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Elements
Eating Men: Cannibalism and Sex (1995)
Traditionally, food has been aligned with sex and
eroticism. Various edibles have various sexual connotations;
oysters for sexual frolics, bananas for suggestiveness
(the peeling of ramboutan likewise), cherries for
virginity and red beef for virility. Vegetables
hold negative sexual connotation; as in "he's
a total vegetable", meaning that the person
in question is not sexually arousing. Thus vegetarians
would not seem to be particularly sexually appetising,
nor particularly sexually appetised. This is further
confirmed by the opposition commonly made between
meat and vegetables, where eating red meat has the
reputation of inflammation of lust while vegetables
have a dampening effect. Vegetables thus seem to
be hopelessly lustless.
Meat, on the other hand, tends to hold a special
position in the hierarchy of erotic edibles. Alina
Reyes's The Butcher has done for overweight butchers
what Joyce did for Dublin; wallowing in flesh and
gore the novella is a supremely sensual piece of
pornography. The butcher's knife slices through
the meat a the butcher whispers obscenities in the
ear of the underweight girl assistant who is selling
buck's testicles for enhancement of sexual prowess.
He fondles the meat as he cuts it, and promises
her similar treatment. I'm not going to give the
end away.
In Meat: A Natural Symbol, Nick Fiddes discusses
the association often made between eating and eroticism,
and in particular the relation between meat and
sexuality. He points out how women are conceived
of as meat to be eaten, week and passive, but men
as mountains of meat, symbol of strength. This binary
meat association is particularly prevalent in sexual
language, where sex is compared to eating meat;
that is, the man compares his sexual relations with
women to eating meat. What follows is that men eat
women, and this is where the cannibalism enters
the picture. If women are meat to be eaten in sex,
then it follows that sex involves cannibalism. Or;
sex equals cannibalism. But is it only men who engage
in cannibalism, and are women the only thing eaten?
(Now this article can take two courses; on the one
hand it can become a prim defence for vegetables
and a celebration of vegetarianism, deploring meateating
and claiming that vegetables can also be sexy. On
the other, this can steer into the traditional gender
discussion, men against women, eaters against eaten.
(Ultimately this would necessarily involve some
kind of an alignment between women and vegetable
(women, vegetable, men, meat).) And then it can
always just peter out into nothing; renouncing both
sex and cannibalism altogether as dirty and depraved
activities.)
According to Fiddes the equation between sex and
cannibalism is demeaning for women, and is in fact
one of the tools that men use to keep women down;
being eaten is inferior to eating.
Leslie Fiedler, however, has pointed out how oral
sex holds expressions of eating or devouring for
both sexes, so cannibalism is obviously not only
for men. He further points out how this metaphoric
relation between sex and eating has been explored
in the vampyre film; vampyres can be of both sexes.
The vampyre evidently, literalises the whole thing,
drinking blood equals cannibalism, drinking blood
also equals sex for the vampyre, oral sex that is,
ergo: sex equals cannibalism.
The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover would
all agree on this. Drawn together in Peter Greenaways
eponymus film, they all collaborate on this food+sex=cannibalism
equation, where the cook cooks the lover at the
order of the wife for the thief to eat. Which he
does, without any appreciation though. Ironically
enough it was not the eaten that was inferior to
the eater, but the very opposite. Cannibalism moves
in mysterious ways. Greenaway's film explores the
universal metaphor between food and sex, taking
it to its logical extreme; cannibalism. And in this
case it was not a man eating a woman, but a man
eating another man. Does that mean homosexuality?
Because if sex equals cannibalism then cannibalism
must through the same deduction equal sex. Like
in the vampyre example, the vampyre's cannibalist
feeding is also the vampyre's sex.
Zombies who habitually feed on human meat (at least
since the Night of the Living Dead in 1968) attest
to the cannibalism/sex collision. In Les Daniels's
"Good Parts" the 'good parts' are the
female genitals which prove such exquisite cuisine.
Poppy Z. Brite describes a similar situation in
her zombie story, "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves",
observing that the cannibalist zombies "burrow"
in between the woman's legs as "happily as
the most avid lover". The literal equation
between oral sex and cannibalism is taken a step
further in Robert R. McCammon's "Eat Me".
There the zombie protagonists, discover that the
only way to give each other - and themselves - sexual
pleasure is by eating each other. "Eat me"
they whisper to each other: "Eat me: the only
way left to feel pleasure in the Dead World."
McCammon's story features the first-ever woman cannibal.
A literal maneater she belies the claim that only
men do the eating. She is furthermore neither a
vegetarian nor a vegetable herself when eventually
she happily gobbles up her partner's penis. Reyes's
novella shows that man is edible too in the continual
reflection between the butcher and the butchered
meat, mainly sustained in the butcher's bulk; thus
the butcher is also meat to be eaten, and not just
the eater. So women are also cannibals.
One of the problems arising here is that cannibalism
is generally has rather negative connotations in
the human mind. Cannibalism is considered bad, a
distasteful activity of monsters and such like.
For vegetarians eating meat has gradually come to
be viewed as akin to cannibalism; in the film Delicatessen
the vegetarians are the good people as opposed to
the meateaters, who are cannibals all of them and
acquire monstrous association. Women just cannot
win here, being eaten is bad but doing the eating
only makes matters worse.
Thus the PC thing to do is to claim that women of
all countries should abhor the equation between
sex and cannibalism and refuse to participate in
such metaphorism (or metonymism rather, this is
all about body parts really), become vegetarians
and announce that yes I mean, yes I say, yes: vegetables
are sexy.
(Still my idea of delicatessen is always a very
very VERY rare filet, served with a lovely red Faustino
and lots of black and red pepper.
And cherries for dessert.)
úlfhildur dagsdóttir
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