"They always just focused on *it*...”
January 30, 2019 11:48 AM   Subscribe

You Know the Lorena Bobbitt Story. But Not All of It. [Amy Chozick, The New York Times]
Even though the “War of the Bobbitts,” as People magazine called it, happened two years after Anita Hill inserted sexual harassment into the conversation and “Thelma & Louise” turned a housewife and a waitress into renegade icons of female revenge, most people never really thought of Lorena in those terms. Men, speaking from Charlie Rose’s table and Geraldo Rivera’s armchairs, made Lorena seem like an unsatisfied, unhinged wife who had dealt a ghastly blow in the gender wars. And while many women defended Lorena and wondered what John must have done to drive her to it, some feminists argued that she had hurt the cause, making the sisterhood look deranged. “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, so now a lot of women are going to do this,’” remembered Katha Pollitt, who wrote about the trial for The Nation. “I do not remember Lorena Bobbitt, feminist hero.”
posted by Atom Eyes (42 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
This, from the last paragraph, really stuck out to me:

It occurred to me that there would be no documentary, no Bobbitt jokes or permanent place in popular culture, had John severed some vital piece of Lorena.

And I remember learning as a kid, from cartoons and stuff I guess, that it's always unfair and uncool to kick someone in the testicles. It was Not Done, you were untrustworthy and shady and even in a fight it was unacceptable, literally "below the belt", and it makes me think about how I was taught that penises and testicles are sacred and we have to respect their vulnerability, that it would be absolutely wrong to take advantage of this weakness in people who were stronger than I was, but I didn't realize until I was much older that there are no parts of me that are marked off as inappropriate to hit.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:56 AM on January 30, 2019 [172 favorites]


I was seven when this happened and I will never forget my parents' reactions the night it made national news. We were watching the kitchen tv while my mom was finishing up dinner.

Dad: Whoaaa, jesus! I'd say that guy really messed up.
Mom: I wonder what he did, because you know he deserved it.
Dad: [yelling to TV] Don't beat your wife, asshole.
Mom: [jokingly menaces dad with paring knife]

We don't agree about much, but it was nice growing up in a house where I knew my parents would never blame me if I had to cut off some cretin's penis in revenge.
posted by phunniemee at 12:02 PM on January 30, 2019 [107 favorites]


Mod note: One comment deleted. Tempting though I understand it is, better to just assume everyone's heard the cornball Bobbitt jokes, and don't be the guy who's telling jokes while other people are talking about spousal abuse.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:10 PM on January 30, 2019 [33 favorites]


Maybe, she figured, her story could finally get equal billing to John’s penis.

God, this sounds awful. The whole story occurred before my time so I have only heard about it in the pop culture history way, as an apocryphal tale. I am very interested to see what Peele has done with the footage and how it will be presented. I hope this woman can get a modicum of the respect it sounds like her story deserves.
posted by hepta at 12:14 PM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


When I run into people who wildly mischaracterize this event, I point out that Lorena used her celebrity to start a charity that supports victims of domestic abuse but her ex-husband used his to make a porn film called Frankenpenis.
posted by peeedro at 12:15 PM on January 30, 2019 [140 favorites]


“It’s all made up and I’m tired of it,” John said. “I was with a lot of women, a lot of women and none of them ever complained, except Lorena —” He paused. “And Joanna.”
My eyes can not roll hard enough.
posted by Frayed Knot at 12:23 PM on January 30, 2019 [27 favorites]


I remember being incredibly disappointed that they were able to reattach it. Her action was heroic, to me, because I was just at the age of realizing how scary and dangerous the world was going to be for me in my female body and how unfair it was that men didn't walk around with the same fear.
posted by emjaybee at 12:24 PM on January 30, 2019 [25 favorites]


Color me 100% unsurprised to learn that her husband went on to become a convicted rapist.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:25 PM on January 30, 2019 [16 favorites]


And I'm not going to repeat the specifics, but the media attention to this story gave a whole lot of unfunny men presumptive license to indulge in a lot of racist jokes that they thought I needed to hear because I'm Hispanic, I guess.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:27 PM on January 30, 2019 [7 favorites]


So, this happened in my hometown.

I was a kid at the time but old enough to be aware of what was going on. Everyone was talking about it. One time my family and I stood behind her in line at a store. I have seen the famous field more times than I care to count.

I knew for years now that she had been working as an advocate for victims of domestic violence, but forgot about her. I also, when I was much much younger, used to be ashamed that this story was associated with my hometown.

But seeing the advocacy work that she has done since then, I'm actually now proud that she is from there and still living there, working there, advocating. I hope that her story and work is what the town becomes associated with, and not just the tawdry details of her trying to flee a violent partner.

Side note: I can't help it but I kind of really want one of those "Manassas: A Cut Above The Rest!" shirts now.
posted by nightrecordings at 12:28 PM on January 30, 2019 [25 favorites]


Agreed, those shirts are awesome.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:41 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


“It’s all made up and I’m tired of it,” John said. “I was with a lot of women, a lot of women and none of them ever complained, except Lorena —” He paused. “And Joanna.” After we discussed the allegations, he proposed we keep talking over dinner at the Empire Hotel where he was staying. I declined.'
Bobbitt seems to be one of those guys who is not only incapable of self-reflection, but also completely unconscious of what his own words reveal about his interior self. I guess the only thing worse than a sociopath is a self-aware sociopath?
posted by klanawa at 12:51 PM on January 30, 2019 [14 favorites]


And yet: how many men will read that and take him 100% at face value?
posted by tobascodagama at 12:57 PM on January 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


I am so, so glad that Jordan Peele is using his creative power to put forth projects like this series.
posted by palomar at 1:01 PM on January 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


And I remember learning as a kid, from cartoons and stuff I guess, that it's always unfair and uncool to kick someone in the testicles.

This even came up in Star Trek VI, when Kirk is in a fight with a big, demonic-looking alien; Kirk kicks him in the knee, the guy instantly folds up, and another alien wryly informs Kirk that not all species keep their genitals in the same place.

I also remember an unusually blunt lecture on personal safety at the state university that I attended in the mid-eighties, which covered the topic of women defending themselves against men: "Eyes and balls. Most guys can't cover both at once. Hit them either place as hard as you can. If you hit them hard enough, they might go into shock and die, but if it's come down to that, they deserve it."
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:25 PM on January 30, 2019 [12 favorites]


I’ve seen the series, and it’s way too long—the 4th episode is the best. The re-enactments are poorly shot. I wish the filmmakers had interviewed those comedians who thought this whole thing was a big dick joke.
posted by Ideefixe at 1:33 PM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


Maybe it was because I was an impressionable age (16) when it happened, but when I hear about Lorena Bobbitt, I think of her as "The Woman who Fought Back".
posted by jb at 1:34 PM on January 30, 2019 [12 favorites]


there are no parts of me that are marked off as inappropriate to hit.

I was taught that to hit a girl at all was deeply disgraceful.
posted by Segundus at 1:54 PM on January 30, 2019 [5 favorites]


...doesn't stop us "walking into doors" a lot, though.
posted by Jilder at 2:19 PM on January 30, 2019 [40 favorites]


I was taught that to hit a girl at all was deeply disgraceful.

Well, you're not supposed to hi nice girls. But a girl who gets hit must have done something to deserve it, and is not, therefore, a nice girl, and is exempted from the rule. Bingo bango, problem solved.
posted by Tentacle of Trust at 2:20 PM on January 30, 2019 [30 favorites]


By which I mean, sure, that's something people say, but the relative frequency of women getting hit anywhere, vs the frequency of women damaging men's penises suggests one rule is much more of a rule than the other.
posted by Tentacle of Trust at 2:25 PM on January 30, 2019 [37 favorites]


It was considered emblematic of the women's movement, and maybe it was, to the extent that a woman acted violently towards a man who abused and raped her, but mostly it was a horrible personal tragedy, played out on television and late night jokes. I saw him on some tv show recently, he is massively lacking in self-awareness as klanawa notes, above. Nice to read about her; I hope shes okay.
posted by theora55 at 2:30 PM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


I was taught that to hit a girl at all was deeply disgraceful.

ok, one down, 3.5 billion to go
posted by poffin boffin at 2:38 PM on January 30, 2019 [22 favorites]


I was told by my psychologist that women and men tend to use violence differentially, i.e., verbal versus physical, and that in our gendered society there is more prohibition of interpersonal physical violence on women than on men. Being gay it strikes me as a heteronormative system: me getting mouthy at a straight male does not afford me much social protection at all. Lorena also reminds me of this, because a transgression of social norms is kind of a way of asserting feminism, in this instance under profound duress. It's just a really sad story of internalized oppression of women and what ends normal people can be driven to.
posted by polymodus at 3:05 PM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


I recently saw a woman wearing a patch on her backpack featuring the Join or Die snake with the words Lorena Bobbitt underneath. That was pretty good.

Nice to learn more about the case. I was very young when it happened, so I missed most of it at the time. She seems great.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:50 PM on January 30, 2019 [7 favorites]


But a girl who gets hit must have done something to deserve it

In the past couple days, the LAPD posted a video of a very large muscular man punching two women on the street. The women are fighting back, while a bunch of other people stand by. The LAPD was hoping to get the man identified and arrested (he surrendered himself.). *Every* comment thread I saw was full of men saying "well, we didn't see the whole video, they probably did something to deserve it."
posted by OolooKitty at 5:00 PM on January 30, 2019 [15 favorites]


I mean, John Bobbitt was probably taught to never hit a girl- didn’t stop him from raping his wife and other women.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 5:02 PM on January 30, 2019 [9 favorites]


Mom: I wonder what he did, because you know he deserved it.

Along those lines, here's a quote from one of the nurses that assisted in the reattachment surgery:
“The surgeons who were doing other cases were very curious. The mere fact that it was totally severed from the body was the biggest thing. They were like, ‘Come on, it’s hanging off him, right?’ I was like, ‘No, here, look—it’s on this table.’

“You got different reactions. The males had lots of sympathy pains for him. The women were all like, ‘He must’ve done something really bad to have had that happen.’ ”
posted by peeedro at 5:16 PM on January 30, 2019 [18 favorites]


I mean, John Bobbitt was probably taught to never hit a girl-

If so, it didn't stick. He was convicted twice in 1994 on domestic battery charges against one woman and again in 2002 against another.
posted by peeedro at 5:57 PM on January 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


That's kinda my fucking point. The fact that boys are taught to not hit girls is completely fucking meaningless considering the rates at which they grow up to become men who rape/beat/kill women.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 6:26 PM on January 30, 2019 [20 favorites]


”Al Franken, as the character Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, implored Lorena to apologize to John’s penis.”
Huge fuckin’ eye roll.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:38 PM on January 30, 2019 [18 favorites]


Yeah, that caught my eye as well. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised when he turned out to be a harasser himself.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:45 PM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


I would guess that thousands of times more men's penises have been cut off by other men than by women.

And we know the name of one person who has cut off a man's penis, and that person happens to be a woman.
posted by jamjam at 7:53 PM on January 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


*Every* comment thread I saw was full of men saying "well, we didn't see the whole video, they probably did something to deserve it."

The other half of those discussions is people complaining that everyone was filming the incident and not “manning up” and taking on the guy. (The guy has been arrested.)

It is disappointingly unsurprising how predictable it is that those two digressions will swamp discussion of so many incidents that are just awful on their face.
posted by jimw at 9:51 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]




I remember news of this going around my middle school, and I distinctly remember all the girls watching the boys' responses very closely, and taking note.
posted by LMGM at 12:29 AM on January 31, 2019 [6 favorites]


I found this photo of graffiti in the early 90s. Lorena B. was temporarily sane.
posted by bendy at 1:20 AM on January 31, 2019 [6 favorites]


"It has been 26 years since Lorena Bobbitt, a 24-year-old wounded bird of a woman with dark, wiry hair and sad, penetrating eyes became so enshrined in the annals of popular culture that she makes a cameo in both a Philip Roth novel and Eminem lyrics."

Is there a word for when something is part of your cultural landscape for decades, yet somehow have managed to never pick up any of the references or really know anything about it. Even the headline is telling me I know this story, and I'm of the ages to have experienced it, but this is all news to me. I've known about a few dong severers before but somehow missed all the kerfluffle about these specific people. The dude sounds like a real piece of shit, can't feel bad for him but I do feel for Lorena.

One last question, the article mentions the last name being unforgettable. IS the last name unforgettable because of the notoriety of the story, or is there some connection between the name and incident I'm not seeing?
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:21 AM on January 31, 2019 [1 favorite]


This happened when I was a kid. I remember hearing the story and it being entirely focused on "omg can you believe she did this to her husband, lol" and absolutely nothing about why she did it or what kind of a man he was. As with the Monica Lewinsky thing (which also happened when I was coming of age), I am grateful for these occasional revisits of how we as a society reacted to these things happening so I can finally hear the whole story and use my context as an adult to understand how utterly fucked up we were in reacting as we did. It is an important part of growth.
posted by olinerd at 8:24 AM on January 31, 2019 [11 favorites]


One last question, the article mentions the last name being unforgettable. IS the last name unforgettable because of the notoriety of the story, or is there some connection between the name and incident I'm not seeing?
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:21 AM on January 31


If you bob a horse's tail ("bells on bob-tails ring" or depending on the source "bells on bobbed tails ring") you're lopping off most of it. From there I'm sure you can see the relation between "bob it" and Bobbitt.
posted by sardonyx at 8:46 AM on January 31, 2019 [1 favorite]


From the piece: "They laugh,” she said several times during our afternoon together. “They always laugh.”

From Christine Blasey Ford's Congressional testimony: "Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter."
posted by Aquifer at 8:50 AM on January 31, 2019 [6 favorites]


One of the things I remember best about the 90s was the multiple tabloid cases where women who acted in completely understandable ways (often in response to abuse and gaslighting) were portrayed as MAAAAAAADWOMEN whose LUNACY was beyond ANYTHING we could EVER understand.

It was daunting to grow up with the understanding that a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances would always lead to punishment and humiliation and a series of late night idiots braying over how angry women get when men won't take out the trash. There was never any amount of hell that a woman lived through that wouldn't get reduced to "lol women, amirite!!!" with a smile and a wink.

When younger people now rightfully ask how people just put up with "x person we now know is an abuser" or "a media landscape full of unvarnished misogyny" or "85% of rock stars bragging about sex with teenage girls", I think back to the lessons I learned in that soup. Nothing you say matters. What happened to you wasn't that big a deal but also it was probably your fault but also you're a liar but also he deserves forgiveness for the thing that didn't happen. Your pain is a joke but your punishment won't be, for you.

It isn't an excuse for how many horrible abuses were readily accepted, but it is a useful reminder for me: the figures who pushed back against those paradigms were pilloried in a way that is hard to explain, in retrospect.

It is amazing that so many of them managed to not only weather those circumstances, but to eloquently speak about them now, and to continue to advocate for and assist women now that they are being given platforms to do so (and who did so in obscurity during the time in between then and now).
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:33 AM on January 31, 2019 [18 favorites]


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