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June 6, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Although Montreal gay porn actor Luka Magnotta shocked the world last month by allegedly killing and cannibalizing his ex-lover, his behavior is not isolated and may echo a pattern of an out-of-control sexual deviancy fueled by the Internet, according to one expert.

Dr. Judith Reisman, an internationally-recognized expert on pornography and sexuality, told LifeSiteNews.com that she believed Magnotta’s behavior “reflects years of brain imprinting by pornography” and a possible identification with Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs.

“His homosexual cannibalism links sex arousal with shame, hate and sadism,” said Reisman, who added that although cannibalism is not as common as simple rape, “serial rape, murder, torture of adults and even of children is an inevitable result of our ‘new brains,’ increasingly rewired by our out-of-control sexually exploitive and sadistic mass media and the Internet.”

Vorarephilia, or “vore” for short, is a sexual fetish or “paraphilia” gratified on the Internet largely as a fantasy. But news reports within the past decade show that the Web, hosting countless paraphilic hook-up communities and extreme hardcore pornography, has spurred the realization of gruesome crimes that defy the imagination.

This underworld came to light in a shocking case in Germany in 2003, when Armin Meiwes was tried for the killing of homosexual lover Bernd Jürgen Brandes, a voluntary fetish victim whom Meiwes picked up through an Internet forum ad seeking “a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.”

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“I had the fantasy, and in the end I fulfilled it,” said Meiwes in court – a fantasy he described as arising amid feelings of rejection from his father. Because the killing was consensual, Meiwes was charged with manslaughter in 2004 and sentenced to eight years in prison, before a retrial two years later handed down a life sentence for murder.

At the time, police estimated that around 10,000 people in Germany alone shared the cannibalism obsession. Meiwes himself said he met around 400 men interested in the practice online, and claimed to know a man through the Internet that police suspected of cannibalizing three boys.

“We have learned through this process that there is a massive cannibal following out there,” said Judge Volker Muetze.

In their 2010 book “Online Killers,” criminology researchers Christopher Berry-Dee and Steven Morris said research has shown “there are an estimated 10,000 cannibal websites, with millions … who sit for hours and hours in front of their computer screens, fantasizing about eating someone.” Meiwes’ case, they said, opened the door to “the secret world of the suburban cannibal, and the internet is key.”

Before the Internet age, cannibalism emerged more than once in tandem with sexualized serial killings. Examples include American child rapist Albert Fish (d. 1936), and American serial killer Ottis Toole (d. 1996), who with homosexual lover Henry Lee Lucas confessed to hundreds of murders. Jeffrey Dahmer (d. 1994), another American serial killer and sex offender, cannibalized 17 boys and men between the ages of 27 and 14.

Evidence suggest that – as in other forms of murder – the gory practice is now finding an especially useful outlet through the anonymity of Craigslist and other online forums. Craigslist was the forum of choice for Matej Curko, a Slovakian man who in 2007 posted an ad there asking for “someone who would agree to be put to sleep then killed, cut up, cooked and eaten.”

As for Magnotta, online sources describe the Ontario native as very active on Craigslist, “sending out different fake photos to try and lure and entice good-looking young guys.” Although it is unclear whether Magnotta met his murder victim through Craigslist, sources told one paper that the two met through “an online classified ad.”

Before Magnotta rose to fame in mainstream international media, he was already gaining attention in another corner of the Internet: in one online hardcore “gore” community, the videotaped mutilation of Lin met with praise, including one post that stated simply, “Dahmer Jr.” 

Magnotta was the target of an international manhunt for several days until he was arrested this week in Berlin, where police say he was found looking at online pornography alongside news articles about himself at an Internet café.