Everyone talks about the wonderbread guy but nobody talks about how the wonderbread isn’t necessarily the fetish object - it’s supposed to symbolize like overcommodification or something. Like wonderbread is such a synthetic suburban concoction it implies wherever it is, that area has become gentrified and mown over by capitalism and this like caricature of commodification. That’s why all the other pics the dude commissions are women (typically white and blonde) chopping down forests and stuff. The fetish isn’t the bread. The fetish is this extreme caricature of earth and culture being consumed by the unstoppable force of like. Sterile Kroger marketability and commerce. That’s why the women are always BUYING the bread and not like, fucking it. Its not about the loaves people. It’s about Karen Bad End TF.
Thank you for the additional information!! And also this is so much more succinct than my rant
To be completely fair to the folks who focus on the bread thing, the fact of it being bread is not purely incidental to its role as a class signifier. If you look at the guy’s broader patronage, yes, there’s commissioned art of blonde white women personally cutting down rain forests with chainsaws in order to build giant smoke-spewing factories, but the thing that these factories are manufacturing is… sandwiches. Many of his commissioned pieces include dialogue explicitly stating that this is the case. Leaving aside the implications of the fact that these pieces are apparently situated in a world in which a “sandwich factory” is a thing that exists, that this whole complicated edifice of eroticised environmental destruction ultimately loops back around to making sandwiches suggests there’s more to it than Wonderbread just happening to be a convenient signifier of gentrification.
So, on the one hand he kinks on women who are styled to indicate that they’re extremely wealthy and powerful (Able to buy up and pave over land to open giant polluting factories, I think examples I’ve seen will have them in sharp power suits and diamond jewelry just going to the grocery store, etc), but on the other hand, the central crux of it all is women making sandwiches; one of the go-to shibboleths of 21st-century not-so-ironic sexism.
I don’t think I dare to pull on the thread of that contradiction any harder.
She’s going to make you a fucking sandwich whether you like it or not.
