Cannibalism - #22: A Disorder?

TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part twenty-two – a disorder?”. (burp)

A thigh, a heart or an eye are easy pickings for a cannibal, but do true cannibals have a disorder which means they will eat anything, no matter how disgusting or complicated, and wannabe cannibals don’t?

Body parts are symbolically unique for different cannibals based on what they are lacking in their lives.

From 1988 to 89, Tsutomu Miyazaki, the Japanese ‘Little Girl Killer’ murdered and mutilated four girls aged 4 to 7. As a paedophilic necrophile, he raped their corpses, drank their blood, and eat their hands, as being born premature with a birth defect, he envied theirs as his were deformed and claw-like.

For less imaginative cannibals, a thigh is an obvious choice as food, whereas hands are complex. They contain 27 bones (a quarter of those in the body), 27 joints, 3 main nerves, five main blood vessels, 100 ligaments, tendons and 30 muscles, the biggest being the dorsal interosseous at just 0.5 mm thick – which for a cannibal is hardly a snack.

Like feet, with 26 bones, 33 joints and 29 muscles, many of which being thin, lack much calorific value, so in extreme cases like the Kazakh famine of 1930–33, eyewitnesses recalled “a foot or a hand of a child boiling in a cauldron over a fire”, as loved one’s were forced to make soup from their dead.

But often with cannibals (who unlike other killers have taken that depravity to a greater extreme) what parts they covet play a large part in their psychological trauma and logic. Having stabbed her abusive husband to death, Omaima Nelson cooked his head, hands and “castrated him in revenge for his alleged sexual assaults”. Conversely serial-killer Jerry Brudos, ‘The Lust Killer’ (who wasn’t a cannibal) severed and froze the feet of three females to assuage his fetish and he dressed the dismembered feet in high heel shoes as he masturbated.

Cannibals often don’t eat to sate a hunger, as guided by emotions like anger or lust, some eat faces, eyes, intestines, even penises, with Dahmer sexually driven to dine on the thighs and biceps of “athletic young men”.

No-one really knows why some people turns to cannibalism; maybe it’s a remnant of our palaeolithic past, that’s it’s linked to nutritional deficiency (as is common amongst many mammals, which humans are), that it’s fuelled by cultural taboos which prevent us from feeding the world in a population crisis, that it symbolises love (as it has done across many centuries in art and literature), that its ceremonial, sacrificial, a psychiatric disorder fuelled by trauma, or a psycho-sexual paraphilia like Vorarephilia.

Paraphilia – the intense sexual arousal sparked by the atypical - isn’t common. It can begin with harmless objects like armpits, mannequins, feathers or fur, and extend all the way up to the more extreme like strangulation, amputation, faeces, or Vorarephilia. This is the erotic desire to be consumed by or to consume another human being´s flesh, and – at a stage further – anthropophagolagnia, which is the raping and cannibalizing of another person.

As individuals, we all have our own idiosyncrasies, we have odd behaviors or harmless fantasies which border paraphilia, and in moments of stress or arousal, especially in sexual situations, they appear; whether dressing up, whispering, role playing, mild pain, voyeurism, sensual feeding, or submission.

Cannibals are merely those who have taken their paraphilia beyond what is acceptable, morally and/or legally to society, and in some cases, even to themselves, as even the most disturbed have boundaries.

Some have also suggested it could also be a psychopathic variation of Pica, an eating disorder resulting from a psychiatric disturbance. Sufferers are known to eat mildly toxic items like soap, plaster or paint; more destructive items like pins, glass, or metals; the disturbing like vomit, urine, and in one case, a woman called Keyshia ate soiled nappies, describing them “having a sour candy like flavour”. But are these real obsessions, an odd nutritional hunger, or merely a psychiatric cry for help or attention?

2009-10, Bradford, Stephen Griffiths, the self-styled ‘Crossbow Cannibal’ murdered three sex-workers (Shelley Armitage, Susan Rushworth & Suzanne Blamires) and back at his council-owned flat at Soho Mills, he dismembered and supposedly “he told detectives he cooked flesh from the first two women and ate the third one raw”, and although their murders were proven, none of the cannibalism was.

Described as an “insignificant loner” with a warped sense of morals and an obsession with true crime, it’s unlikely that Griffiths was a cannibal in the true sense of the word, or that he had a paraphilia which drove him to eat a woman’s flesh. Guided by a lack of love in his life and a sad desperate need to be revered, having bragged about his crimes to the police which were regurgitated by a salivating tabloid press, he felt it would take that level of depravity to join the pantheon of serial killers…

…which explains why – having murdered this last victim in the flat’s communal hallway – he waited to be caught, positioned the evidence, and raised a toast to the CCTV camera which captured his crime. He wasn’t a cannibal, he was just a sad little man who was desperate for the attention his life lacked.

Join me tomorrow to explore the sexual and reproductive organs.