I’ve struggled over the past few days with how to present the sixth chapter of this book, as it deals with a very, very ugly subject: violence against women. I remember a particular incident that happened when I was in either fifth of sixth grade of elementary school back in Canada that has stuck with me ever since: my Hungarian friend (let’s call him Mark) showed up to school in a state of shock. He kept repeating the words “he beat her up so bad” over and over again, switching between trying to process what had happened and bawling his eyes out. It took us and the teacher a good half hour to calm him down enough to understand what he was saying: his father kicked the shit out of his mother the night before.
This was a horribly traumatic experience for Mark, and we were mature enough to do what we could for him in the coming weeks and months as his mother left his father for good. I haven’t thought about this in decades, but it made me realize then just how lucky I was to not live in a domestic environment like that. I have fond memories of Mark. A good guy, a good student, the type of son all parents want. I couldn’t help but look him up right now on social media, and I see that he is happily married with two kids and has a solid job. Good for him.
This type of physical abuse isn’t the subject of this entry, but for me it is incredibly difficult to separate it from the popularity of sado-masochistic sex these days. I have joked in the past that it would be nice to meet a woman who doesn’t in time ask me to beat her or choke her during sex. The fact of the matter is that I am only half-joking. These women exist, and they are the subject of the sixth chapter of this book.
Allow me to present the following case:
Even if you accept the liberal feminist claim that it is possible for someone to truly and meaningfully consent to being strangled by their sexual partner, you are still faced with the problem of how the law is supposed to differentiate between consensual and non-consensual instances of sexual violence. Emmett, a piece of English case law from 1999, highlights the difficulty. The case involved a man who poured lighter fluid over his partner’s breasts and then set her alight, causing third-degree burns. The woman visited her GP for treatment of the injury, and the GP – suspecting domestic violence – took the unusual step of violating patient–doctor confidentiality by making a report to the police. The woman refused to give evidence when the case came to court, and her partner insisted that she had consented to everything that he did.
What is the court to do, in such a case? As Jonathan Herring, professor of law at the University of Oxford, explains:
In cases where a domestic abuser is charged with assaulting their partner where there are proven injuries, explaining the injuries as the results of consensual sadomasochism is one of the few defences available to them and if the victim is too scared to give evidence, then it will be a hard defence for the prosecution to rebut.26
Even if the victim in Emmett had been willing to give evidence and had supported her partner’s account, the court might still have been unsure as to whether her consent was truly free, since, as Herring points out, ‘there are uncomfortable links between the cases where an abuser has sought to control his victim and every aspect of her life, and cases where a BDSM master has sought control of his slave.’27 From the outside, a consensual BDSM relationship and an abusive relationship look exactly the same, and so if a sub is injured or killed during a sexual encounter, and her dom claims it was an accident, how exactly are the courts supposed to tell the difference?
This is not a theoretical problem. The We Can’t Consent to This campaign, which I’ve worked on, has documented sixty-seven cases in the UK in which people have been killed and their killers have claimed that their deaths were the result of a sex game ‘gone wrong’. All suspects in these killings have so far been male, and sixty of those killed have been female.
The liberal feminist position is that if a woman consents (absent coercion) to an act such as the one described above, then it is kosher. Louise firmly rejects this notion, especially considering her history of working in rape crisis centres where violence targeting women was the rule.
If you agree that consensual sado-masochistic relations are wrong, the question then becomes: how do you stop this kind of private and consensual relationship without invading the bedrooms of citizens?
To the family next door, Armin Meiwes seemed the perfect neighbour. He mowed their lawn, repaired their car and even invited them round for dinner.
Other residents in the small German town of Rotenburg also believed there was nothing odd about the 42-year-old computer expert, whose light burned late into the night inside his creaking mansion. Yesterday, however, Meiwes appeared in court charged with killing - and then frying and eating - another man.
In one of the most extraordinary trials in German criminal history, the self-confessed cannibal admitted that he had met a 43-year-old Berlin engineer, Bernd Brandes, after advertising on the internet, and had chopped him up and eaten him.
It was, he said, something he had wanted to do for a long time. "I always had the fantasy and in the end I fulfilled it," Meiwes told the court on the first day of his trial for murder in the nearby city of Kassel.
Yesterday German prosecutors described how Meiwes had fantasised about killing and devouring someone, including his classmates, from the age of eight.
The desire grew stronger after the death of his mother in 1999, prosecutor Marcus Köhler said.
In March 2001 Meiwes advertised on the internet for a "young well-built man, who wanted to be eaten". Brandes replied.
On the evening of March 9, the two men went up to the bedroom in Meiwes' rambling timbered farmhouse. Mr Brandes swallowed 20 sleeping tablets and half a bottle of schnapps before Meiwes cut off Brandes' penis, with his agreement, and fried it for both of them to eat.
Brandes - by this stage bleeding heavily - then took a bath, while Meiwes read a Star Trek novel.
In the early hours of the morning, he finished off his victim by stabbing him in the neck with a large kitchen knife, kissing him first.
The cannibal then chopped Mr Brandes into pieces and put several bits of him in his freezer, next to a takeaway pizza, and buried the skull in his garden.
Over the next few weeks, he defrosted and cooked parts of Mr Brandes in olive oil and garlic, eventually consuming 20kg of human flesh before police finally turned up at his door.
"With every bite, my memory of him grew stronger," he said.
Behind bars, Meiwes told detectives that he had consumed his victim with a bottle of South African red wine, had got out his best cutlery and decorated his dinner table with candles. He tasted of pork, he added.
The unprecedented case has proved problematic for German lawyers who discovered that cannibalism is not illegal in Germany.
Instead, they have charged Meiwes with murder for the purposes of sexual pleasure and with "disturbing the peace of the dead".
The accused, however, has a unique defence: that his victim actually agreed to be killed and eaten.
Crucial to the case is a gruesome videotape made by Meiwes of the entire evening, during which Brandes apparently makes clear his consent.
Before setting off on his one-way journey to Rotenburg, Brandes was, outwardly at least, a successful, financially secure professional, with a live-in girlfriend.
The girlfriend, Bettina L, told German TV that she had enjoyed a healthy sex life with Brandes but they had split up after he revealed that he also liked men.
In fact, prosecutors said yesterday, Brandes was suffering from a severe psychiatric disorder and "a strong desire for self-destruction".1
Consent to be murdered. Is this any different from the ever-expanding euthanasia program in Canada known as MAID? Can one consent to be harmed?
