Last week, unverified screengrabs of extremely sinister text messages allegedly sent by actor Armie Hammer between 2016 and 2020 were posted by the Instagram account @houseofeffie, who also compiled nearly half a dozen examples of women who claimed to have had an affair with Hammer while he was married. Some of the fantasies contained in the screengrabs were obscure, to say the least. In one, Hammer professes his desire to “bite the recipient” and eat his heart; in another, he says: “I am 100% cannibal. I want to eat you. Cum. It’s scary to admit. I never admitted that before. “
It is important to note that the screengrabs have not been verified and Hammer himself has denied that they are legitimate. (Hammer representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) However, after the celebrity gossip account on Instagram Deuxmoi expanded them, they instantly went viral, with people on Twitter joking about his sexual tendencies and TikTok making videos of Hammer dancing with Ke $ ha’s “Cannibal”. The reaction was so intense that Hammer was forced to give up his next romantic comedy with Jennifer Lopez, issuing a statement saying, “I am not responding to these shitty allegations, but in the light of vicious and spurious online attacks against me, I cannot in sane conscience, now I leave my children for 4 months to make a film in the Dominican Republic. ”(Hammer is also involved in a custody dispute, which also served as fodder for the mockery of people on the Internet).
That said, there is no reason to believe that Hammer actually killed and ingested an individual; if you had, you can only take the promotional tour for The Lone Ranger it would have been a lot less boring. What is under debate, however, is whether these perversions are, in fact, inherently predatory or abusive – or whether there is no other conversation to be had about them, one that is much less memorable, but significantly more subtle than that. we have now. So I asked Empress Wu, a professional dominatrix based in New York City, who has, as she says, a “deeply-rooted fetish of cannibalism”.
As Wu explains, cannibalism fetishes have nothing to do with eating someone else. “It’s based on a certain amount of fantasy and there are different elements to play with,” she says. She made personalized clips that play with the “vore” fetish (a similar fetish in which someone fantasizes about being small and being consumed by a giant) and participated in scenes where she bit someone or pretended to open it or talked about turning someone into a piece of meat and cutting them. “For some people, it can be like lancing your finger and making someone drink the blood. For others, it can be scathing. For others, it may be eating someone. It could be the theater of sitting at the table and eating sushi out of your body, ”she says. “I don’t think there is a typical way to represent a cannibalistic scene because the final act itself is extremely unreal.”
Wu became involved with the fetish of cannibalism on both sides, both as a “consumer” and as a “consumer”. As a domme, or consumer, “the power or pleasure comes from the knowledge that they are willing to give part of themselves for my pleasure or nutrition,” she says. On the other side of the equation, “for me, there are many different cases where it represents proximity,” she says. “When you really think about it, the desire is about the eagerness to assimilate another one. When you are so fucking with that person, you need to have or be owned by him.r being entangled in a specific way, cannibalism as a fetish really highlights or fulfills that feeling of wanting to be close to someone and the futility that it will never happen entirely. ”
Experienced members of the kink community highly value consent and, as is the case with most BDSM scenes, all of these dynamics are carefully negotiated beforehand, with both parties participating in an extensive post-game briefing to share what they have done and he did not like the experience; aftercare, or the length of time the dominant meets the sub’s physical and emotional needs, is imperative for even the most experienced perverts.
At first, Empress Wu says, she was relatively unperturbed by Armie’s Hammer’s alleged sexts: “they typically looked like dom-y males, if not a little extreme. “(For what it’s worth, Hammer spoke openly about his taste for twists in a 2013 Playboy interview, and was arrested for liking a rope game tweet in 2017.) It was when she got deeper into them that she started seeing some “red flags”. In a message, after the recipient says that having a belt around his neck during sex is “too much”, Hammer replies, “yes”; in another, referring to a previous sexual encounter, a woman says, “I really wanted to stop most of the time.” “This is explicitly a violation of consent and that is the heart of the matter,” she says. “No matter what the fetish is, it is irrelevant. But when there is a limit violation, this is something to always pay attention to. ”
To further complicate matters, Hammer’s ex-boyfriends alleged inappropriate or non-consensual behavior. “He kind of captivates you and, while he’s charming, is preparing you for those things that are darker, heavier and more immersive, ”ex-girlfriend Courtney Vucekovich, who dated Hammer from June to August, told Page Six, in addition to saying that Hammer wanted to “bake and eat” her. “When I say consume, I mean mentally, physically, emotionally, financially, just everything.” She added that he “did some things with me that I was not comfortable with. You end up doing very strange things for you, including sexual acts ”, although she did not specify what they were. Another Hammer ex-girlfriend, writer Jessica Ciencin Henriquez, tweeted: ““ If you’re still questioning whether those Armie Hammer DMs are real (and they are), maybe you should start to question why we live in a culture willing to give abusers the benefit of the doubt instead of victims ”.
Empress Wu says that the speech around Hammer’s transgressions should focus less on his alleged perversions and more on the alleged breaches of consent that have occurred with women in these texts. “I consider it a bad representation of BDSM because I don’t consider it BDSM ”, she says. If the messages are real, “this man has a fetish, this man has a perversion, but I don’t think it was true BDSM because there was a clear violation of consent that occurred. It’s just a spicy attack. “