Keeping with the theme of kinky and anti-porn horror films, Love Object portrayed necrophilic fantasy, but the 2006 film Feed adds another layer of complexity to anti-porn rhetoric.  Feed addresses a bizarre spectrum of behaviors between consenting adults, opening with a scene based on the real-life case of the German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who placed an advertisement for a willing victim to be “slaughtered and consumed,” and found one. The Meiwes case has been depicted in other films, including Grimm Love (Fangoria Frightfest) Grimm Love and Marion Dora’s Cannibal. Feed and Cannibal are unconventional in their depiction of malevolent victims, That is to say, the “victims” not only consent to their demise, but are at least as culpable and villainous as the villains. The victim in Cannibal berates the Meiwes character into killing and eating him, suggesting that Meiwes initially merely fantasized about cannibalism but didn’t plan on following through. The victim in the beginning of feed is at least equally responsible, and pleads to the investigator who tries to save him, “It’s my body…and I want to be eaten!”

It doesn’t seen that a film that starts with a man eating his own penis after watching it being fried in a skillet could get nastier, but it does. This film addresses an obscure subculture within the BDSM/fetish community (though many BDSM practitioners would disavow it), known as feeders and gainers, with a dash of vore. The gainer, usually a woman, is fed until she is so obese that she is completely dependent on her partner. Of course, numerous pornography websites are devoted to this paraphilia. The would-be hero of the film, Phillip, is an Interpol agent who investigates legal violations on “internet porn” sites. While investigating the fat appreciation fetish site, he discovers that the pornographer Michael is force-feeding the models to death. In an especially gruesome twist, subscribers to Michael’s site place bets as to how long it will take the women to die. Then, these women’s bodies literally become products to be consumed, as he feeds their fat to new, unsuspecting victims. When Phillip tries to save one of the models, Deirdre, who is near death, he is shocked when she rabidly defends her abuser.

Although Feed addresses a very obscure subject, the overall message is that pornography “models” and sexual submissives are often so brainwashed that their consent cannot be considered genuine. The film depicts pornographers and dominants as merely preying on their submissives’ low self-esteem and creating the illusion of a caring relationship. The film’s villainous pornographer often adopts feminist rhetoric about healthy sexuality and body image, but in reality despises women. Michael tells heavy women that they are beautiful, and encourages them to gain more weight. His ideal of beauty becomes just as oppressive and destructive as the mainstream cultural mandate to be very thin. Perhaps this film is not fair to the feeder-gainer subculture, nor to BDSM subculture as a whole, but, based on personal conversations with various…people,  Michael’s rhetoric does resemble the twaddle spouted by some self-described doms…Beating the one you love is a way to honor them, blah blah blah. Suffice it to be said that the more I try to approach BDSM (or at least its apologists) with an open mind, the sillier–and more insulting–it seems.

Yet, this film poses important questions. Who decides what is safe, sane, and consensual? To what extent should we have freedom to decide the fate of our bodies? Are our desires really ours to begin with? Perhaps this is a conundrum because even the most “normal” and “healthy” sexual and romantic relationships are traditionally characterized and defined by the dominant/submissive binary.

(This post was adapted from an excerpt within my earlier work “Carnage and Carnality: Gender and Corporeality in the Modern Horror Film,” originally published in No Limits! A Journal of Women’s and Gender Studies, 2011, Vol.1.)