil and then dust it with salt before popping it in the oven. the only thing he needs for that is the brush; the forks and the knife are strictly for carving. why even get them out? you might spatter turkey juice on them!

he's got a couple of big-ass sticks of butter out? i guess so that he can smile and wink at the camera when he talks about stuffing the turkey with butter, which can only be explained by a very long digression about the history of nutrition and the social construction of beauty

by which i mean, how an obscure academic dispute about the causes of increasing weight in the mid-20th century (sugar vs. fat, with the fat hypothesis winning because of the fat guy knowing how to play the academic game) later plays out in the cult of Thin Ladyness

so the butter is itself a nod to how Masculine ManMen don't care about silly LadyStuff like ~~saturated fat~~, despite the part where literally none of this has any actual connection to health or weight

and it's all even more ridiculous because moist turkey doesn't come from jamming two sticks of butter into it, it comes from brining it and then cooking it slowly (the cold oven method is good), but none of that has got ~~manliness~~ associated with it, so ben is skipping it

anyways the real question is whether he starts scraping that dull-ass department-store knife against a honing rod and grinning because That's What Men Do At Thanksgiving