Tag: vore

Internet Phantasies of Cannibalism

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal writing, On cannibals1 Comment

Trigger warning

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.

cannivore2

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.

Severityschool

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.

Murray David

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.

grandahl2

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.

Hills-finest

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.

Madalot

https://www.tumblr.com/madalot/138271941363/vore-sequence-with-juicy-and-some-willing-anon-i

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

r/cannibalism_ Lounge
byu/drunkcannibal incannibalism_

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.

@iampigmeat

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.

Hammers and cannibals: THE HOUSE OF HAMMER (Discovery+, 2022)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal documentaries, Cannibal News, On cannibals2 Comments

Is Armie Hammer (best known for The Social Network and Call Me by Your Name) a cannibal?

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?

Hammer went on to star in several movies (including some bombs like The Lone Ranger alongside Johnny Depp and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) but he is best known for playing Oliver in Call Me by Your Name in 2017. He was supposed to star in a sequel, based on the novel Find Me, when his world turned to shit. Because he was a cannibal. Or wasn’t.

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.

Many, many people seem fascinated by cannibalism, and one artist is already turning Armie Hammer’s explicit DMs into NFT art (non-fungible tokens – it’s a long story).

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.

IS ARMIE HAMMER A CANNIBAL?

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News, On cannibals6 Comments
In case you’re wondering, the above clip is definitely satirical.

So the news media is sure that Armie Hammer either is, or is not, a cannibal. Let us (briefly I hope) review.

Hammer is a young American actor (not yet 35) 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. Will the ironies never cease!

Hammer went on to star in several movies (including some bombs like The Lone Ranger alongside Johnny Depp) but he is best known for playing Oliver in Call Me by Your Name in 2017. He was supposed to star in a sequel, based on the novel Find Me, when his world turned to shit. Or didn’t. Because he was a cannibal. Or wasn’t.

While most of us were locked down in our humble homes for much of 2020, Hammer and his family locked down in a luxury villa in the Cayman Islands, where, he told GQ Mag,

“It was a very complicated, intense situation, with big personalities all locked in a little tiny place. I don’t think I handled it very well. I think, to be quite frank, I came very close to completely losing my mind.”

Hammer’s family was, shall we say, a colourful one. His aunt Casey declared “I started watching Succession and I had to turn it off, because it was like, ‘Oh, my God. That’s my family.’”

Close families! Hammer said he felt like a trapped wolf who wanted to “chew his own foot off.” Despite the raging pandemic, he flew back to the US, where he got over his imminent divorce with wild parties and a series of girlfriends.

Unfortunately for him, several of those girlfriends in early 2021 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.”

“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.”

“Brand you, tattoo you, mark you, shave your head and keep your hair with me, 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.”

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’.”

Paige Lorenze

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.’ 

Another woman named Effie whom he dated for about five months in 2020 said that he had told her he wanted to eat her flesh, and would suck or lick her wounds if she had “a little cut on my hand.”

Armie and Effie

But let’s remember that no one has actually accused Hammer of acting on his alleged cannibalistic fantasies — and in fact he has never confirmed that he sent those texts. In any case, texting and sex play, even bondage and sado-masochism (if consensual), are not illegal, and Hammer clearly enjoyed both.

But if he sent these texts, and if they were just fantasies, as they appear to be, 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.

Katharine Gates, the author of Deviant Desires, describes a cannibalistic sex role play that tends to “involve more realistic scenarios…but still fantasy—they’re not actually eating pieces of people, but you will have one person be the meat and another is the preparer.”

Many, many people seem fascinated by cannibalism, and one artist is already turning Armie Hammer’s explicit DMs into NFT art (non-fungible tokens – it’s a long story).

One role play which seems popular on sites like Tumblr revolves around cannibal acts, a ‘paraphilia’ known as vorarephilia (it’s not in the DSM) – sexual arousal at eating, or being eaten by, another person (enthusiasts call themselves “vores”). A few, such as Armin Meiwes, eventually find a willing partner and make the fantasy a reality, but such cases are incredibly rare – Meiwes himself found that almost all the men who responded to his requests for someone who wanted to be eaten were not finally ready to take it to the next level –  actually becoming his meal.

But why this fascination? 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’. But this hunger for incorporative power goes back to our earliest experiences.

Freud wrote of an infantile impulse toward “oral incorporation” – a desire not just to feed at the mother’s breast but to consume, possess that source of nourishment, comfort, security and love. He called one of the earliest psychological phases the “cannibalistic pregenital sexual organisation”. This drive is both loving – wanting to unite with the object of desire, and destructive – prepared to destroy the object to satisfy those desires. Infants may generate such hostility when their needs and desires are not satisfied promptly, and may also learn fear from the suspicion that the source will never be enough, or that their feeble attempts to dominate the adult may be met with far more powerful reprisals.

Maggie Kilgour, the doyen of Cannibal Studies, summed up:

“…far from being sublimated into symbolic forms or even sexual desire, our original appetites still move us, so that we remain trapped in a new oral phase of consumption. The work implies that man-eating is a reality – it is civilisation that is the myth.”

So there is a deep vein of cannibalism in our unconscious minds, and it may resurface at times of stress (e.g. being locked down in the Cayman Islands) or as an expression of affection, which in Hammer’s case did not go over well.

Is Armie Hammer a cannibal? He is a rich and handsome movie star from a rich and famous family, who built his career on playing men who can get away with anything. He is certainly a privileged and persuasive abuser of (often much) younger women, a form of exploitative consumption that is uncomfortably close to cannibalistic ingestion.

But is he a cannibal? Almost certainly not in reality. But in his mind, in the deep, dark fissures of his unconscious, he certainly is. We all are.

“Got me spread like a buffet” – KATY PERRY “Bon Appétit”

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal music1 Comment

Katy Perry goes full cannibal? Her 2017 online clip Bon Appétit was a huge hit, with 14 million hits in the first 24 hours. But is it liberation or just lunch? Well, she claims it is about liberation, posting that  she is “hot and ready to serve but make no mistake I’m not your piece of meat”.

Katy Perry about to be prepared by an array of chefs in the Bon Appetit video.

The clip shows her being covered in flour and kneaded by a bunch of chefs, her limbs stretched out, then dropped into a steaming cauldron to baste herself. At one point, her tongue is burned by the kind of torch you might see in a French or Japanese restaurant.

Katy Perry is stretched like dough by chefs in her video.

One tweet stated that Perry was “targeting the cannibal demographic”. Was she appealing to the voraphilia market, or criticising the objectification of the female body?

Baste it: Katy Perry is dropped into a large vat of water.

Appetite for seduction
Fresh out the oven
Melt in your mouth kind of lovin’
Bon a, bon appétit, baby

It looks a lot like exploitation pseudo-porn. But hey, maybe it’s a subtle and clever dig at the way artists, and particularly women, are ‘consumed’ by their fan-base. Yes, and maybe cannibal movies are a subtle and clever dig at the anthropocentric objectification of certain species to satisfy the voracious appetites of humans. Seems unlikely to be intentional but, perhaps at some level, that is what is happening here.

Katy Perry's new music video Bon Appetit had 14 million views on You Tube in 24 hours.