I Get So Hungry When You Say You Love Me: Feminist Cannibalism

TWO UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS about Mimi Cave’s 2022 horror-romance Fresh: One, the meatball of human flesh, resting heavy and crimson atop a bed of pasta, is mouthwatering. Two, Sebastian Stan, playing an entrepreneur and chef specializing in human flesh, is hotter than ever. As my friend put it in a frenzied text exchange about the film: “On the one hand, you’re down a leg,” but “[o]n the other hand…Sebastian Stan.” Her comment, played for laughs, points to the pattern of media targeted toward young women romanticizing toxic heterosexual relationships in ways that Steve (Stan) and Noa’s (Daisy Edgar-Jones) on-screen romance critiques. The casting of Stan—best known for his morally gray roles as Bucky Barnes/the Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Carter Baizen in the hit teen drama Gossip Girl (2007–2012)—ensures that Steve will charm female viewers even after they learn he eats women. Surprisingly, the real horror of the film is not that Steve kidnaps, butchers, and sells women as meat but that it collapses the difference between this extreme, obvious violence and the seemingly mundane yet insidious violence of men who send unsolicited dick pics. When Noa wakes chained inside her would-be boyfriend’s basement, she realizes that Steve has turned out to be just as bad as the typical sleazy men who see her as a mere sex object.

Fresh is one example from the recent resurgence of cannibalism in popular media over the last several years. Whether you have seen the film adaptation of Bones and All (2022), the Netflix limited series Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022), that particularly harrowing episode of the HBO Max series The Last of Us (2023–), or the Showtime series Yellowjackets (2021–), or whether you have listened to singer-songwriter Ethel Cain’s 2022 album Preacher’s Daughter, it seems like everyone is eating everyone. Cannibalism has a long history of many meanings; one might say that the trope can be described along the same macabre lines Steve uses when describing the taste of human flesh: “It depends on where it comes from and how it’s prepared.” However, cannibalism has become an even hotter topic in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. When reality feels horrific and surreal, exploring taboos becomes especially pleasurable. But I am specifically interested in feminist cannibalism: a subgenre of cannibalism content that centers the gendered violence of 21st-century patriarchal culture. This genre addresses the cultural vilification of women and restrictions on female bodily autonomy that are steadily expanding in our post-COVID landscape. Feminist cannibalism media like Fresh make clear that women are as fed up with diet culture as they are with being seen as pieces of meat. Through literalizing the nuanced overlap between hunger for food and sex, these entries explore female desire and feminist rage.

Through literalizing the nuanced overlap between hunger for food and sex, [feminist cannibalism] explores female desire and feminist rage.

American culture’s metaphorical language of love and desire is saturated with themes of consumption. In English, the way we express love is especially filled with metaphors of a particularly voracious incorporation, of desiring another person so desperately you want to merge into one entity—be it physically through sex or legally through marriage. When the language we use to express desire encourages us to visualize love as eating each other, it is no surprise that cannibalism follows close behind. In doing so, it perverts the familiar genre of romance into a grotesque chimera of horror and romance. While viewers of Fresh expect it to fall into the horror genre—which it does in part—the film marries romance with the macabre, performing a complete bait and switch on its audience: our immediate attraction to the perfect romantic lead lands us locked up in his basement, waiting to be carved into pieces. Female seduction is an essential tool not for acceptance or survival, but for destruction.

Although Fresh does not depict rape, sexualized violence permeates Cave’s film, especially as the film paints a painfully familiar portrait of contemporary dating culture. Noa tightly clutches her keys between her fingers as a weapon when she walks to her car after a bad date that ends with the guy, Chad, calling her a “stuck-up bitch” for not wanting to go out with him again. Notably, the only visible penis on screen appears within the daily horror of womanhood: when Noa receives an unsolicited dick pic while chatting with another man on a dating app. Cave makes the bold choice to begin her film with a 30-minute “cold open” that constructs a familiar world in which men primarily see women as bodies: some as bodies to have sex with, others as bodies to butcher and consume (in Steve’s case, it is both). These early scenes also work to contextualize the appeal of Steve; the beginning of the film plays out like a romantic comedy where Steve, unlike Noa’s other romantic prospects, is charming in a self-deprecating way that paints him as more sincere than other men. Steve fools not only Noa but also the audience into believing he is a swoon-worthy romantic lead. This initial romance plot makes the betrayal we experience that much more devastating when he drugs and chains Noa inside his basement. When Noa realizes she has been taken hostage, Steve’s threat is initially framed as sexual violence. But he soon reassures her, “I’m not going to rape you … I’m gonna sell your meat.” Fresh subverts the romance genre while simultaneously making literal the cultural butchering and consumption of women. Are we to be relieved that Noa won’t be assaulted? Or devastated to discover that we are so preoccupied with sexual violence that we have disregarded its other, baser iterations? This unraveling reminds female viewers that their socialized desire to find happiness through monogamous, heterosexual romance is situated in a terrain of misogynistic violence.

Fresh subverts the romance genre while simultaneously making literal the cultural butchering and consumption of women. Are we to be relieved that Noa won’t be assaulted? Or devastated to discover that we are so preoccupied with sexual violence that we have disregarded its other, baser iterations?

Steve describes his first taste of human flesh as a quasi-religious awakening. “It’s a very powerful thing,” he tells Noa, as being turned into meat is about “giving yourself over to somebody. Becoming one with somebody else, forever … That’s a beautiful thing. That’s surrender. That’s love.” This disturbingly sincere declaration hides a fantasy of masculinized incorporation as domination. When Noa asks if he only eats women, he chalks it up to the whims of the free market, playfully adding, “Plus, women just taste better.” The flowery, passionate language Steve uses to describe overt violence draws a stark contrast, forcing the audience to sit back and watch as Cave uses our expectations of romance to reveal its grotesquerie, quietly revealing the inherent violence hidden beneath the normalized objectification of women. Steve makes a tremendous amount of money selling slabs of female meat to a group of faceless, wealthy men for exorbitant prices—a singular meatball is worth $30,000, and it would be worth even more if the woman was still alive. Steve slowly butchers his captives over time, keeping the meat fresh as long as possible. The anthropophagous men he sells to (almost exclusively white and old) reveal Steve’s behavior to be part of a broader culture of systemic, gendered violence where men metaphorically consume women. When Steve packages meat for his clients, he includes the woman’s personal effects: a bundle of her hair, a pair of underwear, a photo of her smiling. The consumption of these women is explicitly sexualized, which is nauseatingly shown when one man sniffs a pair of one woman’s blue lace underwear before inspecting her shrink-wrapped meat. This moment also reflects real-world sexual objectification of women for profit, such as websites that sell women’s used underwear. Steve’s cadre of wealthy, cannibalistic men only eat women unknown to them, but the inclusion of personal items makes it clear that they crave the closeness of the women they ingest and feel entitled to it. Steve asserts that these men want to “feel closer to the women. They become a part of you in some way.” The reverent language Steve uses to describe this violence is disturbingly reminiscent of the metaphorical language of desire; the phrase “I want to be inside you” takes on a darker connotation against this cannibalistic backdrop.

Tenderly, Steve admits to Noa that he has kept her personal items for himself. This moment is one of many where he reveals his romantic interest in her, even after he has imprisoned her and cut off her buttocks. Here, the audience is forced to confront the violence inherent in heteropatriarchal ideals. In the film, it is absurd that a heterosexual woman is expected to continue behaving as a desirable object after extreme abuse, yet Steve surgically removing a part of Noa’s body simply takes the kind of physical and emotional violence victims of domestic abuse experience in reality to a logical extreme. And crucially, it is how Noa weaponizes seduction against Steve’s sexual objectification of her that she is able to eventually break free, saving herself along with two other women. Performing interest in Steve’s cannibalistic lifestyle, she flirts with him over two “dates” they share while she is in captivity. During the last date, Noa and Steve laugh over a shared, candlelit meal of human pâté. They joke, dance, and kiss; all signs point to a successful date, culminating in a bedroom scene where Noa pushes Steve onto his bed to the sound of the French band La Femme’s soft, languid song “Le Jardin.” But the music sharply cuts off when instead of performing oral sex, Noa sinks her teeth into Steve’s penis. The scene, which, on the surface, begins like one straight out of a romantic comedy, returns to horror film territory as Steve realizes Noa has been faking her role as his love interest. Having manipulated Steve into the role of the consumed, Noa flees the room with his blood running down her mouth. Noa shocks Steve—and perhaps audience members convinced by her performance—when she bends over him teeth first, ready to devour. Unlike women, men are not socialized to assume any sexual encounter holds the potential for violence, and Steve does not realize that allowing a woman to put her teeth around him could be risky.

Steve’s cadre of wealthy, cannibalistic men only eat women unknown to them, but the inclusion of personal items makes it clear that they crave the closeness of the women they ingest and feel entitled to it.

While Noa begins Fresh desperately seeking meaningful romantic connection, the film tangles horror with romance to challenge audiences to rethink the patriarchal, heteronormative narratives they have bought into about what will make them happy. Not only does Noa find that achieving romantic companionship—which she has been taught is the most important path to fulfillment—is more complicated than she expected, but she realizes she must navigate a minefield of terrifying violence as she seeks it. Just as Steve’s appeal as a romantic lead disintegrates to expose his violence, the film’s genre conventions crumble to show how cannibalizing women is not so different from the misogynistic violence that permeates 21st-century American culture. Crucially, the film highlights how the violence and power imbalances Noa faces in dating men is specific to a cultural valuation of and attachment to monogamous, heterosexual love. Cave’s film reflects the horror of the ongoing moment in American culture where far-right ideology threatens the autonomy and safety of individuals who are not cisgender, heterosexual white men. Fresh makes it clear that Chad—the young man who called Noa a bitch and then sought to have sex with her—sees women as objects the same way that Steve the cannibal does.