November 10, 2015
"I’m glad that after 22 years you still laugh about it..."
Said Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her husband's penis 22 years ago. She appeared recently on a TV show. It makes you wonder — doesn't it? — why we ever laughed at it.
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Whether she was a battered spouse acting in self defense or a deranged psychopath who mutilated her husband, I certainly didn't laugh about it. Would I laugh about a woman getting her breast cut off by her husband, whatever his reasons to do so?
The fact that it's acceptable for anyone to laugh about it--or cheer this woman--says all you need to know about the double standards of the modern era. Men are expendable ogres, and their pain is hilarious, right?
I didn't laugh. I just kept shaking my head at how the whole episode seemed to bring out the worst in everybody.
One memorable bit of tone-deafness: An editorial cartoon purported to show one of the Bobbitt juries. (John's rape trial or Lorena's malicious wounding trial, I can't recall.) All of the men looked anxious, while all the women looked... eager. But, as a feminist with the nom de guerre "Laura X" was known for pointing out, women as a group tend to be more judgmental of other women than men. (I remember Laura X criticizing a rape trial jury for having "too many" women on it.)
I think women laughed because at some in our lives we've all met a guy we'd like to give a frontal lobotomy.
Context, Althouse, context -- 22 years ago, if I may paraphrase George HW Bush, we lived in a "kinder, gentler nation." We didnt yet have the Internet or blogs, we weren't plastered to our computer screens all day. Talk radio was just beginning, I'm not sure we even had Foxnews. OJ Simpson was still a celebrity hero.
As I recall John Bobitt himself showed up on TV shows, seemingly uninjured, after re-attachment (yikes, hate even writing that), and it seemed like an outrageous novelty.
Today, Yes, it would seem more ugly & violent, agreed.
Eleanor said...
"I think women laughed because at some in our lives we've all met a guy we'd like to give a frontal lobotomy."
Frontal Lobotomy: cute.
How about we reverse this?
I think all men at some point in our lives have met a woman where we'd like to cut her tits off, and then put a baseball bat forcibly up her vagina.
Oops. Forgot to make it 'cute'.
All in the delivery, I guess.
I am Laslo.
It makes you wonder — doesn't it? — why we ever laughed at it.
By "we" I assume you mean yourself and the 51% of the United States who share your biological gender. I don't think very many of us in the other gender thought it was funny. Certainly John Bobbitt wasn't laughing.
Nice to see that your sense of empathy has matured in the intervening decades.
WE never laughed at it. Some people did laugh but there is no "we" there.
From the unequaled Evil Dead 2
"Honey, where's the left-over Chinese?"
"In the refrigerator, behind the Ziploc bag of tits."
"That was going to be my next question."
"Yeah?"
"Why is there a Ziploc Bag with women's breasts in it in the refrigerator?"
"I didn't know what else to do with them. I figured that if I left them in the car they'd go bad."
"That's not what I meant."
"Oh, yeah, I get it. You know Karen, from work?"
"Yeah..."
"I cut her tits off."
"Okay..."
"It seemed funny at the time. We were in the lunchroom, one thing led to another; it's hard to explain."
"How did Karen feel about this?"
"It certainly surprised her."
"And that's all?"
"Well, I did get fired."
"Fired? How are we gonna pay the mortgage?"
"I know. We might lose the house. I guess I really didn't think things through."
"Obviously."
"And I still need to go to her place. That is gonna be awkward."
"Why the hell would you need to go to her place for?"
"Because I think she has my penis in a Ziploc bag in her refrigerator. At least I hope she refrigerated it."
"She cut off your penis?"
"Yeah. Like I said: it's hard to explain."
"Do you need to see a doctor?"
"No, no: it was a clean cut. Although I did get dizzy on the drive home from loss of blood. I think I might have hit a pedestrian, too."
"Oh God..."
"Yeah. I might get in trouble for that."
"I think you might be in a lot of trouble..."
"Yeah. Especially if she didn't refrigerate my penis..."
I am Laslo.
I don't wonder why you laughed at it.
Count me as one of those who didn't laugh. And, pace what Eleanor said, I never had comparable fantasies about mutilating women.
I didn't laugh, but it was a truly surreal soap opera with a lot of entertainment value. Just the name Bobbitt in such a context was kind of funny. The amputee made a couple of porn movies. There were many layers of weirdness......All this happened in pre-Kardashian days when the world was starved of amusing scandals.
Well, I certainly laughed. Tony Kornheiser got a huge amount of mileage on this subject, and I loved those columns. Don't forget, she ran, taking the evidence with her. She threw it out of her car somewhere on the highway. There was a search for the dismembered member. Some poor cop had to find it and rescue it. It had to be transported to the hospital for reattachment. The elaborate farce was a huge part of the comedy.
Bob R said..."She threw it out of her car somewhere on the highway."
It bounced off the windshield of an elderly couple going the other way.
The old lady turned to her husband and said, "Did you see the dick on that bug?"
"Weird Al" Yankovic did include the incident in his "Headline News" song. Also referenced in that song were the Michael Fay Singapore caning and the Kerrigan/Harding ice skating saga. Most of the (dated) humor of the song comes from the weirdness of the stories. Also fart noises.
As I have mentioned before anything can be funny, though perhaps not in good taste. What helps the Bobbitt story is (a) the story had a "white trash" vibe to it which made them both acceptable targets, and (b) John's penis was reattached successfully so the mutilation taboo is muted.
It also helps that the story was a novelty and new and interesting situations tend to be mined for their humor value. The chicken can only cross the road so many times, but if you cut of its pecker first it opens up additional avenues.
Though the incident was never funny, it did create a great joke:
Q. Who's the scariest woman in the world?
A. Tonya Rodham Bobbit.
To cash in on his fame Bobbit went on the strip club circuit and actually mutilated his manhood a second time with enlargement surgery.
But if a woman is mad at you she has every right to do whatever she wants because of her female privilege, in which every female is bathed due to their having a womb and sperm being so cheap, plus, for some reason I don't really get, I just say "pussy juice is thicker than water," women stick together.
A few hundred years ago, a person of a certain class in Europe was allowed to beat any of the kings' subjects on the street with a cane for not showing sufficient respect, this is just more of the same.
But I laughed at it. I did. Hank Goldberg had a thing on his Miami sports talk show, audience almost exclusively men, as you can imagine. He had a knife sharpening sound followed by a man screaming that he would play when he "cut off" a stupid caller. He called it "Bobbiting" and it was pretty funny. Cutting off a woman's clit though would never be funny. Because privilege.
Not long after the Bobbit case, there was another woman who did the same thing. Only, she was a Filipina and disposed of it so there was nothing to reattach. I'm married to a Filipina. She told me that if I ever cheated on her, she'd do that to me. This was long before anyone ever heard of the Bobbits and I knew she'd do it. She was born on Halloween and is a spooky little woman. We've been married 32 years. Never cheated.
Yes, the humor to be found in genital mutilation seems to be entirely on the part of women when it is a case of a woman mutilating a man. I have never heard men laugh about a man mutilating a woman. I note in passing that our society gets exercised about the genital mutilation of infant girls but not the mutilation of infant boys.
False Grackle
It makes you wonder — doesn't it? — why we ever laughed at it.
Some of us never did.
Althouse,I'm going to let you in on one of the secrets of comedy.
Guy getting whacked in the nuts. Hugely funny. You want to make a guy laugh till he pukes? Hit one of his friends in the nuts. It's even funnier if a girl does it.
Want to make a guy cringe?
Joke about cutting off his nuts-or his dick.
Even the scene in "21 Jump Street" was cringe worthy.
Although, " help me find my dick. " was pretty good.
Can you think of any man who seriously disfigured a woman sexually because he was jealous, who got a standing o, when appearing on a show and then made a joke about the assault?
I can't even fathom that possiblilty were it a man.
Eleanor wrote:
Eleanor said...
I think women laughed because at some in our lives we've all met a guy we'd like to give a frontal lobotomy.
Ditto.
By the way, if the joke was funny I probably laughed at it. But I also laugh at funny rape jokes. For women who have moral issues at rape jokes, did you laugh at jokes about this?
then at the very least you are a hypocrite.
I have photographed the "Bobbit" Worm at night in Indonesia. It's an incredible creature. We would dangle a dead fish over it to get it to jump out of its hole. Bobbit will be in our language long after Lorena has left this earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois
Bobbit Worm at dinner time.
https://vimeo.com/28280553
I think women laughed because at some in our lives we've all met a guy we'd like to give a frontal lobotomy.
We've all met women we'd like to do some 'splaining to with our fists too. But we would never admit to that publicly and we do the best we can to overcome it. Women, the privileged creatures that they are get to revel in it and crow about it!
Honestly, even though in my life I have had to swallow my anger at the actions of a woman, I certainly didn't laugh at video of a woman being beat up in an elevator by her boyfriend the football player that came out not too long ago. Not even in private, even if I did think she provoked him a little by hitting him first. That's just the way the world is. Women get to hit you and you have to ignore it. He should have known better.
The real War on Men started way back. But women always used to sneak in and use poison. Using a knife while we are asleep surprised us. We Men just can't get no respect.
Remember the old joke: Confucius say "Rape is impossible because woman can fun faster with skirt up than man can run with pants down."
That used to be humorous, too.
"run" not "fun". Sorry.
There were those who laughed at it.
Also some who excused, praised or encouraged.
They seemed like outliers at the time.
Per a later post, the beginning signs of dementia, perhaps.
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