Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
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-three – the sex organs”. (burp)
Of all our episodes so far, this is the one which has got Steve, our ordinary UK male crossing his legs. 2024, London, five men were convicted of conspiracy to commit GBH for a sadistic site called Eunuch Maker, with 22,000 followers who were aroused by the amputation of men’s penises and testicles. Using clamps, knives and saws, 29 cases of genital castration and mutilation were filmed and uploaded which netted its mastermind £300,000, with one video showing him eating some testicles with a salad. From Ancient Egypt to the Pagans and the Aztecs, across all tribes before our cultures combined, the genitals have been a symbol of power and fertility, and are still seen today as a potent aphrodisiac. 2001, Armin Meiwes severed his volunteer’s penis, but too chewy to eat raw, he fried it with wine, garlic and Brandes' fat. Only having burnt it, he fed it to his dog. But is penis a viable cannibal’s meal? Sort of. Only the penis isn’t a muscle, it’s a spongy mass of erectile tissue and blood vessels, and (on average) weighing 160 grams, being roughly 6 inches long when erect and 3.5 inches when flaccid, it’s a lot smaller when it’s been severed and drained, with Napoleon’s amputated penis being just 1 ½ inches long. Consisting of roughly 9 to 22 calories per inch (dependant on girth), a penis is twice as long as it looks, as it extends well into the pelvis, with the average erection lasting seven minutes, and although ladies may joke that a man’s brain is in his pants, ejaculation is actually controlled by a neurons in the spine. So, if a cannibal wanted to eat a sizable appendage, shoe size is a myth, but the International Journal of Impotence states “penile size correlates with age, height and index finger length”. A death erection is therefore vital to maintain length and girth post-mortem, which scientists believe may be due to pressure on the cerebellum during strangulation, or in shotgun wounds “the destruction of the cervical spinal cord”. Therefore to maintain that girth, before severing, the shaft needs to be tied and cauterised to prevent blood-loss. Animal penis is eaten in many cultures, they’re prepared by splitting it down the urethra, rinsing it to remove the urine smell, and being tough when raw, it needs to be boiled for several hours, after that “they gain a soft and gelatinous texture”, but lacking much flavour, it requires a strong seasoning. Like Armin Meiwes, in 2012, when Japanese performance artist Mao Sugiyama cut off and cooked his own penis for six $250 patrons, having pan-fried it, the Culinary Director of Serious Eats wrote “it was chewy, he didn’t cook it right, what a waste of a good penis”. It’s a delicate meat so it needs to be treated with care. As for testicles. At between 3.5 to 5.5cm long, 2 to 3.5cm wide and about 20g each, they contain no meat, being made of about 800 coiled tubes of germ and Sertoli cells encased in a scrotum. At roughly 20-30 calories per teste, although Albert Fish claimed “his pee wees were chewy”, it’s likely he didn’t cook them correctly, as needing no special preparation, testicles have a “delicate, melting texture when braised”, they suit being breaded and deep-fried as “their texture is a little like a large fresh scallop”, and my local butcher states “they have a very distinctive pop, when bitten into”. It's odd that some cultures are squeamish about eating testicles, when they are considered delicacies in most countries, with the World Testicle Cooking Championship being held each year in Serbia. So, with 167,000 people dying each day, if we put our morals aside, each penis would be a tasty snack for the population of Scunthorpe, 3 testicles each could make a great soup for everyone in Clacton-on-sea, and with the average penis skin being 6.5cm wide and 11cm long, that could cover 60,000 hardback books. So, Steve’s ‘love plumbs’ and ‘pink oboe’ could make a tasty snack for a cannibal, but what about if he wasn’t a Steve, but an Eve? I hate to shock you, but boy’s pee-pee’s are not the same as girl’s nu-nu’s. Biologically men and women are 98.5% identical. Even the labia is comprised of the same mix of skin, sweat glands and blood vessels as the scrotum, it’s also as sensitive and as chewy. When Czech killer Ladislav Hojer stabbed a woman known only as Ivana M in 1981, he sliced off her labia, penetrated the severed lips with his penis, then boiled them in salted water, seasoned them with mustard owing to their “bland taste”, but deciding that they were too chewy, he flushed the remains down the toilet. Like testicles, ovaries are an acquired taste and texture, as they contain no muscle, and only 1cm wide, they are a mix of ovarian follicles, connective tissue, blood and lymphatic vessels. In the 1891 murder of New York prostitute Carrie Brown, her genitals were mutilated, and although an ovary was said to have been removed, it was believed it had dislodged owing to a cyst. So far, there are no known cases of cannibals willingly eating an ovary, although this may simply be that testicles are easy to spot, but ovaries are well hidden. The same could be said for the murders of Annie Chapman & Catherine Eddowes purportedly by Jack the Ripper, as the removal of a uterus drove the press into overdrive about his woman-hating mission. But given that an adult uterus is 8cm long, 5cm wide and the walls 4cm thick, with the intestines, uterus and labia of Annie Chapman having been fully or partially removed, rather than insisting that Jack had a “surgeon’s skill” as it makes for a better story, given the close proximity of these organs and that he also removed her bladder, maybe the truth is more likely that he was simply a vengeful bedwetter who was terrible at anatomy? As mentioned before, it’s possible that many body parts have symbolism (no matter how insignificant) for a cannibal, which is why they eat some bits, and not others. But by accepting their motive after the fact, or by trying to force a motive on their actions to suit a narrative is wrong… unless proven. 2024, Chicago, Clarisa Figueroa was sentenced to 50 years for strangling 19-year-old Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, and slicing open the heavily pregnant teen’s womb to claim the unborn baby as her own. The baby died two months later, and the mother’s body was dumped in a rubbish bin. It was said, not long after Clarisa’s son had died, she lied to her family that she was pregnant, and continued with the lie. Join me tomorrow to explore the one bit of a body a cannibal can’t destroy in its entirety… the DNA.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. Archives
October 2024
Subscribe to the Murder Mile true-crime podcast
Categories
All
Note: This blog contains only licence-free images or photos shot by myself in compliance with UK & EU copyright laws. If any image breaches these laws, blame Google Images.
|