Learning From the Bobbitts

It takes a lot to make the average man wince.

Yet many men are wincing nowadays whenever a certain topic comes up.

The subject? Lorena Bobbitt.

Her story has exploded in virtually every newspaper and television station in the United States. Some argue that she is a merciless woman who attempted to castrate her husband as revenge for lack of sexual fulfillment. Other view her as the symbol of the battered woman who stood up against her bestial husband. In any event, "the cut felt around the world" has certainly reverberated throughout the American population.

Lorena Bobbitt is not the first woman to have ever sliced up part of a man's genitals. According to an article in theAmerican Journal of Surgery, in Thailand in the mid 1970s at least 100 women foreshortened their philandering husbands and threw their penises out the window--a practice dubbed in local terms "feeling the ducks". But Americans need not look beyond their own continent to find other examples--in Canada two years ago a 48 year old woman who castrated her husband was also acquitted, like Lorena Bobbitt, on the grounds that she was a battered woman. Yet why is it that the Canadian case received so little media attention, while the Bobbitt saga became better daytime viewing than any of the afternoon soap?

Part of the answer lies in American society's love for lust and violence. As Mary Nemeth writes in the weekly Canadian news magazine, MacLean's, "...other countries have their lurid scandals. But for sheer volume and variety the American experience--amplified by a hype machine that marries the age-old fascination with sex and violence to the modern miracle of high-tech communications--is unrivaled." Viewers of CNN apparently were so engrossed in courtroom testimony that when the channel switched to coverage of President Clinton's visit to Kiev, angry Bobbitt watchers clogged network phone lines, After all, how could international affairs even hope to compete with tales of rape and a severed penis?

Yet the real answer is that the American obsession with this case largely stems for a tremendous sense of fear. Battered women who have killed their husbands occasionally make the last page of the national news, but Lorena Bobbitt horrified Americans because she fulfilled every man's worse nightmare: a fear of castration. Not only had Mrs. Bobbitt committed a unspeakable deed, she was supported by women who seemed to be vicariously living through her. "I feel like we're kindred sisters," said one woman who attended all three days of Bobbitt's trial. "I never thought about cutting off my husband's penis, but I wished and prayed that it would rot off."

No wonder men feel uneasy. Such comments make women feel uneasy, too, Genital mutilation is unpalatable, whether it be female or male, Yet the whole Bobbitt saga has been turned into a media three-ring circus, ranging from Jay Leno's talk-show quips to radio stations hosting Lorena Bobbitt Weenie Tosses, It seems that it's easier to joke about Lorena Bobbitt than it is to deal with the alarming question it raises: was Lorena Bobbitt justified in her attempt to castrate her husband?

The answer is no, she wasn't. That does not mean that she was not the victim of domestic violence, On the contrary, evidence produced at her trial reveled that during her marriage she suffered immense amounts of both physical and emotional abuse. A military social worker testified at Lorena Bobbitt's trial that in a form Mr. Bobbitt filled out after a 1990 marital dispute, he conceded that he had abused his wife, circling categories on the report sheet that included "threw her bodily," "pushed, carried, restrained, grabbed or shoved", and "hit her or tried to hit her with something." There were also eleven defense witnesses who recalled episodes when John Bobbitt had beaten and humiliated his wife in public. Several described seeing Lorena Bobbitt after such episodes with bruises on her arms, legs, and head. One witness, a close friend of Mr. Bobbitt, claimed that the latter had told him that during sexual encounters "he [John Bobbitt] liked to make girls squirm and bleed and make them yell for help."

The evidence proves both that Lorena Bobbitt was abused and that she had good reason to feel enraged at her husband. There is no denying the anguish and sense of powerlessness women feel when trapped in such destructive marital relationships. As a Venezuelan immigrant, she may not have realized that there were resources she could turn to as a battered woman. Married at an early age and after here recent immigration, she may have clung to Jon Bobbitt as both an emotional and financial buoy.

Yet it is important to examine why exactly Lorena Bobbitt chose to strike back at her husband. When she dismembered John Bobbitt, she was motivated not by fear but by anger. John Bobbitt's penis was a symbol of all the pain and degradation she had been forced to suffer at his hands. By emasculating him, she hoped to make him feel as worthless and powerless as she herself must have throughout their twisted relationship. Her emotions may have been valid, her rage real. Yet unlike many other women who fight back against their batterers, her action was not an act of self-defense. It was an act of revenge.

Those who embrace Lorena Bobbitt as a heroine are doing a disservice to efforts to combat violence against women. It is possible to recognize her as a victim of marital abuse without condoning her actions. What needs to be understood from this tragedy is the fact that many women who are in abusive relationships often do not realize the steps they can legally take to free themselves from their desperate situations.

It is also important to recognize that often these legal solutions are little more than band-aids to a gaping societal wound. In a culture where restraining orders are often little more than meaningless pieces of paper and battered women's shelters are overcrowded and staffed by overworked social workers, there often seems to be no way to eradicate domestic violence.

If he American population is to learn anything from the whole Bobbitt saga, let it be not that such events make good courtroom drama to watch on television, but that marital abuse occurs far too often in our society, The tragedy here is two-fold: it is the horror of a woman dismembering her husband coupled with the knowledge that she suffered from his physical abuse. Our efforts should be spent not promoting weenie tosses or slicer jokes, but working to ensure that incidents such as either of these do not occur again.