Welcome to the Tasteless World of Online Cannibalism

Image by Femsnuffer

You probably remember the German case: A Berlin engineer named Bernd Brandes was voluntarily murdered and eaten by a computer technician named Armin Meiwes back in 2003. They’d met on a forum called Cannibal Café and upon meeting Armin cut off Bernd’s penis, who died a few hours later from blood loss. For the following ten months Armin proceeded to cook and eat 20 kilograms of Bernd, all the while updating his online profile with an array of incriminating photos. Predictably, someone snitched and Armin was sentenced to life in 2006. After all that media excitement, Cannibal Café was pulled from the net and that was the end of convenient online cannibalism.

But actually not. Online cannibalism has evolved since 2003, most notably in the way it’s been rolled into something called Dolcett, which was originally the name of a Canadian fetish artist. Dolcett’s drawings of roast women and torture really took off in the mid-90s (in certain circles) and the space between S&M and snuff adopted his name. This was solidified in 2003 when the founder of now defunct Cannibal Café started a new site called Dolcett Girls, which at time of writing has 52,899 members. It’s now by far the most popular site for Dolcett, but for purist cannibalism it’s perhaps not the first stop. Like everything else, cannibalism has moved onto social media. Facebook generally pulls fetish pages, but Google Groups allows just about anything.

And this is how modern cannibals find each other. Nine out of ten ads are from men wanting to be eaten, with only a minority wanting to do the eating. Here's another example from Experienceproject.com, which also doubles as a cry for help.

The kind person responding to the ad has suggested the number for Lifeline, which really gets to the point – who the fuck wants to be eaten? Is this just a sort of kinky euthanasia? Or is it more of a sexual thing? I asked a few people this and the answer seemed to be the latter. An Experience Project member named Fatboy1384 explained that is was simply fantasy. “As a kid I had dreams about it. I also dreamed about being a pig and as I got older the feelings stayed.” The Pet from Dolcett Girls explained this idea more articulately “I'm not interested in the cannibalism aspect of Dolcett. I'm more interested in the death and dying side to it. As a girl, I would end up being eaten right? So by then I would be dead so therefore I don't really get to have any input. For me the whole being killed in a graphic way or dying thing is more my side of Dolcett.”

And this is where Dolcett has its own doctrine. For such a radical pursuit, it follows old-school gender roles pretty tightly. Men are always depicted at the muscled sadists, while buxom women just have to take it. Dolcett Girls Forum takes this one step further with their own back story, dreamt up by the founder Perro Loco. He role-plays the mayor of some lawless Californian town called Dolcett where the men trade and process the women as meat. There’s also a lottery that calls women up to be butchered. The only rules are that everything exists as fantasy only and no one’s allowed to post child porn. This former bit is probably a hangover from Perro’s last site, which as I explained was shut down for facilitating real cannibalism. The other odd part is that after a while you notice a weird kind of community about the place. To illustrate this, Perro announced he had leukaemia last year to the forum. “Assuming I survive the initial round of chemo,” he wrote, “I'll be keeping my eyes open for someone reliable to succeed me as mayor. The DGF has a life of its own and it's as close to a legacy as I'm gonna have.” The show of support for the mayor was actually kind of touching.

The other community thing is the way they share fantasy art. I got talking to a guy named Femsnuffer who makes Photoshop art for the members using photos they send in. As he explains “I use images of girls who are members because they get a kick out of it and we become friends.” I was keen to get my own photo done so I sent him this one of me drinking coffee:

And I got this back…

Originally I wanted to be butchered and eaten but Femsnuffer said it’d be emasculating so he wouldn’t do it. ”I absolutely hate it when a man is submissive to a female mistress. To me he is no man.” So with that, he knocked up this image of me being non-submissive with a porn star.

The final question is how much of this is real. How much non-Photoshopped cannibalism is going on? Femsnuffer doesn’t know but he did know some girls who were into crucifixion. “They were mostly originally from Russia but they were living in Kentucky. One of the girls would be the executioner and usually 2 of the other girls would be crucified. They would see which girl would last the longest before begging to be taken down. From what they said the goal was usually about 3 hours. One of the girls was so into being nailed to the cross she had tubes inserted into the nail holes so she could be crucified more often.”

As for cannibalism, “It’s out there,” he says. “There’s always someone out there who has to carry anything to an extreme. And if it was legal I'd have to at least try a bite of girl. I imagine like everything else she'd taste like chicken.”

Follow Julian @MorgansJulian