Legalise it – Thomas Moran

November 20, 2025

Our campaign really should have benefited from the growing hostility towards childbirth, particularly the popularity of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), whose pithy “Save the Planet Kill Yourself” T-shirts had recently been spotted on the catwalks of Paris Fashion Week and had since attained a viral notoriety.

The dazzling, colt-like Margaret Qualley had been snapped sporting the shirt on the shores of glittering Lake Como. She was photographed strolling along a pine-tree-lined path, returning to the Villa del Balbanello wearing only the shirt, a bikini, and a pair of enormous square-framed Chanel sunglasses.

It would’ve truly been a coup to have such an exquisite young goddess on-side, but when we contacted her people at United Talent, we received a terse and frankly rather unpleasant response, from some self-important assistant no doubt, insisting that Ms Qualley had no interest in receiving information about our movement and most certainly would not consent to wearing our elegant “Legalise It” T shirt on her next holiday. My dreams dashed once again by another insensitive philistine.

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I suppose we are still a relatively fringe movement and have, despite the growing cult of Malthus, a rather boutique worldview. Sometimes I wonder if we lack that heady sense of ethical inebriation that attracts the young to the VHEMT, although don’t think we haven’t done our darndest to demonstrate the positive effects our program would have on the health of Mother Earth.

It’s just so hard to know what will “get the most traction with the public today”, at least that’s what our marketing manager insists on telling us. The public is increasingly divided into niches and sub-niches, she explains, and so we need to tailor our message and diversify our brand.

These are painful phrases for a lover of the language to hear, even more painful to begrudgingly accept as touching upon a tragic truth. Our old bread and butter, the hedonistic hangers on of the Age of Aquarius, are steadily disappearing. Now they can be found in Swiss alpine chalets, quietly euthanising themselves and it seems the epicurean delight in experience at any cost is dying along with them.

In the last EU elections, we did manage to secure a few more votes than usual, but our marketing manageress was quick to point out that it was probably due to the visual similarity between the name of our party and that of the Legalise Cannabis ticket. I have never felt more thankful for the decline of literacy among the general public.

So how shall we attract the young and graceless to our starry banner? How will we show them that there is an act a thousand times more daring than merely declining to give birth? How can we introduce them to a pleasure infinitely more subtle than the sterile snipping of one’s vas deferens or the brutal bolting up of the gates to Castle Fallopia?

Mere negation, I tell myself, cannot be enough. If only I could awaken in them this passion which cuts so deeply, which wounds and smart and which opens the self to another being in a manner far richer and many-hued than their dreary and all-consuming lust for extinction.

Alas such heroics don’t appeal to the young in the way they once did. Exaltation and adoration have all but disappeared from the earth. If it’s healthy and ecologically sound they’ll drink it up, but if it intoxicates and disturbs, well then tip it down the drain.

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Sometimes I lie awake at night cursing Jerome of Stridon, that irascible Church Father who sat in his study, and if we are to believe the painting by Colantanio, was visited there by a lion. I personally think the image by da Messina is more convincing, where a stately peacock sits on the threshold of his room, a more fitting animal to accompany this sly theological contract killer, murdering with a flourish of his poisoned pen.

It was this holy scribbler who poured his hatred into a treatise entitled Against Jovinianus which described the practices of the heretics at Attacotti, for whom the buttocks of men and the breasts of women were considered great delicacies. It was, I suspect, mere professional jealousy on Jerome’s part and perhaps a way of diverting attention from his own faith which endured its fair share of accusations of anthropophagy in those days.

Poor Jovinian only exists now as Jerome imagined him. A heretic and flesh eater who “amidst pheasants and pork rather belched out than breathed out his life”. Some describe him as an “epicurean Christian”, others as the first Protestant, but I know better. He understood the flesh in all its torsions and tastes. He was a voluptuary after my own heart, and I toy with imagining a future in which he has been restored to his proper place in the pantheon.

Many of my compatriots approvingly cite Montaigne in support of our cause, but I am quick to point out that he believed that “it is more barbaric to eat a man alive than to eat him dead.” Such a position befits that smarmy cynic who could never recognise our art as the spiritual communion it truly is.

Rather he was an advocate of whole-body roasting and has probably contributed more to the caricature of our kind, which once appeared in gruesome cartoons in Punch, standing around a steaming black cauldron, bits of bone and sinew sticking out of the stew, sharpening knives and forks and grinning with mouths full of pointed teeth.

I see myself more in the vein of the lover in that old tale known as Rousillon’s Heart. Sir Guillaume De Roussillon learnt his wife had been unfaithful. She was having an affair with the valiant Sir Guillaume De Guardestaing and so the husband slew his rival before word could reach the court that he had been made a cuckold. He then cooked his rival’s heart, seasoned it with spices and served it to his wife who swiftly gobbled it down. It was reported that she licked the plate clean.

Alas, Madame De Roussillon didn’t appreciate the dish and when she learnt of what she had eaten promptly died of shock. But she had experienced the greatest privilege of all: to taste the heart of the beloved.

Many in our movement choose a side, eater or eaten, but I could never be so base as to embrace a “position”. In the story of Roussillon’s heart, I am both the heart on the plate and the mouth of the Lady, passing from the flesh to the palate ceaselessly, in an impossible exchange.

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Of course, I am, as we all are, an advocate of voluntary anthropophagic action. We have contracts, blood pacts and all kinds of other ways of ensuring what we do is by the book. It is a longing, and it is an art, but I fear we are too delicate to survive much longer in this world.

Our movement grows weak. My companions are old. They fear to display their wounds in public. They prefer to keep their hands hidden in gloves with artificial fingers and cover their prosthetic legs with flowing ankle-length gowns.

They sit on their stumps and refuse to proudly walk the boulevards of the worlds’ great cities, the way I still do, ear-less, nose-less but with my head held high for I still have the courage to live my appetite and seek out lovers who will satiate my passion for the flesh.