“Armin Meiwes, whom neighbours have portrayed as the kind of unassuming man who would chat over the garden fence, has admitted killing and carving up his victim and eating part of the flesh. But what has left Germans shuddering in open-jawed disbelief is that by all accounts, including hours of video footage shot by Meiwes, his ‘victim’ was a willing participant in an extreme form of sex and sado-masochism… The dead man, 43-year-old Berlin engineer Bernd Juergen Brandes, met Meiwes after replying to an Internet advertisement for ‘young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 for slaughter.’ He travelled to his house in the quiet town of Rotenburg, central Germany, on a one-way rail ticket after tidying up his personal affairs. There, prosecutors say, he let Meiwes slice off his penis which they fried and partially ate together. Afterwards, Meiwes stabbed him with a kitchen knife, carved the corpse into pieces, ate part of the flesh, stored some more in a deep-freeze and buried a few bones and the skull in the garden.” — Sify.com (India?)

(Thanks to Carrie L. for pointing out the story.)

The shocking thing about this modest corner of hell is not that some deranged masochist offered himself up to Mr. Meiwes’s meat locker. It makes perfect sense, once you think about it, that the internet would facilitate communication between those who want to die and those who want to kill. Expect more such consensual killings in the future.

Rather, there are two other shocking things about the story:

The first is that the two men shared a fried bit of the victim’s manhood. You can well imagine such a scenario when the killer forces it on the victim. (Just the other day PervScan was re-reading Gustav Hasford’s brilliant book The Phantom Blooper, in which a GI operating a brothel in Vietnam is crucified and castrated by vengeful teen hookers, who proceed to stuff his cock into his mouth and sew his lips shut.) But that’s not the way the news story lays out the action. No, in the story here, the victim seems to take part in a genteel repast that happens to include his own fried penis.

Egad! The mind reels before such an act of self-mutilation. There are plenty of unhappy souls who hurt themselves, plenty of men who castrate themselves, but to sit down and relish it, to share it like a bottle of fine wine… You can imagine hating yourself, doing a Van Gogh number on your ear in a fit of rage or insanity. You can imagine killing yourself. But to be a connoisseur of your own castration? A gourmand of your own gonads? And, what’s more, to relish your cooked penis knowing full well that it is your last meal?

Miewes, the killer, was of course pathologically disturbed. But his victim was in an even further psychological realm, something far beyond the wildest known pathologies. In a weird way, he might even have attained some absolute of sickness, a complete overturning of “normal” sensibilities. And in that respect he was a remarkable figure, a kind of explorer. Like the first man who explored the south pole, the victim here seems to have attained the very antipode of human reason.

The second really shocking thing about this story is just how many people responded to the killer’s internet advertisement for victims. The newspaper claims that four other people — a cook, a teacher, a hotel worker, and a pensioner — had actually made the trip to visit Miewes’s “slaughter room.” Fortunately for them, however, “One he didn’t like, another was too fat, a third backed out…” The paper doesn’t say what happened to the fourth, but you know what happened to the fifth. All told, the killer was in contact with 430 other people who seemed to share his predilection — which is why you should fully expect more such consensual killings in the future.

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