By Melissa Weininger
On January 22, a jury in Manassas, Virginia, acquitted Lorena Bobbitt of malicious wounding. Last summer, she cut off her husband’s penis after he raped her, an act of violence to which she had regularly been subjected since they were married in 1989. Unfortunately, the focus of the Bobbitt case has been carefully shifted away from the real problem—violence against women—to masculine sympathy fixed on the cause of the problem—John Bobbitt’s penis.
During Lorena Bobbitt’s trial, both the prosecution and the defense admitted that she had been subject to years of physical and sexual abuse during her marriage, even that she had been raped (a charge of which John had been acquitted). Her response to this situation, proven by her defense to be an "irresistible impulse," was to cut off her husband’s penis. John Bobbitt is a lucky guy; doctors were able to reattach his penis. No one is going to be able to sew Lorena Bobbitt back together.
When Rush Limbaugh asks in Newsweek, "How about leaving the jerk?" he’s missing the point. It is likely that Lorena Bobbitt had no framework in which to understand or deal with her experience. She came to the United States at seventeen from her native Venezuela and married John Bobbitt—the first man she ever dated—only three years later. She probably didn’t know that she had the "legal and social protections" Limbaugh extols; often those "protections" are nonexistent or inadequate anyway. There is too little space in shelters for all the women who need them: Sarah Buel, a Massachusetts lawyer who works with victims of domestic violence, points out that there are now three times more animal shelters than shelters for battered women in the US; and the legal system, especially for an immigrant with limited English speaking ability, can be mysterious and inaccessible. As for "leaving the jerk"—not such great advice, considering that the majority of female victims of homicide are women who tried to leave their abusers. Lorena Bobbitt could easily have perceived her abusive marriage as inescapable, a situation of such unbearable pressure that there were no conventional solutions.
Despite the obvious severity of Lorena Bobbitt’s situation, all the media-generated hoopla has centered on John Bobbitt’s severed genitalia. Everyone is upset because it was a penis that was cut off, not a breast (as happens all the time to cancer patients) or a clitoris (which commonly happens in other parts of the world to little girls); people are concerned about the near-castration, not the forced penetration. Women are maimed and beaten and killed by their boyfriends, lovers, and husbands every day, and no one cares. According to FBI statistics, in the United States, a woman is raped every three minutes, and a woman is beaten every eighteen seconds. Now one man has had his penis cut off, and everyone is concerned about domestic violence.
But this is the kind of domestic violence that almost never occurs. What Lorena Bobbitt did (or other kinds of retaliation against batterers) happens rarely, but what was done to her is commonplace. John Bobbitt is not the victim in this situation; he is a perpetrator of the most revolting kind of violence whose victim retaliated in self-defense.
In fact, by severing her husband’s penis, Lorena Bobbitt was acting out a fairly normal response to a completely abnormal situation, a pattern common to sufferers of long-term physical and sexual abuse. Long-term abuse is so traumatic that it creates a situation (especially in the closed environment of a marriage) in which what is conventionally considered normal no longer exists. Lorena Bobbitt’s world had been disordered as a result of her husband’s abuse, and in such an aberrant situation, some form of violent retaliation is not a particularly strange response. Of all the women now in prison for violent crimes (less than ten percent of the entire female prison population) ninety-nine percent were convicted of a crime committed against a batterer. And to choose a penis as the locus for this retaliation is not so odd, since that was the weapon with which much of the violence against Lorena Bobbitt was perpetrated.
Because of its sensational quality, this case has perhaps gotten more press than any other case involving violence against women—even the Mike Tyson or William Kennedy Smith rape trials. But as in those "male celebrity rapes woman" cases, the uproar has not been about the abuse endured by Lorena Bobbitt; it has been about her poor husband’s severed penis. In fact, John Bobbitt’s trial for the rape of his wife wasn’t even televised, while Lorena’s trial has become a media orgy. Especially disturbing is the notion, most frighteningly and succinctly stated by Vanity Fair, that "Lorena is, after all, a property now." Certainly Vanity Fair itself is testimony to this sad assertion; accompanying its article about her in the November issue are photographs of Lorena Bobbitt wet and dripping in a bathing suit. In lieu of being subject to her husband’s violence, Lorena Bobbitt has become fair game for the, media, comedians, and the profit-minded entrepreneurs that Newsweek calls "Bobbitteers."
The trend towards "Bobbitteering" is an indication of how rarely violence against women is taken seriously, and it functions to siphon serious attention away from a case which could be a valuable tool for education about domestic violence and its potent psychological effects. Instead, Lorena Bobbitt has become a joke: buttons calling for "Lorena Bobbitt for Surgeon General," T-shirts autographed by John Bobbitt himself that are emblazoned "Love Hurts," and snide jokes all devalue her experience and the importance of both her own trial and that of her husband (who was acquitted of rape). These jokes are also a subtle way of further detracting from the legitimacy of Lorena Bobbitt’s claims of violence and self-defense.
Cynthia Heimel has it backwards when she writes that with "the media’s insistence that she [Lorena Bobbitt] embodies feminism, Lorena could start her very own backlash." The backlash already exists, and media treatment of the Bobbitt case is only symptomatic of a compulsion to cast feminism in a dark and dangerous light. Lorena Bobbitt is literally the typical "castrating woman," an idea that reinforces bogus male fears of emasculation at the hands of unchecked female power. A cartoon in Newsweek depicting Lorena Bobbitt holding her hand out to her husband—who is looking down his pants—and asking, "Call it a Draw?" is a perfect example of these disproportionate fears. In the cartoon, Lorena is taller than John—in reality she’s nine inches shorter and ninety-eight pounds lighter—and it’s obvious why she’s grown so much: she’s gained a formidable power by taking what John’s looking for in his pants. Lorena Bobbitt is still five feet two, but she now looms large in the male public’s imagination, knife in one hand, penis in the other.
But Lorena Bobbitt isn’t really the empowered one, or even the winner, in this case. Her confinement is not over: for the next month, she’ll be held at a mental hospital for tests. She has been painted as a dangerous, crazed, sexually frustrated woman. But in reality, it is men like John Bobbitt, and public neglect of important issues like violence against women, that are dangerous. Media and public treatment of the Bobbitt case reveals a tragic case of domestic violence, a testament to the need for more education about violence against women, and a study in backlash.