Cannibalism of Females

Chew on this — the sensationalist New York Post recently broke the story of an allegedly cannibalistic NYPD officer who went for women.  He should end up in prison, but I’m not so sure they want to give the guy a job working in the kitchen.

I remember only a couple of times in my young life that my parents went into Boston to get a copy of the New York Post.  This was before you could find the National Enquirer at every supermarket checkout stand.  “Tabloid” meant a newspaper with half-size pages that you could read like a book.  It was meant for less educated people than us, I was dutifully informed, and reading it was the intellectual equivalent of “slumming.”  I remember wondering then if stupid people were really that stupid or if they just read newspapers that were easy to hold open.

This resonated with me as I have heard this story at least once before. Diego Rivera, the great muralist, experimented with cannibalism.  Note, even the Buddhist commentary says this is “gross beyond words”.  I heard Diego Rivera was kicked out of church quite young for yelping blasphemies.  This is someone who wanted to try stuff and led a pretty volatile life.

Social taboos against eating dead human flesh are many.  This is probably a good idea, since some of the infectious illnesses that kill people could be transmitted in this way.  In other species, cannibalism actually seems to be accepted.  I have heard, from a couple of country boys, that the innards of dead fish can be the best possible bait for catching fish.  Teleost fish, something you are unlikely to find in your local pond, seem to be the best documented for this sort of behavior.

Leave it to a Berkeley entomologist to portray sexual cannibalism, which has evolved in a couple of species of insects, as a simple product of evolution.  Darwinian natural selection, also known as the “survival of the fittest.”  The unfit can get eaten.  Sure makes you want to be fit.

It makes me feel kind of funny.  Like the Freudian ideal that we all have natural instincts but our ethical absorption of society’s taboos keeps us from acting on them.  People who act on such things are rightly treated as criminals; as this NYPD guy should be, if he actually did this.

I might check out the New York Post again.  It has been too long since I studied this sort of thing.  It might give me, uh, something new to chew on.