Chapter Four (Part Two)


The next article talked about the community who saw cannibalism as a fetish, a kink. There was evidence of this trend as far back as the 1920s, the article explained, citing cartoons in newspapers and “gentleman’s magazines” similar to those shown in Sidney’s joke book where the images of nude young woman in comical peril were clearly intended to be at least a little arousing, but the community had really come into its own with the proliferation of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

At some point in the very early days of the internet, an artist who went by the name “Dolcett” had released a number of hand-drawn comics and one-off pictures depicting all sorts of snuff-based scenarios featuring attractive young woman but very much focussing on consensual and semi-consensual cannibalism and this artist’s name had become a by-word for the whole community. A link was provided to an archive of these comics and Jennifer looked through them with curiosity. Many seemed to depict scenarios that seemed quite every-day her and it felt strange to think that these had once been taboo fantasies. The only real difference between the world Dolcett depicted in most of his images and the one in which she lived, ushered in by Sidney and her campaign, was that most of his meat seemed to be women in their mid-twenties and upwards, rather than the young girls like herself who were normally on the menu in the real world. Sure, girls in their late teens and women in their very early twenties did get cooked sometimes, usually for family occasions when the relationship of the meat to the diners took precedence over the quality, but these were very much outliers, the exception rather than the rule.

There were a few pictures in which Dolcett had tried to depict younger girls, usually as side-characters or in the background, but Jennifer found these drawings quite hilarious! From context, it was clear that these girls were supposed to be somewhere between eleven and fourteen but, whether through a lack of ability on his part or an unwillingness to draw realistic “under-aged” girls, Dolcett’s young characters came out looking like short thirty year olds with saggy boobs, not even just flat-chested! Chuckling to herself, she returned to the article.

Although Dolcett had been among the first and best known producers of this fetish material, the community had only grown from there with many people making their own art, either by drawing, adding captions to pictures of naked models or using photo-editing tools to create composite images showing young women in slaughter-houses or captured by cannibal tribes. As computer graphics had improved and the tools to create them had become more accessible, more people had begun producing Dolcett-style pictures and comics. There was even a high-quality pay-per-view photo site which produced consensual cannibalism stories using live models who posed in cooking pots, in glowing ovens, on grills over fake coals or with fake spits protruding from their mouths and nether-regions.

As well as these picture sites, a whole network for forums and message boards had grown up to host them as well as allowing people to discuss their fantasies, to debate the ethics of real cannibalism and generally just to be able to meet like-minded people talk about the topic in a judgement-free zone. There were plenty of written stories too and it seemed that these had started to favour young meat in a way that legal restrictions at the time, which made little sense to Jennifer, made it controversial to depict in drawings and next to impossible to depict with photographs, whether posed or edited.

It had been in the “safe space” of these forums that the friendly German cannibal she had read about earlier had found the men that the press at the time insisted on referring to as his victims and the scandal that followed his conviction had brought the public eye onto the cannibal fetish community like never before. Suddenly, what had been viewed by most people who did not share the kink as a weird but essentially harmless fantasy, the members of the community looked upon with the same amused indulgence as those who enjoyed playing “Dungeons & Dragons”, was seen as dangerous, a place where evil predictors could hunt for victims! Almost over night, more than three quarters of these sites disappeared, either finding that their host platforms were no longer willing to host them or not wanting to deal with the newfound scrutiny in the aftermath of what became known as “The German Case”. Those that remained instituted strict rules and what could and could not be discussed and strongly discouraged their users from making external contact with anyone they met there.

Never the less, by the time Sidney was eight years old, which is the age at which she claimed her obsession with being eaten had begun, there were still plenty of sites in existence hosting pictures, stories and discussions related to a type of cannibalism far closer to what Sidney advocated for than anything in her joke book. Surely, Jennifer reasoned, these must have been an influence for her? Perhaps it was genuinely the book that had originally sparked the interest, in as much as she had found the cartoons amusing, maybe even a little exciting, and had gone online in search of more only to find herself very quickly in the depths of this, as it was at the time, underground community. Of course all the sites that allowed posting carried age restrictions but there was nothing to stop an intrigued youngster like Sidney lying about their age and being granted full access! It must have been within this community, concluded Jennifer, that Sidney’s ideas and obsession developed. The parallels were just too close for it to be a coincidence!

The article went on to explain how the community had been a little hesitant about Sidney at first, perhaps not wanted to be accused to pressuring a young girl into their fetish, but as her campaign had gained traction, they had come to embrace her and she had even become a popular topic for fan-art and stories on the forums.

Feeling like she now had a far more rounded picture of the circumstances and the cultural views of cannibalism around the time Sidney began her campaign, Jennifer felt pieces of the puzzle falling into place. The cannibal joke book but an interesting piece of history and “Sidney lore” but, presumably because admitting the significance of an adults-online fetish community which essentially traded in cannibal-themed pornography would not have helped her campaign in the increasingly conservative America of the early twenty-first century, it’s importance in Sidney’s story had been greatly exaggerated. Out of curiosity, Jennifer clicked a link at the end of the article which led to an archive of the Sidney-related stories and pictures published on the forums before she had achieved her dream. They would certainly make for interesting reading!