Nearly Naked Sushi Fu

I read in the St. Petersburg Times last week about a restaurant that just opened somewhere in Tampa Bay called Nearly Naked Sushi. As the name suggests, patrons select their sushi options from plates spread out upon bodies of prone g-string and pasty-clad ladies. An accompanying photograph showed the torso only of one such nubile nymph, with a plate of some seaweed-wrapped rice and fish dish perched upon her mons, with patrons standing in the background as if this were any normal cocktail party.

Gives new meaning to the phrase, "tastes like tuna." Or, as Toni Morrison has said more poetically, "smells like the ocean, tastes like the sea." (An aside: in an unexpected simile, one of my new favorite writers Junot Diaz says, "tastes like Heinecken." My friend Raymond and I get quite a kick out of it. This is how you know I am not a male basher. One of my very best friends is male. Raymond likes to ask me, "want to go out for some Heinecken tonight?")

Don't these people worry about getting pubes in their sushi? I have also wondered this about the men who frequent Café Risque on I-75 just south of Gainesville (Couples Welcome!). I went in once – don't ask why – and saw guys eating burgers and drinking beer right there where the bored/stoned out of their minds pole-dancers were gyrating and squatting. Of course, I also noticed, with both the pole-dancers and the Nearly Naked Sushi girls, that wearing the g-string entails shaving off one's pubes entirely or so closely that they might as well be gone.

Number One: without that protective coat of hair, I would soooo get a yeast infection – which results in something else one does not want to ingest with sushi or burgers. Number Two: without the hair, doesn't one's pussy look a bit prepubescent? (Um, that's why it's called pre-PUBE-scent, right?) With all the brouhaha about Amber Alerts and sexual predators around, why isn't anyone questioning grown men wanting grown women to look like twelve-year-olds "down there"?

Why, precisely, does our society ostracize child pornographers and make jokes about pussy tasting like tuna, then turn around and open up a restaurant where people eat raw tuna off a woman's shaved pubic area?

And Raymond tells me I'm crazy. "It's edgy," he says of Nearly Naked Sushi.

"Right," I say. "Edgy in that retro sort of way. Like the 1950s. Edgy like Playboy Bunnies. Edgy in the way women's bodies as objects of conspicuous consumption have always been edgy."

"If you want something really edgy," I tell Raymond, "Let's go in there with those biker dykes you know and see how people react."

"Are you kidding," Raymond laughs, "lesbians are totally hot."

"That's true only if they're young, breasty, and Scandinavian, or maybe that Afrolatinasian mix. I don't see Howard Sterne begging someone's Meemaw and Aunt Gladys to do a lesbian shower scene."

Raymond concedes the point. A rarity for him.

"In my fantasy," I tell him, "the Nearly Naked Sushi girl conceals a razor under her tongue that she flips out mid-sashimi. One by one, the poly-blend tropical shirts and gold-chained chests of the day traders and house flippers tumble. One by one, their plastic-boobed, strappy-sandaled pseudo-Barbies get upended. Headline reads: 'Tragedy Slashes Tampa Bay Eatery.'" My fantasy is all razor-toting, g-string fu, to use Joe Bob Briggs' term for B-movie violence.

Raymond tells me, "Your fantasy sounds a lot like Quentin Tarantino's. Talk about women's bodies as objects of conspicuous consumption. Nearly Naked Sushi girl as Uma Thurman."

I concede the point. A rarity for me.

Raymond has given me something to chew on. As free as I think myself, I remain a prisoner of the male gaze.

I'll have to reconsider my position later. Right now, I have new fantasy film in mind. Pissed off razor-toting grannies take control of the country, starting with Florida. I'm calling it Meemaw-Fu.