Lorena Bobbitt and Other Heroines

Around the world, people sympathize with female Jack-the-Rippers and laugh at their victims

The case of Lorena Bobbitt, found not guilty thirty years ago of cutting off her husband’s penis, set the template: female violence against a man’s genitals is downplayed, justified, and even celebrated, often with a claim to victimhood on the part of the female perpetrator and barely suppressed hilarity directed at the victim.

In 2019, Lorena aired at the Sundance Film Festival. It was a four-part documentary produced by Jordan Peele and directed by Joshua Rofé, with the intention to sanctify a brutal woman.

Lorena Bobbitt became a household name in 1993. While her husband was sleeping on the night of June 23rd, she took a knife from the kitchen drawer and cut off his penis, which she then threw into a field as she drove away from their home. Later that night, she told police what she had done; the penis was found and re-attached.

On trial on a charge of malicious wounding in the following year, Lorena’s defense was that she was suffering from PTSD because of years of sexual and physical abuse by her husband John, who had raped her, she alleged, on the night in question and on many other nights (John was, in the same year, acquitted of this rape charge). She argued that amputating her husband’s penis was an “irresistible impulse” and an act of “survival,” and jury members believed her.

There were plenty of other, more likely, motives: for instance that Lorena wanted to punish John because he had been unfaithful; or even that she was fed up with his failures as a husband, including his alleged failure to satisfy her sexually. She had told Detective Peter Weintz during a tape-recorded interview that “He always has orgasm, and he doesn’t wait for me ever to have orgasm. I don’t think it’s fair, it’s selfish.”

This statement indicates that rage, not trauma, was the primary driver of Lorena’s violence. But that hasn’t mattered to her many supporters, then and now, one of whom, feminist stalwart Suzanne Moore in The Guardian, had no trouble affirming Lorena’s perspective even in the absence of evidence. “The bottom line is that life for many women is made miserable by the men who are supposed to love them because we live in a culture that tolerates an awful amount of male violence.” For Moore, it didn’t particularly matter whether Lorena could prove herself any sort of victim; what mattered was that “many women” undoubtedly were. Moore saw Lorena’s crime as an act of resistance to “male power” and expressed approval of “the smiles on women’s faces whenever this case is mentioned.” John was for Moore an afterthought who “appear[ed] to be the same ape with his penis severed or re-attached.”

That was the climate of opinion in 1994 that enabled Lorena’s defense team to obtain a verdict of not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. (It is a defense that has been used successfully for centuries in cases where women kill family members, including children.) Women who commit violence must not have been fully responsible, so the thinking goes. Lorena was sentenced to 45 days in a psychiatric hospital, after which she was released and eventually made a career for herself as an advocate for victims of domestic violence—by which she meant not men like her husband, of course, but women like her. 

For his part, John Bobbitt consistently denied the allegations of abuse, claiming that the real problem in his and Lorena’s marriage was Lorena herself, headstrong and volatile. She was angry, he asserted, that he had not been able to give her the opulent American Dream lifestyle that, as an Ecuadoran-born immigrant from Venezuela, she had expected. John described Lorena as often violent, resentful, and jealous.

It seems likely that the relationship was mutually abusive. Certainly, there is no clear evidence that John terrorized Lorena, as was claimed at the trial. He was never charged, let alone convicted, of domestic violence against her, and there were no black eyes or broken bones to confirm her story of persecution. Only the evidence of John’s wounding was blatant.

Twenty-five years after the trial, the makers of Lorena played up heroic female victimhood as if it were a new narrative, contending that at the time of her attack, Lorena’s “suffering” had been “ignored by the male-dominated press” as she “became a national joke.” Variety pronounced her “re-victimized by the sexist coverage of her case.” Someone even had the chutzpah to describe how “as John spiraled downward, Lorena found strength in the scars [sic] of her ordeal.” Producer Jordan Peele quipped that “With this project, Lorena has a platform to tell her truth as well as engage in a critical conversation about gender dynamics, abuse, and her demand for justice.”

As the stress on “her truth” reveals, here was feminist postmodernism on steroids, in which any reality, including a woman’s knife-attack on a sleeping man, could be made to fit the satisfying script of female suffering and male culpability. The story served Lorena Bobbitt for thirty years, saving her from a lengthy prison term and, it seems, from any remorse for what she did. In the incredible Variety interview, Lorena never once took even a smidgeon of responsibility for her crime, focusing repeatedly on her alleged mistreatment by the media, including bemoaning that “Instead of having a serious conversation about domestic violence and sexual assault, it was all about John’s organ.”

Poor, poor Lorena: all she did was cut off a man’s penis, and some kill-joys thought that mattered. Undaunted, she burnished her image as a crusader for women. Few seem to have cared that making Lorena the face of battered women explicitly condoned her bloody assault.

Unfortunately, stories of women who mutilate men are far from uncommon, and neither is the guffawing, satisfied response. In 2011, Sharon Osbourne of The Talk, an American women’s talk show, could not hold back her giggles as she told a seemingly delighted audience about how “fabulous” it was that a California woman, Catherine Kieu, had cut off the penis of her husband and thrown it into the garburator because he had filed for divorce.

All of the women on the show, and at least some in the audience, joined in the merriment, their faces distorted with glee. Here there was no claim that the violent woman feared for her life or was temporarily out of her mind; revenge was accepted as a motive. (The woman was given a life sentence, but eligible for parole in 7 years.)

A few years later, in China, a wife who had discovered her husband’s infidelity cut off his penis with scissors not once but twice, the second time after the penis had been re-attached. Attacking him in his hospital bed, the vengeful woman threw the penis out the window, where it was not recovered. The news report in The Mirror played up the infidelity angle, referring to the victim jocularly as the “cheating husband” and “two-timing dad-of-five.” In Romania in 2016, a woman stabbed her husband in the groin after an argument on International Women’s Day, obviously fueled by feminist grievance-mongering. She said she had become angry when he wouldn’t help her with the yard work, but she didn’t think his wound was a “big deal,” and seemed to think it sufficient that she had offered to bandage the damaged testicles. The news report registered amusement at the perpetrator’s nonchalance.

As Dan Bell observed that year in The Telegraph, the subject of penis amputation or wounding often provokes merriment, and almost never a serious discussion of female-on-male domestic violence. In 2015, Joel Golby titled an article for Vice magazine “A Brief History of Men Getting Their Dicks Chopped Off, and How You Can Avoid It,” in which he could barely contain his mirth, taking particular pleasure in reporting that in the two years following Lorena Bobbitt’s much-publicized attack, a significant number of copy-cat crimes had been reported. He ended jauntily with “some easy-to-follow advice if you’re looking to not get your penis cut off: Don’t commit adultery or domestic abuse, and if you absolutely must have an affair, don’t message your girlfriend from your wife’s phone.” The clear message for men was: if you can’t keep it in your pants, expect to lose it.

Golby also mentioned that in Thailand, there was a period in the 1970s when a reported “epidemic” of penile amputations occurred, as Thai women attacked their allegedly unfaithful husbands. Reports agree that the women encouraged one another during the bloody outbreak and that many victims were reluctant to report their injuries.

Attacks continue around the world. In 2021, a Spanish woman cut off her lover’s penis because he was about to return to his homeland, where he had a wife and children. In 2023, a Brazilian woman cut off her husband’s penis after allegedly discovering his affair with her 15-year-old niece. In April of this year, an Indian woman tortured her newly-married husband by burning his penis with cigarettes and mutilating it with a knife in an attempted amputation, allegedly because he had criticized her smoking and drinking. Last month, a pregnant Colorado woman cut off her lover’s penis and allowed him to bleed to death after an argument about whether he was the father of her child. 

All of the aforementioned crimes seem to have been motivated by revenge rather than sexual perversion or desperation, and to have been cold-blooded rather than “irresistible,” with quite a few of the cases involving planning as to time and means. The women wished to retaliate against their men either because the men took a pleasure in sex that the women did not experience (Lorena’s original stated motive) or because the women wanted to guarantee that the man could not have pleasure, or be a man at all (in the women’s conception), especially with anyone else.

The association between a man’s penis and alleged advantage or power could hardly be clearer. It is an idea that feminism has both exploited and massively promoted under cover of patriarchal critique. Even the frequency with which women mock men for their penis size or shape, belittling those who fail to measure up to women’s standards, demonstrates that obsession with the penis as sign and source of power, far from being a tiresome male delusion, as feminists so often claim, is frequently advanced by women.

There is no need to dwell on any what if reversals in order to recognize the breathtaking double-standards at work: what if it had been a man who mutilated his unfaithful wife, slicing off her breasts or jabbing a knife into her vagina. Men who mutilate women are treated with universal repugnance. There are no sympathetic documentaries to tell their story; no one who talks about their lasting scars. There are certainly no amused mentions of the likelihood of copy-cat mutilators; there are no outbreaks of breast- or labia-cutting mania amongst ordinary aggrieved husbands.

The admiration for women who commit atrocities against men and the indifference shown their victims are deeply embedded in our societies. In the thirty years since Lorena’s not-guilty verdict, the culturally sanctioned rage of women has only deepened.