“Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion.” — Harvey Weinstein, October 1, 2009, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Maybe you have been following the sicko scandal involving the movie star Armie Hammer, who allegedly sent messages to one or more female sexual partners saying that he has a cannibal fetish — that is, he becomes sexually aroused by the thought of eating the flesh of his sexual partners.

Disgusting, right? Utterly horrible, deranged, degenerate, you name it. Well, Cosmopolitan magazine is here to tell you that you should not be judgmental. The magazine of sophisticated urban females consulted a pervert named Jet Setting Jasmine, described as a “master fetish educator,” to set us straight about cannibalism fetishes. From the interview:

Here’s what I’ve been seeing people get wrong in the conversation around Armie Hammer and the abuse allegations against him: His alleged cannibalism fetish itself isn’t the problem. The problem is, if the allegations are true, whether he used his power to groom these women into participating in a lifestyle they had truly not consented to.

A cannibalism fetish, or vorarephilia, is characterized by a person who fantasizes about consuming someone or being consumed. The key word there is “fantasy.” The fetish never goes so far as actually eating or killing someone, of course—that’d be illegal. Just having the conversation around eating someone, and being sexually stimulated by that, is considered a cannibalism fetish.

Once the allegations against Hammer blew up the internet, all the media attention zeroed in on the word “cannibalism.” We were totally titillated by the taboo. But I’d like to offer a different framework, one where we understand Hammer’s alleged behavior as troubled, but not necessarily because of the C-word. Well, because of the potential absence of another C-word. Consent.

Ah. Consent. Well, how would that work, Jasmine?

A *consensual* form of BDSM play featuring a cannibalism fetish would go something like this: Someone might say, “I know I can’t actually eat your hand off, but I can suck your fingers until you tell me to stop or nibble on you.” Blood play is another fetish called hematolagnia. And that can present as someone being turned on by any form of blood during sex from menstrual blood to needle play to biting until there is blood or spanking until there is blood.

I remind you that this is not from some dirty magazine you have to buy at a porn shop. This is from one of the biggest magazines in America, with a circulation of just over three million.

Cosmo’s fetish educator advises:

Instead of shaming people’s fetishes, we should be teaching them to share their interest in a way that doesn’t harm others.

So we need to learn how to beat people bloody for sexual sport without harming others. Got it.

This is a cosmopolitan — and a Cosmopolitan — value in the United States in 2021: promoting “safe” sexual activity involving drawing blood and fantasizing about eating human flesh.

This is Jessica Pels, the editor-in-chief of Cosmo. She is 34 years old:

Can you imagine this being your life’s work?

This is one of those things that makes you wonder: What kind of country are we? God help young women growing up in this cesspool. We are no light to the nations. We are becoming darkness visible.

UPDATE: Last year, Justin Lee wrote in First Things about the real-life case of a German cannibal, Arwin Meiwes, who murdered and ate his male lover, who, on video, clearly consented to it. Meiwes was convicted and sent to prison, but Lee questions the logic of that sentence given that Germany’s highest court issued an assisted suicide ruling:

A recent ruling of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG), Germany’s highest court, has made death on demand a constitutional right. Wesley J. Smith summarizes the decision: “In Germany, autonomous people now have the absolute right to commit suicide and receive assistance in doing so for any reason or no identifiable reason at all.” The ruling guarantees this right “in all stages of a person’s existence.” Even children capable of autonomous decision-making may avail themselves of this liberty.

The ruling is a rather elegant reductio ad absurdum exposing the logical terminus of liberal individualism. No limiting principle may be applied to the exercise of the “autonomous” human will, and John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” is worse than useless when harm is defined subjectively. “The individual’s decision to end their own life,” writes the BVerfG, “based on how they personally define quality of life and a meaningful existence, eludes any evaluation on the basis of general values, religious dogmas, societal norms for dealing with life and death, or considerations of objective rationality.” The individual’s subjective understanding of harm overrules considerations of objective rationality.

The German court’s language echoes that of U.S. Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Germany’s BVerfG is applying the same concept of liberty; it’s just doing so more consistently and with considerably more intellectual integrity. “Where the protection of life runs counter to the protection of autonomy,” declares the BVerfG, “it contradicts the central understanding of a community which places human dignity at the core of its order of values and thus commits itself to respecting and protecting the freedom of human personality as the highest value of its Constitution.”

John Paul II called it a Culture of Death. He was right.