"Lying shrivelled upon a blue cloth, jaundice yellow but for the bloody end where it was sliced off—apparently as cleanly as sashimi..."

"... the severed penis is instead a listless nubbin, small and sad: not a pound of flesh so much as a few pathetic ounces. Still, it is the enduring symbolic power of the penis which gives the documentary its cumulatively disquieting effect....  Most salutary is the way that 'Lorena' reveals what happens when symbols of manhood are under threat—a subject as relevant today as it was in the early nineties, when John’s penis became a potent stand-in for masculinity itself and the cultural response to Lorena’s act suggested what might ensue when masculinity is robbed of its potency.... The raucous humor that still surrounds the story—that made the Bobbitts a punch line for decades—disguises an unbidden and unwelcome sense of vulnerability on the part of that half of the population who had hitherto not been obliged to think of their intimate body parts as means by which they might be violated. It takes a comedian, Whoopi Goldberg, to articulate, in a clip from her show, the unfunny truth behind the humor. 'Women live with the knowledge that weird shit can happen at any point—you go down a dark alley and whoosh, somebody grabs you,”' she says. 'Now men actually have to think about this shit.'"

From "The Lorena Bobbitt Story Offers New Lessons on Male Vulnerability" by Rebecca Mead (in The New Yorker), about the 4-part Amazon documentary, "Lorena."