American School, circa 1930: Boy Fucking a Turkey. Oil on canvas. 14″ x 10″.
Well, you did it, didn’t you? Did you really think that a headline like “This Is a Painting of a Boy Fucking a Turkey” was some kind of elaborate clickbait to get you to buy V!@gr@? No. You read it and immediately clicked on the link because you wanted to see a painting of a boy fucking a turkey. Congratulations. Here it is. Are you happy? Does it meet your standards for poultry-violation-themed art?
I mean, it’s just as advertised. A painting—not a sculpture, not an etching, not an impressive, improbably rude Lego construction. What you might have reckoned to be a colorful figure of speech is, in fact, nothing of the sort. “Fucking a turkey” isn’t mere coarse slang for a massive screw-up (“Hey Democrats, you really fucked the turkey this time!”); a difficult skateboard maneuver (“Did you see the way he fucked the turkey in that half-pipe?”); or an unfortunate culinary mishap (“Damn it, Lester, I told you to baste the turkey every fifteen minutes, and now it’s dry as shit, and you completely fucked the turkey, you fucking fuck!”) No; “fucking a turkey” is, as should now be obvious, the literal act of penetrating a turkey with one’s penis.
The question that immediately arises upon first seeing this turkey-fucking painting is, clearly: how can it be that the flowering bush at left is in full bloom? Contrary, perhaps, to conventional turkey-fucking expectations, the viewer is left to draw one of two vague conclusions: a) the turkey fucking is taking place well prior to Thanksgiving, during a more temperate season, or b) the turkey-fucking is taking place south of the Mason-Dixon line, which, well, explains so much. Yet further examination only deepens the mystery. Are the boy’s rose-colored bedroom slippers somehow integral to the ritual, or simply a flight of the artist’s fancy? Did the turkey reciprocate? Was the boy using adequate protection against poultry-borne diseases? Were the models paid a fair wage? Is the frame of appropriate style to showcase and emphasize the turkey fucking to maximum advantage? In which room of the house is a turkey-fucking scene apt to be most effective from a decorating standpoint? Is a gratuitous reference to “stuffing” just way too easy?
In trying to suss out a deeper meaning from this, well, rather atypical image, one might be tempted to try to place this painting of a boy fucking a turkey into a larger art-historical context. From what tradition might have arisen such a provocative, decidedly vegan-unfriendly scene? One supposes that deep in the bowels of some museum must lie an ancient amphora ringed with an a daisy chain of Greeks and large fowl in flagrante delicto (or, as it was termed in the Lower East Side of ancient Athens, “shtupping”); an elegant Fabergé platinum and enamel turkey’s egg containing an exquisite automaton of the Czar realistically fucking Rasputin, who in turn is fucking a tiny, bejeweled bird; a long-forgotten study for a Butterball advertisement as conceived by Norman Rockwell in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert. Intriguingly, there seems to be little precedent for the artistic depiction of human-poultry carnal relations*. (In the course of investigation, one can only imagine the results of a Google Image search on “turkey fucking.” Go ahead, I’ll wait.)
In the apparent absence of a turkey-fucking lineage in the fine arts—at least as pertains to subject matter—it would appear that this painting of a boy fucking a turkey is the first of its kind. As such, it must be recognized, regardless of its humble thrift-store origins, as a priceless aesthetic landmark. But perhaps more important during these troubled, uncertain times, this turkey-fucking painting nourishes and uplifts the human spirit in the way that only great art can—and reminds us to pause and reflect that only in the act of turkey fucking may we truly appreciate the timeless maxim: That’s what (feathered) friends (with benefits) are for.
