Seduced by a burger: Carl's Jr. advertising finds its groove

When I watch the Carl's Jr. commercial featuring "Top Chef" host and mega-model Padma Lakshmi make hot sweet love to a Western Bacon Cheeseburger, I have many thoughts, some of which, I confess, are not entirely to my credit. The spot features the former Mrs. Salman Rushdie sitting on a brownstone stoop in a clingy sundress hiked up mid-thigh, cramming the giant burger into her educated maw and sucking barbecue sauce from her fingers and wrists. Let's not mince onions here: This is sex with a burger.

You might think that here, at last, television advertising might have crossed some sort of debauched Rubicon, or at least some tripwire at the Federal Communications Commission. Not even close. It's merely the latest chapter in the weird mash-up between sex and diabolically unhealthful fast food.

What gives?

If my cultural antenna doesn't fail me, the mood of the country is slightly more relaxed about sexual matters. Global economic crisis tends to put provincialism on the back burner.

Not only that, fast food has a huge image problem. This is the bottom rung of America's food chain. Prescribed use of fast food makes you undesirable. The Western Bacon Cheeseburger from Carl's Jr., for instance, has 720 calories, 33 grams of fat and 1,410 milligrams of sodium, a veritable pillar of biblical salt.

The Carl's Jr. commercial, from Mendelsohn Zien Advertising in Los Angeles, is in heavy rotation this month with a duplicate for corporate cousin Hardee's that's running in Eastern markets. The ads reunite Mendelsohn Zien and director Chris Applebaum, who created the 2005 commercial with a nearly naked Paris Hilton lathering up a Bentley. Applebaum also directed the 2007 campaign for Carl's Jr. flat-bun burgers, featuring a hip-hop duo serenading their high school teacher's flat butt -- her badonkadon't, if you will.

All future correspondence to Mendelsohn Zien and Applebaum should be addressed to the Eighth Circle of Hell.

I cannot pretend to be offended by these ads. Young men are coarse, callow, emotional imbeciles with suicidal dietary habits. In other words, from a marketing perspective, these ads are perfection itself, practically verite. Meanwhile, if I put on my magic deconstructing spectacles, I can see neo-feminist subversion in these messages. Note the tagline of the Padma Lakshmi commercial: "More than a piece of meat." This was the cri de coeur of feminism back in the day, and though it refers to the burger, it is also a tweak of conscience to males slobbering over the accomplished actress-author-chef. Take that, you objectifying pig.