In the year 2000, 44-year-old slaughterhouse worker Katherine Knight had a night of passion with her partner, John Price, then stabbed him 37 times, professionally skinned him, hung his hide on a meat hook over the lounge room door, decapitated him, butchered his corpse and cooked parts of him. She served up his meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, squash and gravy in neat settings at the dinner table, putting beside each plate place-names for Price’s children. Another meal was tossed into the backyard; it appears she intended to eat it but couldn’t do so. The police arrived before Price’s children so, as far as we know, none of him was consumed (by humans anyway).
Knight pleaded guilty to murder and the judge ordered that her papers be marked “never to be released.” An appeal was quickly denied, and she is still serving her life sentence at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in Sydney.
Shoreline Entertainment planned to make a film of the incident based on Peter Lalor’s book Blood Stain, but so far it has not surfaced.
It appears that Knight was NOT a cannibal, despite one of the favourite media labels about her being “Kathy the Cannibal”. Other reports called her “The Woman Hannibal Lecter”, a comparison that makes no sense at all, since Hannibal did not use 37 strokes to kill people, definitely did eat parts of them, and did not (as Knight did) take a cocktail of sleeping tablets afterwards while lying in bed with the mutilated corpse.
Darren O’Sullivan, whose documentary is linked at the top of this blog, commented,
“this is possibly the most horrific thing I have ever discovered”.
Although the series is called “Real Twisted Tales”, I suspect O’Sullivan must have led a sheltered life. Knight was a slaughterhouse worker, recognised for her skills in knife work. She grew up in the NSW town of Aberdeen, where everyone in her family and most of the town were employed in the abattoir. Her job, from a young age, was to kill and cut up animals. She did to John Price what she was trained to do to other animals – slaughter them, cut them up, cook them. She did try to feed bits to his children, which is what farmers did in the UK (feeding cattle bone-meal to cattle), an act of cannibalism which led to Mad Cow Disease. But there is little evidence that she herself ate any of him.
The documentary above states that Katherine Knight is “one of the most evil people in the world”, because she was found sane enough to stand trial. But really, what she did was what she was paid to do every day, just to a different species than those who usually suffered and died under her hand.
Superstitious anthropocentric beliefs put humans on a tier somewhere between angels and animals, but really we are a species of Great Ape, closely related to the chimpanzee. Rationally speaking, there really is only a thin red line between killing and eating any species of animal.
Cannibalism is defined by our good friends at Wikipedia as:
“the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food.”
Most dictionaries like to put “human” in there somewhere, but that is just another manifestation of anthropocentrism, a species-wide narcissism that believes everything is just about us. The same ideology also insists that human flesh is somehow different to that of other animals, and human suffering somehow more intense, or at least more important.
Now, we know that corn cobs cannot grow arms and legs and barbecue each other or indeed anyone of another species. As far as we know, they also cannot suffer, as pain is an evolutionary response to danger, and only useful to animals, who can seek to avoid that danger. The concept of corn cobs tormenting and killing other vegetables is absurd.
But that is exactly what humans do, confining, tormenting and slaughtering some eighty billion sentient land animals every year, and several trillion sea animals. We draw the line, usually at other humans, sometimes at dogs and cats in Ohio, but that line is arbitrary and can shift without much impetus.
If corn cobs could eat each other, they probably would. The objectification of the other, human or nonhuman, and the intensity of the slaughterhouse we have built in this world, sees that line between carnivore and cannibal increasingly porous, as we have seen in the hundreds of examples in this blog.
“…as long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin . . . all such deeds are done in the name of ‘social justice’. There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, foreword to ‘Vegetarianism, a Way of Life’, by Dudley Giehl
Candace Owens responded to a young woman challenging Owen's anti-trans rant by pointing out Native American Two Spirit people existed. Owens goes off on her, calling Native Americans cannibals and drug users. Shocking, racist and vile. pic.twitter.com/HXFRyCR5Eo
Short answer: yes, and regularly used that way, throughout recorded history.
If you don’t recognise the person in the Tweet, her name is Candace Owens, and she is an American Conservative political commentator, author, activist, and television presenter who has both criticised and supported Donald Trump, attacked Black Lives Matter and been widely condemned for disseminating conspiracy theories, including accusing Israel of genocide. She seems to choose her conspiracies from both extremes of the political crazies – right and left. She has declared Kanye West to be a “dear friend and fellow superhero”.
In the clip above, she is asked by a young woman about Native American “Two Spirit” people – those who might today be called LGBTQIA+, particularly the “T” for “Trans”. The existence of the term and the concept itself would therefore, the questioner argues, go back hundreds or indeed thousands of years, and make nonsense of Owens’ claim that there were no transgender people when she graduated (although it seems she never did), so therefore the population must have has exploded since then. She summarises Owens’ argument: “Trans people are only here because the media is telling people these things”.
Owens does not know the term “Two Spirit” or that there are multiple words referring to the concept in many Native American languages. She answers instead:
“With Two Spirit people, is this like a Native American Tribe? Like high, smoking and talking about your spirit? I’m asking you seriously ’cause I think of Native American tribes talking about their spirits – I know they used to smoke a lot, they used to do drugs, they also were cannibals who used to eat people, so I don’t know if we should be taking our cues from cannibals…”
Owens used the same argument against Colin Kaepernick at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2020, who had spoken of the 1.5 billion acres of land stolen from Indigenous people in the United States, asking “Did cannibalism get lost in Colin’s flowery depiction of Indigenous people?” She referred to Aztec cannibalism, which is generally thought to have taken place in Mesoamerican areas of what is now central Mexico, from 1300 until their society was decimated by the Spanish conquistadors. There is little academic consensus about this – theories range from Marvin Harris who said the flesh of the human sacrifices to the gods was fed to the ruling class due to the shortage of protein in the area, to William Arens who insisted that “there is no firm, substantiable evidence for the socially accepted practice of cannibalism anywhere in the world, at any time in history.” Nonetheless, cannibalism is still depicted as epitomising the uncivilised or, worse, those who have degenerated to savagery. Think of the “troglodytes” in the movie Bone Tomahawk.
the term “cannibalism” itself comes from Christopher Columbus, who named the practice after the Carib tribe of the Caribbean (also named after the Caribs). He claimed the Caribs ate their neighbors, but there is little evidence for this beyond the accusations of rival tribes who, despite never before meeting Europeans, understood that cannibalism was a powerful way to defame enemies. Frank Lestringant examines, in his book Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (1997), the contrasting reports from that period of the “savage” cannibals of the New World and the way they were compared, sometimes favourably, with the horrendous cruelty of European politics of the time, particularly in the writings of Montaigne.
Cannibalism is, therefore, an enduring and popular way to denigrate and vilify another group, to declare them less-than-human and therefore not worthy of respect or consideration. Cannibalism, definitionally, requires both sides of the repast to be human—the eater and eaten. But paradoxically, cannibals deny the anthropocentric particularity of their victims, and are in turn symbolically stripped of humanity due to what is seen as a horrendous contravention of shared ethics, deserving redefinition of the eaters as “inhuman” monsters. This was very useful to Columbus, who was not allowed to take slaves unless they were found to be cannibals, and has been used extensively by colonists to slander other Indigenous people including the people of the Pacific, Africans, and the Aboriginal people of Australia.
Cannibalism is a particularly popular trope for political, racist or queerphobic demonisation. The cannibal is most often depicted as male, but homosexuality, still considered repulsive by some despite its legalisation in most of the world, is often emphasised in the reporting of cases such as Jeffrey Dahmer,Ottis Toole, and Armin Meiwes, as if to impugn their masculinity and erroneously imply that straight men are not potential cannibals.
Accusations that a conspiracy known as “Deep State” was trying to subvert Trump crystallised in groups, accounts and pages linked to QAnon during the 2020 election campaign. The accusations included allegations of devil-worship, child-sex trafficking, torture and cannibalism. The fact-checking website Snopes rebuffed allegations about the existence of a “deep web” video showing Hillary Clinton and her campaign vice-chair raping, torturing and mutilating a little girl to cause the child to release adrenochrome into her bloodstream, before drinking her blood during a Satanic ritual sacrifice. Like characters in the filmsTexas Chain Saw Massacre(Hooper, 1974) and Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), and the real-life murderer Ed Gein on whom they were based, they also supposedly excoriated the face to use as a mask. The bestselling QAnon-linked novel The Turner Diaries depicts a race war where white women and girls are constantly threatened and raped by “untamed, cannibalistic” black men, presented as symbolic of nature, and resisted by heroic white men, representing civilisation. Infanticide for cannibalistic feasts is not an original accusation, going back to the blood libels targeting European Jews and the Malleus Maleficarum(Hammer of Witches),the Inquisition’s guide to witch-hunting, which stated that witches would steal the host or wine from the Eucharist ritual to manifest a Christ-child, who would then be tortured, killed and consumed during diabolical feasts.
But back to Owens and her dismissal of “two-spirit” people as being the drug-fueled fantasies of cannibals. The term “Two-spirit” refers to persons who identify as having both masculine and feminine spirits, and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity. The wider use of the term is attributed to Elder Myra Laramee, who proposed its use during the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference, held in Winnipeg in 1990. The term is a translation of the Anishinaabemowin term niizh manidoowag, meaning two spirits. It seems obvious that we all have some masculine and feminine features within our complex personalities, and it is useful, if poetic, to call these “spirits”. It explains motives, desires, emotions that may roil and confuse and sometimes contradict each other. It has little to do with gustatory preferences, except that some who feel they need to buttress their masculinity may insist on eating other animals to prove some dubious suppositions of human superiority, often including over other people they may consider less than human. “Real men”, they earnestly insist, don’t eat quiche; they eat lumps of meat, rare or even raw.
As do cannibals, very often. And with the flesh may come the spirit, allowing two spirits to co-exist, mingle, join within the cannibal’s body. Armin Meiwes told an interviewer that
“It’s not about killing or butchering. It is about entering into a relationship… My desire has always been to find a “brother” whom I could assimilate into myself.”
The nature or existence of ‘spirit’ is an eternal debate that will not be finalised in a Q&A session, particularly by a speaker who seems to know nothing about it. But it can only be obscured further by unfounded accusations about cannibalism, particularly by those who still happily chow down on their fellow mammals.
In the year 2000, 44-year-old slaughterhouse worker Katherine Knight had a night of passion with her partner, John Price, then stabbed him 37 times, professionally skinned him, hung his hide on a meat hook over the lounge room door, decapitated him, butchered his corpse and cooked parts of him. She served up his meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, squash and gravy in neat settings at the dinner table, putting beside each plate place-names for Price’s children. Another meal was tossed into the backyard; it appears she intended to eat it but couldn’t do so. The police arrived before Price’s children so, as far as we know, none of him was consumed (by humans anyway).
Knight pleaded guilty to murder and the judge ordered that her papers be marked “never to be released.” An appeal was quickly denied, and she is still serving her life sentence at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in Sydney.
Shoreline Entertainment planned to make a film of the incident based on Peter Lalor’s book Blood Stain, but so far it has not surfaced.
It appears that Knight was NOT a cannibal, despite one of the favourite media labels about her being “Kathy the Cannibal”. Other reports called her “The Woman Hannibal Lecter”, a comparison that makes no sense at all, since Hannibal did not use 37 strokes to kill people, definitely did eat parts of them, and did not (as Knight did) take a cocktail of sleeping tablets afterwards while lying in bed with the mutilated corpse.
Darren O’Sullivan, whose documentary is linked at the top of this blog, commented,
“this is possibly the most horrific thing I have ever discovered”.
Although the series is called “Real Twisted Tales”, I suspect O’Sullivan must have led a sheltered life. Knight was a slaughterhouse worker, recognised for her skills in knife work. She grew up in the NSW town of Aberdeen, where everyone in her family and most of the town were employed in the abattoir. Her job, from a young age, was to kill and cut up animals. She did to John Price what she was trained to do to other animals – slaughter them, cut them up, cook them. She did try to feed bits to his children, which is what farmers did in the UK (feeding cattle bone-meal to cattle), an act of cannibalism which led to Mad Cow Disease. But there is little evidence that she herself ate any of him.
The documentary above states that Katherine Knight is “one of the most evil people in the world”, because she was found sane enough to stand trial. But really, what she did was what she was paid to do every day, just to a different species than those who usually suffered and died under her hand.
Superstitious anthropocentric beliefs put humans on a tier somewhere between angels and animals, but really we are a species of Great Ape, closely related to the chimpanzee. Rationally speaking, there really is only a thin red line between killing and eating any species of animal.
What’s your idea of a great night out? How about attending a post mortem examination of a cannibal serial killer’s victims? That is the theme of “Post Mortem Live” which is touring various parts of the UK, purporting to show the workings of a crime lab, with some extras for the paying audience – they supposedly get to taste parts of the corpses! The press release asks:
“Ever wanted to try a real organ? Well now’s your chance. What does it taste like? Tender, fatty, juicy? Will introducing the pallet to organ meat leave you wanting more, and what lengths will you go to in order to satisfy your hunger?”
This press release is not on their website or Facebook page as far as I could see. If it ever existed (it is reported on several outraged social media sites) then it must have been a joke, and has now been removed.
The show is based on the real murders committed by Dennis Nilsen in the UK and Jeffrey Dahmer in the USA, and gives the audience a hands-on experience of the post-mortem and forensic processes used to gather evidence of cause of death and identity of the victims, as well as piece together the actions of the serial killer, including tracing evidence of cooking and eating body parts.
The storyline involves the (fictional) killings of 23 people, brutally murdered and dismembered by an equally fictional serial killer called Jack Brewer, who is said to have had a “feast”. Audience members will investigate the crimes in an “immersive and one-of-a-kind experience” through forensic tests similar to those used to catch and prosecute Nilsen and Dahmer.
Jeffrey Dahmer killed at least seventeen young men and boys between 1978 and 1991, and ate parts of some of them. Dahmer did not look monstrous, just a lonely young gay man befriending marginalised others and offering them money to pose for photographs or friendship and sex, then drugging them. In some cases, he injected acid into their brains in a desperate but vain attempt to turn them into sex zombies, before killing and eating them, often preserving their skulls so that they would always remain with him.
Dennis Nilsen was a Scottish serial killer who murdered at least twelve young men and boys between 1978 and 1983. Following each murder, Nilsen would bathe and dress the victim’s body, which he retained for extended periods of time, before dissecting and disposing of the remains by burning them or flushing them down the toilet. Nilsen expressed surprise at the public revulsion towards his disposal of his victims’ corpses, which included cooking the flesh to render it down, and perhaps to consume it. Nilsen was trained as a butcher and chef, and we know that a number of serial killers worked as butchers, one of many occupations conferring a professional detachment from the carcasses of non-human animals, which are not very different from human ones.
The audience at this show are offered the opportunity to dissect organs, a method used in crime labs to determine whether a suspect had tried to dismember, degrade, cook or consume the victims. Is it possible, they ask, to deceive the science and conspire to carry out the perfect murder?
The FAQ states that the show is aimed at students and healthcare professionals, but anyone can attend as long as they’re over 14, and buy a ticket. The ticket price includes “basic PPE, gloves, specimens and clinical consumables.”
What happens at the show?
“The Post Mortem Live offers the chance to get hands on with real anatomical specimens of porcine origin contextualised into a simulated human body dissection.”
There is some eating. For a bit extra, you can book a “Dinner & Dissection”. The offer asks “Are you ready for main-corpse? or Dead-ssert?” Ah, no cannibalism story is complete without a few puns, and the organisers aggravate the crime by calling this a “cutting edge insight” into dark world of homicide detection, forensics and pathology.
The website blog features a number of particularly gruesome images of diseased and injured body parts, nothing to do with the fictional case, but maybe a warning of what to expect. Many of them are on their Facebook page too, some with graphic content warnings, others (possibly worse ones) without. Go figure. I can safely predict you will either love or hate these pages. If you think you will hate them, maybe don’t open them.
I’m not using the images of smashed limbs and spiked eyeballs on this site – all images here are from the show. Which is not real humans.
But… it is is bodily material from real pigs – that’s what they mean by “real anatomical specimens of porcine origin.” I wonder if this is supposed to be reassuring? No dead humans were harmed in the making of this show, but a whole lot of live pigs were killed so that they could be cut up for human amusement. That is sicker than the atrocity pics.
This blog contains graphic scenes of sexual abuse, violence and cannibalism. These are all imaginary phantasies (in the Freudian sense of wish fulfilment rather than whimsical fiction or “fantasy”), drawn, written or simulated. None claim or even appear to be anything other than phantasies.
Note: these images were all taken from a standard browser search of the Internet in 2023. Most were captured from the short form blogging platform Tumblr, which hosts a wide range of different sites, including cannibalguy. None of these images below are from the “dark web” where there are supposed to be far more graphic scenes including, allegedly, genuine instances of rape, murder and cannibalism.
If you don’t like graphic images (he said to people reading a blog called thecannibalguy), please exit, and come back next week.
Tumblr has deleted this account since I downloaded these images in January 2023. The link below is to his or her new account at an aggregation site called Tumbex. Some of these images appear there, while others not shown here have been added. The images reflect a deep male fear of the female cannibal, an extreme form of what Barbara Creed calls Phallic Panic.
This site seems to explore the eating of the male; some images such as the one below consider the parallel with those considered ontologically animal and so morally inconsequential, and question why humans might not be the same.
More cannibalism of the male, but this time on Facebook, which is usually considered a little more, shall we say, demure than Tumblr. The most interesting aspect of this image is that the male has been penetrated (an outrage usually reserved for the female) and that, although the site censors seem to have no quarrel with the steel rod entering his anus and exiting his mouth, the penis has been blurred for the sake of decorum. Torture and cannibalism are, it seems, less offensive than images of human genitals.
Cannibalism can fascinate not just objectively but subjectively. Many web users claim to crave their own consumption by a cannibal, and some of them like Bernd Juergen Brandes achieve their desires. For most, it is phantasy, often expressed in long rambling narratives.
Preparing my meat
I know it’s unusual, but I’ve wanted someone to eat my genitals for as long as I can remember. If you think you might be interested in cooking and eating my cock and balls, please drop me a note. You should prepare me however you think best. I’m willing to help prepare and serve myself to you to eat if you desire. One cooking method I’ve thought a lot about has me sitting on a low mound, my legs straddling a wood fire burned down to coals. My butt is impaled on a short steak pounded into the mound to keep me from moving and some insulation is placed on my inner thighs. Before I’m placed over the coals to cook, the chef has tied my erect cock and balls off tightly. He tamps a seasoned stuffing mix down my pee hole to season me from inside and forces a large clove of garlic in my glans to keep the stuffing in me. He then takes a large syringe and injects some seasoned Cabernet into my ball sack. He tells me my balls will braise in the wine and cook more slowly as my penis is roasting. At first just a few coals are placed under my genitals at first to provide a little heat. Foil is tented over my genitals so they cook evenly from all sides. I’m grinning and trying not to cum with my cock tied off. I feel some pain from the heat, but my cock is getting numb from being tied off. At this point the chef occupies me with some conversation as I start to cook… The chef and I continue to chat about dinner. He bastes my balls and cock head frequently so they don’t burn and periodically sifts more seasoning onto my genitals. My cock is continuously twitching. My cum seeps into the stuffing chef forced down my pee hole, but can’t escape to the end of my cock. My balls move in the wine that fills my sac, but can’t get away from the heat. Chef keeps adding a few more coals around my genitals. Then I realize: I’m starting to cook! and get the first whiffs of my roasting sausage – musky pork ! I’m so excited to finally be dinner. I hope I’m tasty. After some time my cock is mostly numb and I’m cumming deep in my groin. My cock is a golden brown and my ball sac is getting crispy on the outside. Some stuffing has blossomed out the end of my penis around the garlic. Some wine has leaked from the hole used to fill my sac and mixed with the seasoning I’m coated with. I’m ready to be served! The chef helps me up off of the dowel that impales my butt and I hobble to a sturdy outside table… I sit on a large platter facing the chef and spread my legs as far as possible to present myself for his dinner. He shakes some salt and ladles juniper berry sauce on my browned and steaming cock and I’m ready to be carved. With wide eyes I watch the chef spear my cock head and slice it off. He smiles just before popping it in his mouth and starting to chew. I’m trying desperately to cum, but can’t with the tight binding at the base of my genitals. Piece by piece he carves and eats my roasted penis, dipping each bite in the juniper berry sauce. Eventually, it’s a twitching red circle even with my balls. He eyes the second course greedily, and smiles again as he slices open my crispy ball sac. My roasted testicles pop out with the remaining wine sauce. The cords are cut and my oysters sliced. (he gives me a piece to taste, interesting flavor with a hint of cum.) With my testicles devoured, he trims off the crispy bits of my sac and wipes the plate with them. They crunch in his mouth. The root of my penis is now exposed and dripping juice on the plate. He comes at it with you carving knife and starts to cut. I feel him slicing through my living meat. I grit my teethe and push into the knife, willing him to carve out my root for the final bites of his meal. He pops it in his mouth and walks off chewing as I collapse on the table.
sashaotaku
Much hand-drawn art involves violence against women, usually helpless but sometimes compliant and occasionally even enthusiastic. This image suggests that penetration by penis and skewer or spear are analogous, and the figure in the middle appears to be a woman with a camera who is at least voluntarily documenting the intercourse and likely murders, possibly to prepare herself for the same fate from the man who is sexually fondling both her and the prospective killer.
Coffingag
The artist who posted this is unapologetically into ‘dolcett’, a subset of vorarephilia, usually abbreviated to ‘vore’. Vore of women (gynophagia) can be ‘soft vore’ where the victim is eaten while still alive and whole or ‘hard vore’ where killing and dismemberment is depicted with attendant gore, while male diners usually express appreciation for the meat. Dolcett is hard vore gynophagia that depicts females being killed and cooked, often on a spit, and often with their enthusiastic agreement.
The artist of this piece stated that the art was “commissioned” and would be the first of a series that would be drawn when time allowed during their semester. I wonder if the semester covers the writings of Julia Kristeva, who speaks of the “fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal”. This image is clearly based on the roast chicken which appears on millions of dining tables nightly, but is clearly a woman – it shows breasts and a round but stitched stomach, implying an equivalence between being pregnant and being ‘stuffed’. The pregnant woman is the ultimate disrupter of the patriarchal symbolic order, a symbol of fertile, fecund nature.
sexual-freak-show
This is a hard vore site, but also promotes other paraphilias such as scopophilia, voyeurism, bondage, incest, torture and bestiality, interspersed with innocuous images of entirely healthy young women, conceivably placed to allow readers to exercise their own imagination. The concept of a person seeming to enjoy being roasted alive is pure phantasy; there have been no reports to my knowledge of anyone ‘enjoying’ this, even Joan of Arc. This image appears to have been removed, but replaced with many more graphic scenes.
Flostress
This site is no longer available, or at least cannot be opened safely, indicating that it may have been appropriated by a fraud site. It demonstrates the equivalence of women and animals that Carol J. Adams has studied comprehensively. The face and breasts are clearly human, the ears and tail clearly porcine.
This site involves many purported recipes for “girl meat” and line drawings imagining various abuses. The one below seems to have been removed but while there it expressed (with appallingly ignorant spelling) a profound misogyny.
Fluidcravings
Originally uploaded to Tumblr but since deleted, in fact the whole account has been removed.
A succinct summary of the problem with cannibalism and carnivorism in general. The eater is motivated by a voracious appetite and objectifies the victim as simply food. The victim is terrified, experiencing an agonising death immersed in stomach acid. The end result is satisfaction for the cannibal while the victim is reduced to ordure. “I’m not food” is what the trillions of animals slaughtered every year for human consumption would say if they could make themselves understood by the consumers, and sums up the struggle against carnivorous virility.
Clearly Creed’s archaic mother, the basis of so many man-eating monsters, who reflect an unconscious fear that the mother’s body, from which we all emerged, has the power to re-absorb the child. In this drawing, we see one who is seemingly willing to re-enter her body, assuming a foetal position in her stomach.
ForbiddenFeast
This is a site dedicated to gynophagia and dolcett images, and is only fully accessible by paid subscription, but there is still plenty of free content for those who happen upon it. The explanatory page states that it features
“exclusive artworks depicting food in a “unmentionable” nature (sic). If I seem vague, I’m sorry. You should check out the terms “dolcett” and “gynophagia” to get what we mean. If you are here by mistake and do not know the context of what this site is about already, you should leave now.”
I’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of words wondering why an image such as the above is so abject and repugnant, while the same scene is unremarkable in any butcher shop, just because it involves a different species of mammal.
Reddit is a social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website where readers can join and participate in discussions on particular topics in dedicated areas called “subreddits”. This subreddit is simply entitled “cannibalism_lounge”. It offers a rather more sophisticated version of the defunct Internet fetish forum “The Cannibal Café” where Armin Meiwes contacted prospective victims in the year 2000.
This account has been removed from Tumblr but content is still available in Tumbex. Objectifies the human body into “choice cuts”, a process common to butcher shops, but usually showing the bovine rather than human form.
Content removed by the website
Sites like Facebook and Tumblr spend a lot of time and money deleting gratuitously offensive posts. Most effort seems to be spent in tracking down and removing porn, which I would think might be less offensive to many than the scenes of bloody mayhem in the vore posts. The ones like those shown in this blog, which last long enough to be captured, are probably relatively mild content. Anything stronger (or focused on genitals) usually gets the boot, often accompanied by a triumphant statement such as the one below, which seems to say “we caught you”.
They are pretty successful capturing consensual sex, but rape, torture and cannibalism? Not so much.
What a year! These are some of the cannibalism stories, films and songs that arrived in 2022, with links back to the original reports, so that you can look up the ones that catch your interest, and so that this blog does not take all of 2023 to read.
January
A German man dubbed by the press the ‘cannibal teacher’ was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Stefan R., a 41-year-old maths and chemistry teacher, had apparently searched on the dark web for terms such as “long pig” and “fatten and slaughter people”. The man claimed his victim died of natural causes after a (presumably vigorous) sexual tryst, and he had removed the man’s penis “since my DNA could still have possibly been present due to the oral sex I performed”. In other words, he didn’t mind a bit of mutilation and perhaps cannibalism, but was concerned not to be “outed” as gay.
Djalma Campos Figueiredo, 46, was arrested in Brazil. He had been sentenced by the Court of Justice of Rondonia in the city of Porto Velho to 42 years in prison for several counts of aggravated murder but had escaped custody. The Civil Police alleged he would eat his victims’ eyes and ears and drink their blood.
Meanwhile, the Zamfara (NW Nigeria) State Police Command arrested a 57-year-old man, Aminu Baba, for allegedly eating and selling human body parts. Baba and three others were arrested after the murder of a nine-year-old boy. The Police Commissioner reported that Baba had “confessed that he usually ate the body parts and identified the throat as the most delicious part. He also sold some of the human parts to his customers.”
February
A war between rival cartels in the Mexican state of Zacatecas graduated from the normal torture and beheadings to systematic cannibalism, with new sicarios (cartel assassins) being required to eat parts of their rivals before being allowed to graduate (or remain alive).
In Afghanistan, we discovered that the Taliban were rounding up drug addicts and putting them in rehabilitation centres to detox, which is a nice thought, except that they gave them little or no food (“cold turkey” does not count), so they apparently resorted to cannibalism.
In the Indian state of Assam, a man who had had perhaps more than a few drinks smelt cooking meat in a crematorium in a Hindu cremation ground. He helped himself to a few portions of the body, but was caught by villagers and handed over to police; but not before he had eaten about half of his purloined flesh.
May
A man calling himself The Chinese Zodiac Killer was arrested by the FBI in Jefferson County, New York for sending letters to media outlets, government offices including the White House, and other organisations, claiming he killed people and ate their flesh, and that he plans to kill more. He seems to have based his story on the Zodiac killer who terrorised California in the late 1960s. The original Zodiac Killer (who was not accused of cannibalism) was never caught, but this one was easily found, posting his threatening letters (what century is this again?) at the same letterbox he had previously used.
June
The case against James David Russell (see above in April) went to preliminary trial. Sadly, the judge threw out the charge of cannibalism, saying there was insufficient evidence to pursue it, and went with the rather more mundane offence of first-degree murder. Since this has a life sentence attached, the practical effect of dropping the cannibalism charge is negligible, but as the first cannibalism case in the USA, it would have been fascinating.
A rumour swept the Internet that the actress Anne Hathaway was a cannibal, based on a cryptic Tweet saying “police didn’t find human remains and evidence of cannibalism in her LA home that she sold in 2013.” We were all later astonished to discover the whole thing was a hoax.
The effects of the war in The Ukraine were starting to be felt in Europe and the UK (whose people often do not think it’s part of Europe). The Russians fell gladly on a statement from one Jeremy Clarkson (a car enthusiast) that “Hunger makes people eat their neighbours” to predict that the British will soon be a nation of cavemen feeding off each other. Of course, if you’ve ever been to a soccer match…
industrial/electronic music duo SKYND released their tenth song, called ARMIN MEIWES, about the German man who killed and ate a willing volunteer.
The New York Times raised the temperature of the culture wars with its review of several books, movies and TV shows about cannibalism, culminating in the (somewhat tongue in cheek) statement that “Cannibalism has a time and place… that time is now.” The right-wing press predictably jumped on the story accusing the NYT of everything from irresponsibility to Satanism.
Also in New York, Steven Spielberg whipped out his cell phone to record Marcus Mumford singing his new work, a haunting song called “CANNIBAL“. The song might be about love and lockdown, or it could involve child abuse.
DISCOVERY+ launched a three-part series called HOUSE OF HAMMER. The series explored allegations from various girlfriends of the actor Armie Hammer that he was a cannibal, or had at least threatened them with cannibalism. It also examined his relatives, many of whom seemed to be presented as even worse specimens than Armie.
Russia discovered the war was not going well in Ukraine, and started recruiting murderers and rapists to be sent to the front as reinforcements. Also – one cannibal, Yegor Komarov, whose man-eating exploits we learned about in December 2021.
October
In the Indian state of Kerala, there were allegations that a couple who ran a massage centre were bringing women home not so much for massages, but for human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism.
In the US state of Michigan, Mark David Latunski, who had been arrested in 2019 for killing and eating his Grindr date, finally came to trial and entered a plea of guilty.
November
Issei Sagawa, the “Kobe Cannibal”, died of pneumonia at the age of 73. Sagawa had killed and eaten a young Dutch fellow-student in Paris in 1981. He was found insane and sent back to Japan, where he was released and lived free ever since, making movies, writing books, and even becoming a restaurant reviewer.
Rapper Comethazine released Bawskee 5, the 12th song on which was called “CANNIBAL“.
Back in Brazil again! A patient in the Municipal Hospital of Nuovo Hamburgo in the state of Rio Grande do Sul attacked other patients, screamed and spat at people, and eventually chewed off his own fingers and toes. A witness said “while he was chewing his own meat, you could hear the crackling of bones in his mouth”.
December
Mark Latunski, 52, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on December 15 for the murder of his Grindr date three years previously. Kevin Bacon, 25, had been killed and mutilated by Latunski on December 24, 2019 at Latunski’s Bennington home. Latunski pleaded guilty in September to killing Bacon and eating one of his testicles, after stabbing him in the back and slitting his throat. In a victims’ impact statement, the victim’s father said “Evil does exist, and it touched us.”
On the screen
The big news on streaming television this year was Jeffrey Dahmer, the “Milwaukee Cannibal”, who took Netflix by storm with not one but two titles, despite having been killed by a fellow prisoner in 1994.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s docudrama called “MONSTER: THE JEFFREY DAHMER STORY“, which logged nearly two hundred million hours of watching in its first week of release
Joe Berlinger’s third series of CONVERSATIONS WITH A KILLER, featuring previously unheard defence attorney tapes of interviews with Dahmer.
Lots of new cannibalism feature films in 2022, some of which I will catch up with next year:
Luca Guadagnino’s BONES AND ALL, featuring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as teenage cannibals in a tender and gory road movie, has been getting heaps of publicity.
Mimi Cave’s FRESH is a charming romcom, until the knives come out. A fascinating insight into ultimate consumerism.
Leatherface came back (again!), this time older but no wiser. This is the ninth (!) instalment of the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE franchise, and went straight to Netflix.
John Ainslie’s DO NOT DISTURB depicts a couple renewing their romance by taking peyote, but finding that this particular variant of the drug awakens a taste for human flesh.
Leatherface came out to play again, this time as a fan-film prequel called THE SAWYER MASSACRE. Made on a shoestring but arguably superior to the other sequels and prequels.
Liam Regan’s EATING MISS CAMPBELL, in which a vegan, goth student falls in love with her new English teacher and develops a taste for human flesh.
Sean Patrick Flanery’s enjoyable road movieFRANK AND PENELOPE, in which a couple take on a cannibal cult in the wilds of Texas.
Timo Vuorensola’s JEEPERS CREEPERS REBORN, the umpteenth take on a supernatural tale of the demon who eats people and incorporates their bodies, but only every 23 years.
Fred Olen Ray’s PIRANHA WOMEN offers a totally believable story of women who turn into man-eaters because of an anti-cancer treatment.
THE MENU has Ralph Fiennes as a demented chef and Anya Taylor-Joy as the fly, as it were, in his menu plan. There is no obvious cannibalism involved in the movie, but there is some speculation on-line about the final cheeseburger.
‘Ted Lasso goes cannibal’ in Adam Leader & Richard Oakes’ FEED ME, a jolly rant in which a grieving man wants to die, and a nearby cannibal wants to help him, but by instalment.
And now for something completely different
From out of the future, we have some new AI software of which Shital Shah, a senior research engineer at Microsoft, said:
ChatGPT was dropped on us just bit over 24 hours. It's like you wake up to the news of first nuclear explosion and you don't know yet what to think about it but you know world will never be the same again. Here some interesting snapshots of this "explosion"🧵:
ChatGPT is “a large language model that has been trained to generate human-like responses to text input.” In other words, you can ask it questions and receive (often) intelligent answers, rather than a series of links, like Google. You can try it for free (at the moment) here.
Naturally, I asked it questions such as “is meat murder” and it replied:
“Ultimately, whether or not eating meat is considered murder is a matter of personal belief and moral judgement.”
So, I barked back, like a prosector out for a conviction, “Where does that leave the cannibal?”
“Whether or not eating other humans is considered murder would also be a matter of personal belief and moral judgement. Most people would consider cannibalism to be morally reprehensible, as it involves the killing and consuming of another human being. However, there may be some individuals who do not see it that way, and their personal beliefs and moral judgement would dictate their view on the matter.”
Hammer is a young American actor (in his thirties) who found fame with his 2008 portrayal of the evangelist Billy Graham in Billy, the Early Years for which he won a “Faith and Values Award” from Mediaguide, a Christian review organisation. Don’t you love irony?
Now, a new three-part documentary on Discovery+ has gone through the history of the Hammer family, and the way the Hammers seem to treat everyone as, well, nails. Narrated in part by Armie’s aunt, Casey Hammer, the documentary makes clear that the family tree is rotten with toxic masculinity, abuse and exploitation. If we were wondering how Armie got that way, this sheds plenty of light on the question.
Hammer’s family was, shall we say, a colourful one. His aunt Casey declared,
“I know my grandfather had a dark side, but I saw my father’s dark side first hand, and I’ve seen my brother’s dark side, and I’ve just heard about Armie’s dark side. But I believe it.”
The documentary goes through the dark deeds of these generations: the patriarch and oil tycoon Armand Hammer, his son Julian, his son (and Casey’s brother) Michael, and his son, Armie. Casey said of her brother Michael (Armie’s dad):
“That’s the sign of a true monster. You can look in the mirror and not see any fault or that you’re doing anything wrong. And that’s how deep it goes with my brother. And that’s why he’s so scary, because he has no conscience.”
The first episode is about Armie’s allegedly violent relationships with young women who were often so star-struck that they would often let him get away with tying them up and biting them, among other things. He made his appetite seem like love.
In early 2021, several of Armie’s girlfriends took to social media to describe Hammer as abusive, manipulative and violent. Screenshots of his text messages appeared to show him describing fantasies (or real events) of rape and cannibalism.
“I am 100% a cannibal…. Fuck. That’s scary to admit. I’ve never admitted that before. I’ve cut the heart out of a living animal before and eaten it while still warm. Totally raw. Still warm. ‘d eat your heart if i wasn’t stuck without you after.”
“I want to see your brain, your blood, your organs, every part of you. I would definitely bite it. 100%. Or try to fuck it. Not sure which. Probably both.”
“If I fucked you into a vegetative state id keep you, feed you, watch you, and keep fucking you…Till you are so sore and broken…. I can’t stop thinking of [fucking] your actual brain.”
“…cut a piece of your skin off and make you cook it for me…. Who’s slave/master relationship is the strongest? We’d win. When I tell you to slit your wrists and use the blood for anal.”
The documentary shows a clearly nervous Courtney Vucevovich describing Armie taking her to Sedona, tying her up, and doing whatever he wanted to her.
She shows texts on her phone, but also a note that he left at her home after he stalked her and found her address.
“Armie wanted total control of me, and absolute compliance, destroying any sense of bodily autonomy.”
Then he took her to meet his Mom! But, she said, “it was like a band-aid on a bullet wound.”
In early March, Armie’s ex-girlfriend Paige Lorenze, 24, said in an explosive interview with Vanity Fair that during their time together she felt “really unsafe and sick to her stomach.” The interview claimed that the celebrity’s ex-partners have “compared him to Ted Bundy” and said he was obsessed with shibari – a Japanese bondage art form where people are tied up in intricate patterns.
Lorenze was horrified to see the accusations of cannibalism,
“Because he would say things to me…weird stuff…like, ‘I want to eat your ribs’.”
She also claimed that Hammer had carved his initial into her pubic area and licked the wound, later bragging about it to friends, and that Hammer was fixated on biting her body, saying,
”If you did not tell me to stop I would eat a piece out of you.” And he was serious too. It was like he actually wanted to eat my flesh away.
The “A” that Armie allegedly carved into Paige
On their first night together, Lorenze said Hammer insisted: ‘You can either call me daddy or sir.’ She tells us in the documentary that
“He’s obsessed with meat. I brushed it off, but I do believe that he was serious.”
Another woman named Effie whom he dated for about five months in 2020 said that he had raped her for over four hours in Los Angeles. He told her he wanted to eat her flesh, and would suck or lick her wounds if she had “a little cut on my hand.”
Most of the documentary details allegations of non-consensual sex, AKA rape, for which Armie is being investigated by detectives from the Los Angeles sex crime division.
One such text read:
“I’m not going to lie… you cryin and crawling away while I stalked you down your halway was so exhilarating”
But on the subject of cannibalism (which is what this blog is about) let’s remember that Hammer has not been charged with acting on his cannibalistic fantasies — and in fact he has denied sending those texts. Courtney Vucevovich claims that her shoulder bears evidence of his cannibalistic ways, a wound that he suggested should be tattooed into her skin to make it permanent:
But texting and sex play, even bondage and sado-masochism (if consensual), are not illegal, and Hammer clearly enjoyed both.
But if he said these things and sent these texts, and if they were just fantasies, he picked the very worst time, the apex of the #MeToo movement, to send them. Hammer subsequently lost leading roles for which he had been preparing, including in the Jennifer Lopez film Shotgun Wedding, and his agency dropped him.
In March 2021, Effie, the woman who initially came forward with abuse allegations on Instagram, identified herself and accused Hammer of violently raping her in April 2017. The Los Angeles Police Department subsequently confirmed that he was the subject of a sexual assault investigation, which had been set in motion a month prior. Hammer has vehemently denied any wrongdoing via his lawyer, who stated that “all of his interactions with [Effie] – and every other sexual partner of his for that matter – have been completely consensual, discussed and agreed upon in advance, and mutually participatory.”
Hammer was unable to see his family during the pandemic lockdown, and his marriage fell apart. In June 2021, Hammer checked into a Florida treatment centre for drug, alcohol and sex issues.
The documentary outlines Armie’s fantasies and alleged assaults, and also goes into details of the corruption and violent activities of his forebears. So that raises the question, the one that Clarice asked Hannibal, “what happened to you?” Nothing happened, Hannibal answered. “I happened… Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil?”
WTF? Is there a curse of the Hammer family? An evil gene? An epigenetic generational trauma that makes each new generation a bit more abusive than the last? Of course, Hannibal has some philosophy about this as well:
“when it comes to nature versus nurture I choose neither. We are built from a DNA blueprint and born into a world of scenario and circumstance we don’t control.“
The Hammer family have for some generations been enormously wealthy, and with wealth comes privilege. That does not necessarily lead to cannibalism (although movies like The Cannibal Club suggest otherwise), and certainly poor people can also be cannibals, but it may make the wealthy feel insulated against consequences – that is one important theme of shows like Succession. Wealth, privilege and entitlement does lead to cannibalism (not clear whether real or imagined) in American Psycho, at least in the book, (the film lingered on the murders but wimped out a bit on the actual eating of body parts).
Cannibalism is an act of domination – there can be no greater conquest of another than converting them into a meal and eventually into excrement. Hammer revealed this need to dominate in wanting to be called ‘daddy or sir’. In wanting to tie these women up so they are helplessly compliant with his every desire. In the power of watching them cry and beg. In ownership of their bodies.
The massive wealth of the Hammers demonstrates Bataille’s concept of “the accursed share”. Excess energy – in this case, wealth from the exploitation of energy in the form of oil – is spent on luxury without any public benefit, in non-procreative sexuality, in pageants and grand buildings, or else in catastrophic ways like war or sacrifice. In other words, in social terms, it must be used, or wasted. Armie Hammer used his excess energy on finding ways to control women, ultimately tying them up for the purposes of eroticism. Whether this was consensual or forced, which is what most of the women allege, is up to the Los Angeles sex crime detectives to determine. But it seems clear that privilege, particularly multiplied over several generations,
“must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.”
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share Vol 1, p.21.
Excess energy can be donated – billionaires such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have pledged to give away at least half of their wealth during their lifetimes or at their deaths. Or they can expend their excess energy (wealth) on fancy homes and cars and bending others to their will. Although they usually do this less publicly than Armie Hammer did, this is still metaphoric cannibalism.
Fun fact: Rotten Tomatoes critics gave the documentary a 67% “fresh” rating, but the “audience” rating is only 5%. Most reviews, and thousands of other social media posts, doubted the veracity of the women’s claims, saying that Hammer had suffered the loss of his career because he openly expressed his fantasies. Vucekovich, on the other hand, says that after the news came out about her relationship with Hammer, she received death threats and harassing messages from Armie’s “die-hard fans.” Out of fear, she relocated from an apartment to a house where she installed cameras. “The ‘Charmies’ made my life hell,” she says. At the same time, she fielded “thousands” of messages from women who had been through something similar.
Is Armie Hammer a cannibal? He is a rich and handsome movie star from a wealthy and privileged family, who built his career on playing men who can get away with anything. He is certainly a persuasive abuser of (often much) younger women, a form of exploitative consumption that is uncomfortably close to cannibalistic ingestion.
But is he a cannibal? Technically, almost certainly not. But in his mind, in the deep, dark fissures of his unconscious, he certainly is. According to Freud, we all are.
I guess it was only a matter of time before cannibalism became part of the culture wars. A light-hearted article in the New York Times July 23 by freelance writer Alex Beggs looked at the undeniable plethora of cannibalism narratives in contemporary movies, TV series, books and news reports, including the TV series Yellowjackets and the recent novel A Certain Hunger by Chelsea Summers, in which a (female) restaurant critic develops a taste for (male) human flesh. The article asserted:
“Turns out, cannibalism has a time and a place. In the pages of some recent stomach-churning books, and on television and film screens, Ms. Summers and others suggest that that time is now.”
Alex Begg has also written for Bon Appétit magazine, making her well qualified to write about food, of whatever provenance. Cooking shows are full of lumps of meat being baked and braised and broiled and smothered in sauces; why not add humans to the livestock list? There certainly are billions of us.
The appearance of cannibalism in secular culture reflects the fading of traditional morality. As Dostoevsky warned in The Brothers Karamazov, without a belief in “immortality” (implying divine judgement), “everything would be lawful, even cannibalism”. Our reflexive distaste for cannibalism (and our fascination with it) comes from the belief that humans are somehow not animals, or animals that have transcended animality – it all comes back to the Biblical statement that we are made in “the image of God”, whatever that means.
Such a belief, with or without support from on high, is called anthropocentrism, or sometimes speciesism, and is maintained by the practice of killing other animals in ever increasing numbers, to prove our superiority. Jacques Derrida called that “carnivorous virility”, but what happens when the lust to kill outruns the limits of anthropocentrism and is instead turned back on fellow humans? We have people who see humans as just another edible species, like Sawney Bean, Sweeney Todd, Albert Fish, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and of course Hannibal Lecter. Not all of those were real people, and not all the facts about the real ones are real facts, but one fact remains: humans are animals, and animals are made of meat. When a society reaches a point where the old ethical agreements are disintegrating, it can either forge new ones or dissolve into chaos, war and, yes, cannibalism. At a time when the news is full of pandemics, climate change, famine, school shootings and political turmoil, is it so surprising that cultural representations show us eating each other?
Did I mention culture wars? Those who despise the New York Times (a certain and fairly large section of America apparently) came out with their anti-cannibalism guns blazing (they like guns, love meat, don’t like cannibals – it does seem a little inconsistent.)
“It’s a sign that our culture and civilization has become so decadent, so enamored by sensation, that we actually fetishize eating death…. We now live in a Culture of Death, in which we regard books, television, and film drama about the eating of human beings as pleasurable, as exciting.”
On Twitter, reactions poured in such as that of writer Emmanuel Rincón:
Zack Kanter tweeted
“A zero sum worldview, irrational fear of overpopulation, and hatred of success will inevitably lead NYT journos to the literal conclusion of ‘eat the rich.’”
Journalist Tom Fitton tweeted
“NY Times, taking a break from promoting the mass killing of the unborn through abortion, promotes cannibalism.”
Many had clearly not even bothered to read the article:
And a blessedly brief journalist, Sameera Khan, tweeted
“THIS IS SATANISM”
Greg Gutfeld on his high rating Fox talk show (if you haven’t seen him, imagine a fairy waved a wand and turned The Colbert Report into a real boy) took the opportunity to pack every cannibal pun imaginable (“it’s an ATE part series”) into a short segment, as well as several digs at other shows run by Liberals such as Samantha Bee, and their regular target, CNN. Gutfeld accuses comedian Tom Shillue (formerly of The Daily Show!) of thinking he would be delicious, because he is all white meat.
The gist of much of the criticism was that the Liberal elite are trying to normalise cannibalism, as a way to – what? Reduce overpopulation? Feed the hungry? The website Editorials 360 accuses a “globalist cabal” of planning to make us all eat insects and humans, and drink recycled sewage, a fiendish plot “to enslave, denigrate and dehumanize humanity.”
The website TMZ recalled that the movie Soylent Green was set in 2022, which was then fifty years in the future, but is now, well, now. Are we in fact normalising cannibalism, because it is the logical end-point of voracious consumerism?
Soylent Green is a good place to start the analysis of this “normalizing” phenomenon. Even after fifty years, it is still the movie many people name when cannibalism comes up in discussion (as it seems to do quite a lot whenever thecannibalguy is around). The movie [spoiler alert] was set in 2022 New York, which is portrayed as part of a failed state, in which overpopulation and global warming has led to a chronic shortage of food, leading the authorities (secretly) to grind up humans who have died (or agreed to be euthanised) and convert them into nutritious protein crackers called Soylent Green. Setting it in 2022 was a bit pessimistic, but let us remember that the world’s human population has almost doubled since the movie was made fifty years ago, and that CO2 concentration was 330 parts per million in 1973, compared to around 420 now. Are we entering a time when our voracious consumerism will so deplete the planet that, as Cormac McCarthy suggested, the only thing left to eat will be each other?
Chelsea Summers put it in a political context, relating cannibalism to capitalism:
“Cannibalism is about consumption and it’s about burning up from the inside in order to exist.”
“Cannibalism is the extreme conclusion of the idea that humans – and their bodies – do not have inherent value that demands respect. American society has been traveling down this philosophical road for a while. It started with legalizing abortion: After Roe v. Wade in 1973, any baby born or killed was just a “choice” at the mercy of their parents. They were not recognized as having inherent value with rights to their body or their life. More recently were the mandatory lockdowns, mask wearing, and vaccinations for Covid-19. Again, a lack of respect for human bodies and for our ability to make decisions for ourselves occurred. The encroachment on human dignity could potentially continue to progress into cannibalism – where the bodies of others have no inherent meaning, value, or sacredness that separates them from the animals we do rightfully and naturally eat.”
Lots of problems with that explanation, not least no attempt to explain the “inherent value” of humans or the assumption that we can eat other animals “rightfully and naturally.” But it is a pretty good summation of the unexamined assumptions at the heart of most writings on cannibalism, or carnivorism, or vivisection, or hunting – the idea that humans are somehow more than animals, and less than edible, while every other species on the planet is stripped of all moral value.
However, talking about cannibalism can put people off the slaughter treadmill altogether. When fact checkers came to ask Chelsea Summers about the way the book’s anti-heroine gastronomically prepares her murdered lovers, their questions about the intricacies of human butchery so disturbed her that she went “full raw vegan for two weeks.” Tobe Hooper gave up meat while making The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, saying “the heart of the film was about meat; it’s about the chain of life and killing sentient beings”. He also claimed that Guillermo Del Toro, no shrinking violet himself in abject filmmaking, gave up meat after seeing it. Bryan Fuller, creator of Hannibal, gave up eating meat during filming of the first season, telling Entertainment Weekly he had been:
“writing about cannibalism for the last three years but also doing considerable research on the psychology of animals, and how sophisticated cows and pigs and the animals that we eat actually are.”
Shows like Hannibal and The Santa Clarita Diet show human flesh as “just meat.” But to do that, they have to (their legal departments insist) come up with ways of simulating the human flesh without actually killing people (or digging them up like Ed Gein). The Yellowjackets prop team chose to use venison (think Bambi). But, the showrunners warned,
“they’ll have to find an alternative for future episodes, because many in its cast are vegan.”
Portrayals of cannibalism, whether actual or fictional, can make some people hungry, and turn others against eating flesh.
Gutfeld points out that:
“In the mind of the NY Times, it’s probably more humane to eat a human being than an animal.”
By “animal”, Gutfeld presumably means every multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia except one – Homo sapiens. We know we are a species of great ape, but spend much of our time pretending we don’t know that.
Being humane, being ethical, is largely about respect and consent. Which was precisely the defence offered by Armin Meiwes when arrested for eating a man who had made it very clear he wanted to be eaten. Cannibalism texts, in ever-increasing numbers, joyfully confound the human/animal divide, and show the human body as edible flesh. So it is not surprising that such questions will be raised, and that, as the NYT said, “that time is now.”
However, Ted Cruz, who likes cannibalism jokes as much as the next meal, came up with a brilliant two-word solution that will put people off human flesh for a considerable time:
The Cannibal Guy is on the road because of the floods in the Northern Rivers of NSW. I feel a bit like Hannibal in season 3, without quite as much gore. Blogs will, hopefully, resume next week, or whenever the flood waters recede. Until then, please check some of the 236 previous posts that can be searched at www.thecannibalguy.com.
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