A keen-eyed Cannibal Studies student spotted this sign on the Interstate 80 in California recently.
The lake is named after the Donner Party, a group of Midwestern pioneers who were forced to spend the winter of 1846–47 in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. They became snowbound in the bitter winter that year, and famously turned to cannibalism to survive. Only 48 of the original 87 members of the party endured and made it to California.
The best part of the sign is the symbol below it of a knife and fork. One presumes this was meant to advise weary travellers that there were restaurant facilities at the Lake, but it has caused some hilarity on Facebook where the poster tagged the picture,
Nicely played CalTrans, nicely played..
Many of the comments (and there are well over 3,000 of them when last checked) gloried in the cannibalism theme:
California Department of Transportation public information officer Steve Nelson said that there are 38 restaurants past the exit, “so the sign is appropriate to notify motorists, but [we] also understand the irony and that it may be considered insensitive.”
Well, the sensitive can always drive straight past the Donner Lake exit. But if they drive 8 miles beyond this sign, and take exit 188, they’ll see this one instead,
Nothing improves the appetite like a picnic in the snow.
Tyree Smith, from Bridgeport Connecticut, killed a homeless man on December 15, 2011, and ate his brain and eyeballs. He has just been released into the community, ten years after being committed to a state psychiatric hospital, the Whiting Forensic Hospital, supposedly for sixty years.
Smith apologised for the murder at the trial, and the three-judge panel decided he was not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, during his sentencing in July 2013.
In lieu of prison, Smith was committed to a state psychiatric hospital for sixty years. After just ten years, the state Psychiatric Security Review Board said Smith was ready to be transitioned back into the community and he has been released from the facility, Connecticut’s most secure.
He will be living in a Waterbury group home, under orders not to associate with anyone involved in criminal activity. The board stated in its report:
Tyree Smith is an individual with a psychiatric illness requiring care, custody and treatment. Since his last hearing, Tyree Smith has continued to demonstrate clinical stability. Mr. Smith is medication compliant, actively engaged in all recommended forms of treatment, and has been symptom-free for many years.
During the trial, Smith’s cousin Nicole Rabb claimed he arrived at her Connecticut home in December 2011, ranting about Greek gods and talking about needing to go out and get blood.
Police described in the arrest warrant what they believed happened.
Smith curled up outside the abandoned, boarded-up Brooks Street apartment building where he used to live. He was awakened by Angel “Tun Tun” Gonzalez, a homeless drunk who invited him in from the cold. Gonzalez was popular in the neighbourhood. Like Smith, he had also once lived in the Brooks Street building before it was boarded up. Once inside the apartment, Smith heard a voice saying, “This is your blood.” Police said Smith hacked Gonzalez to death with his axe and cannibalised the body.
When Smith’s cousin saw him the next evening, she noticed what appeared to be specks of blood on his pants, and found that he was carrying chopsticks and a bloody axe. Smith allegedly told Rabb he killed a man and ate his brains in the Lakeview Cemetery while drinking sake, and warned her he intended to eat more people. Smith said the rush he felt while hacking Gonzalez and consuming pieces of his body was unlike anything he had ever experienced before, according to the arrest warrant. He told Rabb he has a sexual lust for blood.
A month later, police found Angel Gonzalez’s mutilated body in the vacant apartment on Brooks Street in Bridgeport where Smith had lived as a child. Police later recovered the bloody axe and an empty bottle of sake in a streambed near the Boston Avenue cemetery.
In a videotaped statement to police, Smith said he used a hatchet to kill Gonzalez, then took out the man’s eyes and part of his brain and ate them, washed down with sake (rice wine).
Smith’s defence team relied on the testimony of Yale University psychiatrist Dr. Reena Kapoor, who indicated that Smith had retained his lust for human flesh after his arrest, even offering to eat her. Kapoor claimed Smith suffered from psychotic incidents since childhood, and heard voices.
The voices ordered Smith to eat the victim’s brain so they would get a better understanding of human behaviour, and the eyes so that they could see into the ‘spirit realm’
Kapoor added that Smith went to Subway after eating the man’s body parts.
The report on Smith’s release said there was no evidence of “internal preoccupation or paranoia” and that “he denied experiencing cravings but stated that if they were to arise, he would reach out to his hospital and community supports and providers.”
A year before the murder, Smith wrote on Facebook,
Devouring your flesh. Smelling your bodies burn in a heap. I hate the day they created you filthy humans. There. Thats whats been on my mind since a child. Happy?
Of course, spouting abuse on Facebook doesn’t mean that the writer will eat people’s brains. Well, not always.
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.
Who’s in your burger? One of the best parts of any news story about cannibalism (and don’t the media just love them?) is the cheeky double entendre, the thigh-slapping pun, the sly innuendo. This story has generated many of them. E.g.
Estefany Benitez wrote in a Facebook post about an incident she alleges occurred on Sunday September 12 at the Hot Burger store in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia. Benitez claimed that she chewed on a severed finger with her first bite of her hamburguesa magnifica burger.
Accompanying photos show what appears to be a rotting fingertip on the plate next to the burger.
In Benitez’s accompanying video, which currently boasts more than 60,000 views, she says,
“Here we are at the magnificent Hot Burger where a finger ended up in my burger.”
The video shows an employee pleading “Please tell me what you want and we will give it to you.” The young employee tells the angry customer that the burgers arrive at the restaurant pre-prepared and that “nothing like this has ever happened to us before.” But the video claims that the restaurant then reportedly continued “serving customers like nothing had happened”.
UNINTENTIONAL PUN OF THE WEEK GOES TO:
“This issue is out of our hands.”
After the post went viral, a company spokesperson called the discovery an “unfortunate incident” and explained that an employee had lost two fingers while prepping the meat — a story that has been confirmed by local police.
It’s not unusual for customers to discover human body parts in their food. In an incident in 2019, a UK couple claimed they’d found a tooth in their Chinese takeout. This trope of the innocent cannibal eating human body parts under the assumption that they are from some anonymous animal who is not human has been around since the legend of Sweeney Todd, the ‘demon barber of Fleet St’ who processed his customers into meat pies, and who was supposedly hanged in London in 1802. Todd has graced several movies, most recently a musical with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Other similar stories include Motel Hell and the Danish comedy Green Butcher, starring Mads Mikkelsen. Of course, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre famously begins with a group of tourists chowing down on some unnamed “barbeque” before themselves becoming the ingredients.
In the movie The Farm, a group of animal activists make a living cutting up tourists who stop at their hotel, selling their meat as part of a catering business. Female victims are artificially inseminated to make saleable milk. Like the Hot Burger company, they also have production problems, when a customer finds a tooth in his delivery of meat.
In light of the events at Hot Burger, the Bolivian vice-minister for the defense of consumer rights ordered the temporary closure of the burger branch and fined the firm. However, it’s unclear whether Benitez will pursue legal action. Comments on her Facebook page are running hot, many of them condemning her for putting hard-working restaurant staff out of work. And, when you think of it, is it really so very shocking to find meat from a large mammal in a burger?
The Cannibal Guy 