Let’s unpack … stuff me like a Berliner
“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
Stuff me like a Berliner, is a line taken from the erotica piece penned by Beverly Rossellini and Tabitha Switchitt in the Nothing to See Here, Berlin’s premiere highbrow-lowbrow erotic fiction zine. What does this mean? Berliner the citizen? Berliner the donut? Is this sexy? Is it funny? Is it political? Follow along as Let’s unpack unpacks …
As intellectuals, we must ask ourselves:
Are donuts
more interesting than
sex?
A LINE BY LINE CONTENT ANALYSIS:
“She lines up all the Berliners in a row, and pegs them one by one, filling them up with her sweet syrup as she moves her hips back and forth and down the line.
The heat in the kitchen is always stifling, and it’s hard to tell where the flush in her cheeks is coming from.
She works feverishly, stuffing each one with the sticky red goo, until, lost in her work, she squeezes the bag too hard. ”
from Stuff Me Like a Berliner
By Beverly Rossellini and Tabitha Switchitt
“Stuff me like a Berliner”
stuff verb [ T ]/stʌf/
stuff verb [T] (FILL)
to fill the inside of something:
To stuff a turkey, or other meat or vegetable, is to fill it with other food before cooking it.
If you stuff yourself, you eat a large amount of food
Definition of stuff from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press
Let’s digress towards US President John F. Kennedy’s June 26, 1963 speech in West Berlin …
“Stuff me like a Berliner”
… he had prepared words with his speechwriter, but characteristically decided to improvise the morning of, declaring:
“Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was ‘Civis Romanus sum [I am a Roman citizen].’ Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner …
All free men, wherever they live,
are citizens of Berlin,
and, therefore, as a free man,
I take pride in the words,
Ich bin ein Berliner.”
FROM LEFT: Berliner donut; JFK’s phonetically-written notes for “Ich bin ein Berliner”; JFK looks on over crowd gathered for June 26, 1963 speech in West Berlin
QUESTION: Did JFK call himself a jelly donut by saying, “Ich bin ein Berliner?”
ANSWER: No. In West Berlin within the region of Brandenburg, where JFK spoke, jelly donuts are actually called Pfannkuchen, not Berliners. There, it is understood that Berliner means a citizen on Berlin. JFK would have had to have said “Ich bin ein Pfannkuchen,” if he wanted to say he was a jelly donut in this case.
NOW, back to the line-by-line content analysis at hand…
QUESTION: In this context, to what extent is “sticky red goo” from the Stuff Me Like a Berliner erotica sexual? How is it sexualised? Does “sticky red goo” refer to semen? Or perhaps menstrual blood?
CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING:
QUESTION: To what extent is “Stuff Me Like a Berliner,” sexualized within the context of erotica?
Further viewing for a contextual analysis:
In the above, we have unpacked the de-erotification of food. Later, we will unpack the erotification of food:
