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Cannibal
Culture ....
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While literal cannibalism may well be relatively rare in our society,
I have to agree with Margaret Morse when she says that cannibal imagery
is ubiquitous: "One could call 'eating/being eaten' and 'enveloping/being
enveloped' both metaphors that pervade the 'most advanced' cultures and
the 'highest' art forms" (167). And it is easy to focus on cannibal
imagery with destructive implications, since violence has become a way
of life (124). Even our formal dinner etiquette alludes to this underlying
violence, with rules explicitly intended to prevent the utensils from
appearing threatening (Diner's Digest). The film The Cook, the
Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover depicts society's unabashed gluttony
for flesh. It is also revealing that, as a society, we cannot seem to
regulate our own food consumption: while the majority of Americans are
overweight, many children go starving. And while the market offers us
a myriad ways to make our bodies beautiful, we are simultaneously entrenched
in physical vanity and self-loathing of the body, another metaphoric cannibalism.
Just as women in literal cannibalistic societies have typically been the
victims devoured by their own communities, so have women in our society
typically become the devoured: the eye candy, the low-wage worker, the
mother/nurturer. And when she is seen as the cannibal herself, it is perhaps
the male models that depict her in threatening terms--as castrator, as
man-eater. While those terms often dictate how we see the feminine desirer,
at other times she seems to creatively transcend her position on the food
chain.
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