Sarah: It's going to search for the word ‘penis’ in this document of notes I have. It appears 37 times, which seems even like a low number of times.
Mike: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the show where we revisit your childhood memories from the nineties, so you don’t have to.
Sarah: I like that because who has the time.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes, I am a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I am Sarah Marshall and I'm tired of naming all the places I write for. Cause this is like the main thing I do now. And we're talking about, I think the title of this is going to be You're Wrong About Lorena Bobbitt, because that is the primary person in this who I think America is wrong about. But we're going to talk a lot about John Wayne Bobbitt ,and I've just become fascinated by him.
Mike: America was fascinated by him. I remember when his porn came out and they reviewed it and the New Yorker and stuff.
Sarah: He did two pornographic films and I've now seen one of them. And I would sum up the themes of this whole episode with a quote that John Wayne Bobbitt himself says, and this is his first porno, which is John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut directed by Ron Jeremy. Have you seen it?
Mike: No, unfortunately,
Sarah: First of all, it's pretending to be biographical. It's a biopic. And so Lorena is played by this very scary looking lady who has this villainous, Disney villainess.
Mike: Like Ursula from a Little Mermaid.
Sarah: A little bit Ursula. Yeah. But basically there's a scene midway through where he's having an orgy with two or three women. And then Ron Jeremy walks in with his own date and he's like, it's me, Ron Jeremy, I'm here to join you. You know? And at this point, John Wayne Bobbitt doing, as always, an unconvincing job playing himself says “I was meeting some very important people now, but everything seemed to turn into an orgy”.
Mike: Condolences. Condolences to John Wayne Bobbitt.
Sarah: I feel like John Wayne Bobbitt's life in the nineties was he was the heroine of an 18th century novel about a young lad, sort of without much intelligence sort of making his way around the world and getting sort of randomly kidnapped by pirates and turns out to look exactly like a duke. And he impersonates him. His life became this sort of weird picaresque adventure for a while there.
Mike: Oh yeah.
Sarah: What do you remember about all this? What are your impressions of this saga?
Mike: My understanding of the case was that Lorena Bobbitt, her husband came home and he was drunk and he passed out in the bed and he was a deadbeat husband, like a shitty husband. And so she went to the kitchen, got a kitchen knife, cut off his penis got in her car, and drove away. I don't even know what city this was in, but it was near cornfields or fields of something. And she threw the penis amidst the fields, and he was so drunk that he didn't wake up. I'm sure this is 100% accurate.
Sarah: I just love the phrase, ‘she threw the penis amidst the fields’.
Mike: It was amidst the corn, that's what I remember about it at the time. And then the cops obviously got involved and then they found the penis and they sewed it back on. And that was where we got all of this aftermath stuff.
Sarah: That’s why it’s allowed to be funny because his penis came through it with him.
Mike: That's my overwhelming impression of this case is that it was a national joke. I remember Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien and Saturday I've had 10 billion jokes about this case for 10 billion years. That's what I remember. Both of them were just national laughingstocks and this case was something that the country did not take seriously at all. It was just hardy, har, har – woman cuts off man's penis, she's the evil hag, he's the emasculated cuck. We had these archetypes, these tropes ready for them.
Sarah: Yeah. It's a fascinating thing for men to find funny.
Mike: So should we start from the beginning?
Sarah: Let’s start from the beginning. So one thing that I feel is the big You're Wrong About in this that people tend not to know and that certainly John Wayne Bobbitt himself has probably forgotten by now is that there was not just one trial, there were two trials. Yes, because before Lorena Bobbitt went to trial for the quote ‘malicious wounding’ of her husband, John Wayne Bobbitt went to trial for sexually assaulting her.
Mike: Oh wow.
Sarah: Which she claimed is what he did before she cut off his penis and that was her motivation. He says her motivation was that he was bad at sex or that she was upset that he was leaving her or that if she couldn't have him, nobody would. It changes based on what year in the life of John Wayne Bobbitt you read an interview from. First of all, it's always a version of the events where he's not at fault for anything. What do you know about Lorena Bobbitt? If you try to imagine her as a person.
Mike: Nothing.
Sarah: So Lorena Bobbitt was born in Ecuador in 1969. She grew up in Venezuela. She came to the US in 1987 on a student visa. She went to community college. She started working as a manicurist. She met John Wayne Bobbitt, who was a Marine. Doesn't he just have that head shape>
Mike: Yeah, dude. He's like high and tight. He's just the high and tight, dude.
Sarah: So Lorena Bobbitt came to the U S in 1987, met John Wayne Bobbitt.
Mike: How did they meet?
Sarah: She meets him at a dance near the Marine Corps base at Quantico. She said in a really fabulous Vanity Fair article that came out this summer written by Lili Anolik, quote, “I thought John was very handsome, blue eyes, man in uniform, you know, he was almost like a symbol, a Marine fighting for the country. I believed in this beautiful country, I was swept off my feet. I wanted my American dream.”
Mike: Wow. How do you get quotes like that out of people like that, man?
Sarah: I don’t know, man. That's how the pros do it. And then John says “Lorena was pretty, she was innocent. She was real, real sweet.” So, you know, you can get better quotes out of some people than others, but yeah. And do you have a mental image of him?
Mike: He just seemed like the kind of dude that would have become a cop or an army soldier or something like dudes I went to high school with who would have looked directly through me. That is the vibe I always got from John Wayne Bobbitt, just his world and my world do not collide anywhere. There's no overlap in our Venn diagrams. I look at him like a zoo animal and he looks at me like a zoo animal. That is the level on which we interact with each other.
Sarah: Like the guy that you went to high school with, where you sort of knew him vaguely or knew of him, if he was in the news 10 years later for his wife cutting his penis off, you'll be like, hmm, I can see that.
Mike: Yeah, John. Good old John.
Sarah: So they got married in June of 19 89, 4 years before the incident. Lorena is 20. John is 22. So they got married and she started supporting them pretty quickly. She's working as a manicurist. He leaves the Marines and is sporadically employed. She embezzled $7,200 from work at one point, which he later brings up as evidence of her untrustworthiness. She says that was to support her and John and the lifestyle that they both wanted to have, and that she was pressured into it. So just from the beginning it’s just a difficult marriage and becomes more complicated. And this is in Manassas, Virginia, which is like in the greater DC area. It's in Northern Virginia.
Mike: So they get married. They're tumultuous.
Sarah: Yeah. They get married. It's a tumultuous marriage from the beginning. They get married because she is about to have to leave the country and he doesn't want her to.
Mike: Oh, so it's a visa marriage.
Sarah: Yeah. One of the things that he later says is that, well, you know, the reason she attacked me later was because he needed to be married for five years to become legal if it's a visa marriage. So that's why she assaulted me. And it's like, John, why would you think that her assaulting you would make you want to stay married to her for another year?
Mike: If that's true, that's not a great strategy on her part.
Sarah: Yeah. It's a visa marriage. It's a stormy marriage to begin with. They fight about money. He leaves the Marines fairly soon after, so he's not this American dream type person anymore. He's just a regular guy. She's working to support them pretty much from the beginning, she's working long hours as a manicurist.
You know, they separate for a period. He goes off and fathers a child with another woman and then comes back to the marriage. But they've already been separated for one lengthy period. They're back living together again but are talking about divorce, and essentially both of them know which way it's going. By the time of the night in question, which is June 23rd, 1993, they pretty much know that they're going to get divorced. And then this is the end. But they've separated and come together a couple times before. You know that feeling when you're in a shitty relationship that you just can't end.
Mike: Yes, very yes.
Sarah: It feels like this was one of those.
Mike: So they’re coasting on the momentum. It's easy to stay together. They have this fiery thing.
Sarah: They both were really young when they got together, she was 20 years old, and he was 22 when they got married. The idea of your marriage ending when you're a young married person seems like it's hard because you made this big decision, and now you have to admit that you need to move on. I don't know, I feel like harmful emotional attachment can be more tenacious than a healthy emotional attachment. The bad relationships can be harder to leave.
Mike: Why?
Sarah: I don't know. Because of the basic masochism of human beings.
Mike: Yes. You get addicted to the tumultuousness of it or you sort of think that that's what love is.
Sarah: Who knows if that's what was happening here, but it just seems like one of those relationships that the people in it wouldn't let die, that's being continually defibrillated back to life. And each time it comes back, it's like a little bit worse off, right?
Mike: Yeah. That's called being in your twenties. That is extremely being in your twenties.
Sarah: It's just, look, everyone made a series of small, bad decisions. And so the night that this all happens, they're living together, which is important legally later on, because in Virginia, you cannot charge someone with marital rape if they are living with their alleged victim, unless there is some kind of physical injury.
Mike: Jesus Christ.
Sarah: The reason that this is going to be called sexual assault later is because they’re iving in the same house.
Mike: That there's no such thing as raping someone if they're your spouse.
Sarah: If you don't injure them. You can legally rape your spouse without physically injuring them in the state of Virginia, if they live in a different, at a different address than you, this is the way that it breaks down at the bureaucratic level. All the little ways of not applying the term marital rape to cases of marital rape. So he goes out with his friend, who's staying with him at the time. They come back at like three in the morning. What John Wayne Bobbitt says later on variously is that he doesn't remember having sex with Lorena or that they had consensual sex. What Lorena says is that he raped her and that this was not an uncommon thing in the marriage. One of the things that becomes a problem for her also later is that when she is finally apprehended by the police later that night, what she tells them is that he always has an orgasm, and he never gives her an orgasm. What are you hearing in that?
Mike: Don't get mad at me. I hear just straight relationships.
Sarah: You hear the danger of straight relationships and how maybe they're too risky for anyone to be in.
Mike: It sounds like every conversation I've had with straight female and straight male friends of mine. But isn't her account pretty plausible? If he comes home at three in the morning and he's been drinking the idea that she, who presumably has to get up early to work the next morning, is going to be like, yes, let's bang this out.
Sarah: Yeah. She wants to go out, go off to work, to do manicures all day to support him in his, you know, whatever the hell he does.
Mike: I'm definitely really into having sex with you at three in the morning when you're drunk, I'm not, and I have to get up for work the next morning. It doesn't necessarily mean it's assault, but it's not an enthusiastic consensual interaction, I assume.
Sarah: She also says that he held her down and that she had said previously that forcing someone to submit sexually was a turn on for him, which like, right, none of that is surprising, that’s straight relationship culture. Yes. I personally look at that and I'm like, yeah, like if this is a relationship that has involved an abuse dynamic, and if we go by a version of the story where she didn't say anything or attempt to resist in any way on this particular incident, it's like, I don't think that that even particularly matters in the scheme of things, because we're looking at consent spread over an entire marriage and at a relationship where the idea of whether it matters what she says he does if he feels like having sex. That might've been completely eroded from the relationship years ago. This particular night, I think, doesn't matter as much as we want it to matter. And then the Ron Jeremy version of events.
Mike: Oh no.
Sarah: Because Ron Jeremy dramatizes them.
Mike: Oh my God. I can't believe the phrase, ‘the Ron Jeremy version of events’, exists.
Sarah: I mean it sucks, but also really nice to be looking at this weird chapter of American history and Ron Jeremy is there. I almost wish that when we were talking about the creation of the FBI. And it's like, and here's the Ron Jeremy version.
Mike: 9/11 the Ron Jeremy version.
Sarah: There's a whole rainbow of possibilities that Ron Jeremy never tapped, but the Ron Jeremy version of this is first of all, that Lorena is sleeping with her huge, scary boobs out on display. John Wayne Bobbitt comes home and basically has sex with her in a way that is consensual, but lame. He's guilty of being what every straight guy fears being, which is boring sexually and can't stay hard for very long. And he just sort of very quickly cums and then falls asleep. And then she goes and gets the knife and stands over him and is like, you deserve this. I am going to wound you. And then cuts off his penis. And then instead of throwing it into a field, it actually lands at the feet of Motorhead Lemmy.
Mike: No way. Really? The special guest appearance by Motorhead?
Sarah: Yeah, they also did the closing credits theme. So that's the I'm Ron Jeremy version. The part where the two actual Bobbitt's start telling the same story is that she gets out, she gets a glass of water. She says she sees the knife and the kitchen and just grabs it. She's not really thinking, she just does it. She goes back into the bedroom. John Wayne Bobbitt later will say that he feels her grabbing him and initially thinks that she wants to like-
Mike: Round two?
Sarah: Round two. That's a very John Wayne Bobbitt thing to think. And she cuts it off. And then he fully wakes up and wakes his friend up who's staying with him to have him drive him to the hospital and his friend who doesn't think it's super serious starts brushing his teeth.
Mike: No fucking way.
Sarah: John Wayne Bobbitt is like, no, we have to go to the hospital right now, but apparently stays very calm. And then at the hospital first they're clamping it and suturing it, and then they retrieved the penis, and it is reattached in a nine and a half hour long surgery. And even after it's sewn back on, they don't know if it's going to be able to stay back on. The doctor apparently tells him that it could literally turn black and fall off. But it stays on.
Mike: What is she doing at this time? She cuts it off and then she runs out of the apartment super quickly. Or, how does she.
Sarah: She runs out of the apartment. She doesn't have shoes on. She's still holding the penis and she also takes his Gameboy which is very mysterious.
Mike: Why did she take the Gameboy?
Sarah: I don't know. Why wouldn't you take a Gameboy, if you were in her position.
Mike: She's halfway through playing a link to the past.
Sarah: I don't know, it's valuable. It's sitting there. You know, so this crime takes place. She gets in the car still holding it, the penis, not really realizing that she still has it in her hand, is what she says later. And she's driving around, and she suddenly realizes that she's holding it and so she throws it out the window.
Mike: Amidst the corn.
Sarah: As far as I know corn wasn't involved. I think it might've been like a vacant lot. Because it was across the street from a 7-Eleven.
Mike: I was imagining the fields of wheat from Gladiator.
Sarah: That would be nice. The mythic resting place of the penis.
Mike: Penis Valhalla. Yes. That's what I was imagining,
Sarah: But no, sadly it was really across the street from a 7-Eleven. Lorena after this, drives to her boss's house. Her boss, Shanna, from whom she has embezzled.
Mike: Oh, wow.
Sarah: Yeah. She doesn't have an extended friend network, which is maybe one of the problems in her life. And so she drives to her boss Shanna's house. And she’s like, I just cut off my husband's penis. And her boss, to her credit, is like, let's call the police and explain the situation. And so, because of that, because she immediately is like, oh hmm, I definitely did that, and then said where she threw it out the window, the cops can go retrieve it. And since there's a 7-Eleven across the street, they take it to the 7-Eleven and fill a Big Bite container with ice and then put the penis in the container.
Mike: Shut up. Yeah, that really happened. And the big bite container, is that the one for hotdogs?
Sarah: Yeah.
Mike: Oh my God. Well whatever works, that's very MacGyver.
Sarah: It is very MacGyver. It's not as if they would have anything with them. It is an example of how this really happened. It was these people's lives. It was all of this serious, horrific stuff that gets pulled in the deeper you go into the story, but also in this way that you just literally cannot deny that it was just funny. It's horrible. And it's also funny, in its bones. The story is funny, and you don't want it to be funny, but it's funny.
Mike: I'm sure that there are many like Oberlin PhDs written on why this is so funny.
Sarah: Why do you always compare me to an Oberlin PhD?
Mike: That's my go to like left wing poetry slam reference college. I'm sorry. I should use evergreen or something instead. So on the way she throws the penis out the window.
Sarah: Yeah. And then goes to her boss's house and then her boss calls the police and is like, hello, this is where that penis you're looking for is, and then is arrested, turns herself in, cooperates, everyone's cooperative. And then before she goes to trial, she goes to trial a few months later, but before that, because she's accused John Wayne Bobbitt of rape and because he can be tried for sexual assault based on state law, he goes to trial for sexual assault and a jury of mostly women acquits him.
Mike: Oh, interesting.
Sarah: Apparently at the time, one of the jurors told the New York Times that they wanted to have a little addendum saying this is not to be taken. This is not a feminist statement. Everyone calm down. This is a regular verdict. There's this feeling at the time that the way people are responding to this, it's like John and Lorena Bobbitt are proxy warriors in the battle of the sexes basically. And there's this response that immediately happens where it feels like there's some feminist voices that are sort of like emboldened by this.
There's a large tide of feminists and of people who think Lorena Bobbitt was abused and this is a crime that makes sense in the context of spousal battery and of the kind of marriage that she describes. Let's be more merciful towards her than the legal system tends to be. And there are also some voices that are like, yay, this is fit punishment, et cetera. And there, of course, are people saying that there is going to be a wave of copycat crimes. This was a big fear in 1993.
Mike: Weird.
Sarah: Yeah. Why is that weird?
Mike: This is the same thing that we said with the battered woman syndrome, many, many episodes ago about how there's this idea that women are biding their time and that women are super murderous against men and are holding on all this anger against men and at the slightest provocation, it's just all going to come flooding out. And so there's this fear among ‘the straights’ that the women are just going to rise up at any moment. And I guess this gives fuel to that.
Sarah: Yeah. I feel like what we consistently learn is straight people are just living every day in their own personal cold war. That's just stressful. Yeah. Because you look at that and that same language that showed up in the late seventies and early eighties when cases went to trial where women who killed their abusive husbands and either were laid off without having to do time or being given comparatively light sentences because of a battered woman syndrome defense. There was the same rhetoric that we see about Lorena Bobbitt, that is going to be, “open season” on husbands. And it's like, what are the straight men of America doing? What is the husband population up to that? These men think that women are sharpening their carving knives waiting until the first legal window when it seems like women who commit the crimes that they, of course, all secretly want to commit, aren't having the book thrown at them. And then immediately they're just going to start doing exactly what Lorena Bobbitt did. Like what kind of a self-image do you have to have to believe that your wife wants to do that to you?
Mike: The solution to these things is never, Hey, wait, maybe our wives are people with agency, and we should just be nice to them and that's the best way to keep them from murdering us. No, no, it's always, we need harsher punishments. We need to crack down. It's always tough on crime path, rather than just, let's ask our wives what they need and our relationships and how to make them healthier.
Sarah: Right. Right. Why don't you treat your wife in such a way that you're not worried that if it were illegally possible for her, she would kill you immediately?
Mike: Right? The only thing keeping my wife from killing me is laws, nothing else. She's afraid of punishments. Everything else is in place for her to want to murder me.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. I guess I live in an America where we trust people to not murder their spouses for reasons other than that it's illegal.
Mike: But why do they acquit? Why do they acquit John Wayne Bobbitt of the sexual assault?
Sarah: There's some good quotes here from the prosecutor in this case, because another of the weird things that happened is that the guy who prosecutes John Wayne Bobbitt and who has used Lorena Bobbitt as his star witness, then turns around immediately and prosecutes Lorena Bobbitt using John Wayne Bobbitt as his star witness.
Mike: Wait, the same guy?
Sarah: Yes. His name is Paul Bieber, the Prince William county Commonwealth's attorney because we're in Commonwealth territory.
Mike: So he’s just the prosecution one-stop shop. And when it's John under trial Lorena the witness. And when it's Lorena under trial, it's John.
Sarah: Yeah. It's like bugs on first, bugs on second, bugs on third. Okay. So this is quoted in the New York Times coverage of John Wayne Bobbitt 's acquittal, Commonwealth attorney, Paul Bieber says, “you might say these two people deserve each other.” And then of his own role he says, “it's not the best position to be in. I believe what she said was the truth, and I continue to believe what she did in response was not justified. So essentially, he's sort of making his legal position tenable by being like, you know, I believe that her husband did rape her or did sexually assault her based on what the law of the Commonwealth of Virginia says. But I believe then that what she did in response wasn't justified by being a rape victim, which like is, you know, Standard prosecutorial standpoint across both trials. It was just weird to sort of flip the defendant and the witness so obviously.
Mike: What was the evidence for and against? Was it just her word against his?
Sarah: Yeah. I’m so tired of the phrase he said, she said, but it is the kind of case that they call that. Cause there's no physical injury that there's any documentation of, they're married so that's a hard case to try. You get the feeling that if not for the malicious wounding trial, that the sexual assault trial probably wouldn't have happened. And also then they're trying based on the idea of the whole reasonable doubt thing, right? There's a lot of room for reasonable doubt if it's a question of testimony versus testimony and the testimony of the victim, regardless of how you're going to try and focus on what's at hand. The victim in this case is going to go on and be tried for something pretty incendiary and a couple of months, that's going to affect the way that you apply your understanding of the case as a juror. So there's this weird thing where she then goes to trial and he has been acquitted of sexually assaulting her, which kind of takes some of her motive away. There has to be proof of sexual assault for there to be proof of her battered wife syndrome, diminished capacity. And specifically her lawyers are arguing temporary insanity. So the first trial there's a lot of coverage of it, but it doesn't rise to the level of soap opera. The second trial, Lorena Bobbitt going to trial for malicious wounding, is on TV, the whole thing.
Mike: Oh live? It’s fed live?
Sarah: It's one of the first of those, one of the first trials that shows TV people that there's a market for showing trials. And that's one of the first shows people will watch anything because they watch a lot of material just about John and Lorena Bobbitt's marriage and not about the interesting parts of it. There's a lot of testimony about them arguing about money. So that's on TV for two weeks. And she is found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.
Mike: Yes. I remember this and I remember that being like a big deal. My understanding is the insanity defense does not work all that often.
Sarah: I don’t have numbers on it but if you look at just the cases that we grew up watching and that have made a big impression on American media in the last 20 years, how often does an insanity defense work?
Mike: Like, none times. So what is her argument? She says she blacked out.
Sarah: I would describe it essentially as just having diminished capacity. One of the defenses that comes up a lot in cases where the mitigation is battered wife syndrome or something like it is that you essentially have lost the ability to respond appropriately to a threat. You are attacked or you feel the threat of attack which may be real, or maybe just you experienced something that you suggest here about to be attacked based on your previous experiences of that and you respond to that threat. All of this makes complete sense when you sort of say it thing by thing, right? Because if you're used to being attacked specifically by someone who's physically larger or more powerful than you. If you sort of get this limbic reaction to the threat of future attack, then you're not going to be conservative. Right. You're not going to be like, I'm going to try and disable, but not kill this person.
Mike: Right. You're going to overreact because you think that your life is in danger, and you have to.
Sarah: Yeah. Because that's what our survival instincts do. And that's why we do things like, the same adrenaline rushes that are responsible for mothers lifting helicopters off of babies, wherever the hell that happens. If we want to celebrate that, they're also responsible for people overreacting to real or perceived threats. And there's also the thing I've learned helplessness that happens in abuse dynamics where if you are consistently abused and nothing that you do makes a difference about whether you get abused or not and if you have tried to get out before, but have just given up on that, that you essentially don't have a sense of possessing any will of your own. So then even if you're presented with free and clear options to leave the relationship or to protect yourself, you just don't see those opportunities anymore.
The global battered wife defense basically breaks down to a lot of different things, but essentially you can't look at someone who responded to someone who was abusing them consistently and say that they responded in a way that was disproportionate to what they were experiencing or what they were afraid of, because you don't know what seemed disproportionate in their brain as it existed after being in that relationship and in that abuse dynamic for that long.
Mike: So basically based on the abuse, she has built him up in her mind as an existential threat to her in a way that being sexually assaulted at a bar or something by someone you don't know wouldn't necessarily provoke that response. It's because it's part of a pattern that she then has this reaction.
Sarah: Yeah. I think there would be this feeling. And I think this was why there were women in America at the time, you know, and not just women in America, who lifted Lorena Bobbitt up as a figure of resistance in a way that kind of oversimplified her case, but also was a form of support of, we've all felt like that because John Wayne Bobbitt also just doesn't understand what harm he's doing, who literally doesn't conceptualize of himself as doing harm who cannot be intervened on like even now. He also comes across to me as morally vacant and I feel as if there is this sense that John Wayne Bobbitt had been blessed. That there was this hand of masculinity reaching down to touch him and be like, even if the worst thing happens to you, you didn't deserve it and you'll be okay.
And so in John Wayne Bobbitt's interviews, as you know, after this happened and then as he's sort of taken out of a drawer on multiple of five anniversary. Let me just read the quote. He says, “obviously I would have preferred not to go through all that pain and suffering, but being famous for my penis has given me opportunities I could not have ever imagined”
Mike: Oh my God. This is like, he's living the dream. The whole country is talking about your dick.
Sarah: The weird thing about John Wayne Bobbitt is that I feel like he does feel that just from the beginning, from the moment this happened, this awful thing happens to him. His wife's motive for doing what she did is very much at issue at the time, which he doesn't seem to notice at all. And he just sort of steps under the spotlight like he's been waiting for this his whole life. He always had a feeling and it's finally happened. He was like, hello. And every interview that you read with him, he just sort of has this blithe disregard for the possibility that any of this was because of anything that he did. This idea that he got famous for his penis, and he sees himself as being this famous victim. And he's been able to tell himself that story, because so much of our cultural version of the story has gone along with that. But yeah, this was a story about his wife accusing him of raping her, and he's been able to completely ignore that part of it and focus just on the part that's worked out well for him. And you can see looking at the dynamics of this event and of these trials and of just seeing him as this archetypal guy who just uses his sexuality in a way that is harmful to women and doesn't even notice that he's doing that, right? He has all of this power to harm, and he doesn't even see it. It's not that there's malice, there's just ignorance.
Mike: And a total refusal to examine himself to do any soul searching or any self-reflection at all. He's just bouncing through life like a little pin ball without really being like, huh? I wonder what Lorena’s needs are. I wonder how I can be a better husband. Just skating along the surface of everything.
Sarah: Yeah. And so after this happened, after the trials end, after Lorena Bobbitt is committed for psychiatric observation for 45 days, she's let out after I think 38 because she's not dangerous.
Mike: She just had a toxic dynamic with this dude.
Sarah: This marriage. And it's so interesting how consistently both of them behaved, she just went radio silent, basically, at least in the end. She did paid appearances and stuff in South America. She stayed here. She applied for permanent residency. She brought her family up. She continued working as a manicurist. Playboy offered her a million dollars to pose. And she was like, no, I'm just going to keep doing my manicures, this is really the end of Lorena’s time in the spotlight. And this has really been enough for me. Thank you. And of course, John Wayne Bobbitt, as we've discussed, just went for it. In the immediate aftermath of all of this happening, John Wayne Bobbitt has gone on a worldwide media tour called Love Hurts. He appears on radio stations across the country. He appeared on a radio station where he was hooked up to a polygraph.
Mike: His penis or his self?
Sarah: His actual self. He had a merchandising deal for something called the Private Parts Protector. He autographed steak knives.
Mike: The only thing more masculine than a penis, a set of steak knives.
Sarah: He also had his penis embiggened and then made its regular size again later on.
Mike: Really?
Sarah: Yeah, he did. And so now it’s regular sized again. This is all from a New York Times article at the time. And this ends with a quote from his lawyer who says, “no one who has come to instant celebrity will have systematically exploited as many avenues as John Wayne Bobbitt.
Mike: Wow. Maybe there's a lesson there that the only way to be a successful celebrity is to be morally vacuous about it.
Sarah: That's probably true.
Mike: And just feel ambivalent or I don't know what to do with all this. And what does it all mean? It sounds like he just skated over the surface the whole time and it was just like, this is fun, and the wind is at my back and just didn't put too much thought into it.
Sarah: He's so has the ‘wind is at my back’, look on his face during so much of this. Yeah. And John Wayne Bobbitt continues to make media appearances when he can get them. And one of the things that she said when she made a recent relatively rare media appearances, is that he's tried to call her over the years, and she always just deletes his number.
Mike: No way. He's still sending like “u up?” texts?
Sarah: He’s still calling her every so often and he's made coy remarks that he could forgive Lorena if she apologized. He wants to go back for more. He's like, you know, there was good stuff there.
Mike: Oh my God. It is a toxic relationship from your early twenties. I'm still trying to figure out what to think about this guy. Is he basically a domestic abuser who sort of got off because he became this joke?
Sarah: Well an important thing too, is that in his future relationships they were also domestic abuse incidents. So he was charged with domestic battery of his third wife several times, but he was acquitted of all of those. And he was also convicted of misdemeanor domestic battery in 1994.
Mike: We've got someone who's been accused of domestic violence three times and convicted once.
Sarah: This is at least a pattern in his relationship. The most conservative thing you can say is that he's consistently accused of domestic abuse by the women he's in relationships with.
Mike: Does anyone ever give him shit about this on any of these Montel Jordan appearances? Does anybody say, tell us about the abuse?
Sarah: I will answer that with a quote. Okay. So this is from an interview that he did with the Daily Mail. I was just so looking forward to the noise you would make about the Daily Mail. This is the author talking. “But in the fevered atmosphere of these #metoo times, the impulse by some to recast Lorena as the victim has proved irresistible. There should be a me too movement for men because the law's bias toward women says Bobbitt. We could all stand up and say, me too. I went through that. My girlfriend did this, my fiancé poisoned me. My wife cut off my penis because I filed for divorce. Me too. Me too. Let the men do it. Do you agree?”
Mike: Oh, my God.
Sarah: And it's like John, you're the only one.
Mike: You’re actually the only one who had his penis cut off.
Sarah: And from all this talk of copycat crimes, this has happened a couple more times.
Mike: Oh yeah?
Sarah: Apparently there was a phenomenon in the seventies in Thailand where this happened dozens of times, but I don't know if this has happened at all in the US.
Mike: Despite opening the legal flood gates.
Sarah: There hasn't been anything we can call a copycat phenomenon. It's a big country. Eventually this will happen again, but it never sparked a wave. And here's another one of John Wayne Bobbitt conceptualizing himself reasonably. “What happened to me is like OJ and Nicole. She finalized the relationship and two weeks later she was dead. The same jealous behavior occurred with me and Lorena. The hurt person becomes enraged. Me and Nicole both got our heads cut off. And it's also like Nancy Kerrigan, we both had our legs cut off. It is equal behavior.” And for the record, by the way, Nancy Kerrigan, didn't get her leg cut off. No one got their leg cut off of the people that we're discussing today. What does it mean to describe yourself that way?
Mike: To be fair, oftentimes when people are held accountable for their actions, they tend to catastrophize, right? We've had a wave recently of men who have faced the tiniest possible consequences for their actions saying, it's a witch hunt. And so it's easy to put John Wayne Bobbitt into that frame. On the other hand, he did actually have his penis cut off.
Sarah: That’s true. He literally did and no one can say that he didn't.
Mike: So that's the thing. So it's not a situation where he lost a grant or like he was fired from his extremely lucrative job. There's an element of whining about this for men, but John Wayne Bobbitt to some extent is the only man in America that can actually make that case because he did. He was actually mutilated. I feel like I come down where the prosecutor came down, where it's like a sexual assault probably took place and domestic abuse probably happened and it's a wildly disproportionate way to react to that. She was trapped in the marriage. She couldn't leave because of visa reasons, she was scared. But mutilating somebody in a very severe way is a really fucked up and inappropriate thing to do. I don't think she should have been locked up and thrown away the key or whatever, but it's a really big deal to cut someone's penis off. If anyone can be a martyr for men's rights, it's probably John Wayne Bobbitt and everyone else should shut the fuck up.
Sarah: There needs to be one, so they can have him. He likes being famous. And he's in this weird position where yes, he can be the face of men who are maimed by women in disproportionate ways. And he's the face of a movement of almost one. And yet he's also still capable of being annoying because he still has a penis that works fine. And of course I was watching John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut, and I was like, I want to see the penis. I want to see the penis. I want to see the penis. And then finally they show it and they cut to it pretty abruptly from something else so you’re not ready. And then suddenly it's there and you're like, oh, I would not even necessarily have guessed. It is pretty amazing, it works.
Mike: He materially benefited from this situation.
Sarah: It's part of why he's weirdly appealing as a human being. You're like, wouldn't it be nice to just have no self-awareness at all and deep down, we know it will be horrible because we wouldn't be accountable for our actions and there'd be all this good stuff and self-insight that we wouldn't have. But at the same time, you're like, what if I were John Wayne Bobbitt and I could have the biggest sign that you were capable of getting that maybe you need to make different decisions about what you do with your life. And you're like, wow, I'm the victim. And I'm going to make a movie with Ron Jeremy, I'm going to make two movies.
Mike: Isn't that the thing that says something about where we were in the nineties, despite the evidence that we had about domestic abuse, he became like a joke-y fun celebrity that went on Jay Leno and that no one ever held him accountable for that, or even was like, you know, something funny happened to this guy, but maybe let's not welcome him into polite society. I always thought it seemed weird how it just became this joke. Nothing about the whole situation is like all that funny. Just cause it has the word penis in it, it's funny. But if she had cut off his hand or something, we would be having a completely different conversation about it.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. It's true. It probably has to do with the fact that in America we are uncomfortable with penises as a whole and we really don't know what to do with them.
Mike: Someone has written their Oberlin PhD about our weird obsession with penises and as soon as penises get involved in something, we all become little giggling toddlers.
Sarah: I'm going to read you something. So, you know how I have complicated feelings about Alan Dershowitz? But who in the nineties was still passively a civil libertarian, and now he's just a big balloon full of am radio. Alan Dershowitz wrote a book in the mid nineties called the Abuse Excuse.
Mike: Oh, nice.
Sarah: I would like you to argue against Alan Dershowitz and you know, this is in response to the Lorena Bobbitt trial, it's in response to Tanya Harding. The argument is that everyone wants to be killing everyone and now they found all these loopholes. And it's folded into this general hysteria about the nineties and how everyone likes TV too much. And so here's the thesis of Alan Dershowitz’s book that I want you to argue against; this is the New York Times review. “Mr. Dershowitz yokes the parts together with observations that quote ‘abuse and other excuses may be a symptom of a national abdication of personal responsibility’ and that all the excuses he writes about, quote, ‘encouraged a sense of helplessness, which leads to an unbroken cycle of abuse, counter abuse, excuse, and violence’, and that to regain control over our destiny, we must first reassert responsibility for our choices and our actions.”
Mike: This is like, now that's what I call personal responsibility, volume 78. Just cranking out the same arguments for everything always. By wanting to make things harder for women, I'm actually the one that cares about women. It's the same upside-down-ery. What's interesting about this argument is that he's right in the general, right? People respond to incentives and that legal structures matter. But then right now, and especially when he was writing, we basically have widespread impunity for domestic abusers. And so swinging that pendulum back, he's saying it's gonna make women more aggressive or whatever, but it's like, What is it doing to the behavior of men that they know they're going to get away with it? I do think that the chances of punishment matter, punishments to some extent matter, but he never applies that to the status quo, he only applies that to changes to the status quo.
Sarah: What do you think Alan Derschewitz says to that?
Mike: Meh!
Sarah: People have snow on me at Martha's vineyard.
Mike: You make the sound of the monsters from Pitch Black.
Sarah: Yeah. And what's funny too, is that I feel like if you're defending a system where say there's something systemic, like domestic abuse, there are crimes that then can’t function if you look at them this way as canaries in coal mines, where like, if you have a certain amount of women who retaliate against abusive partners and you can be like, okay, this is an indication that domestic abuse is an endemic problem. If you see it that way, then you can be like, all right, how do we lower crime rates by managing the thing that's caused the retaliatory crime, the crime that women feel is necessary in order to end or get out of difficult abusive relationships. Or you can also do this thing where if there's this larger problem, and then these more visible crimes that are indicative of that problem, if you're punishing people for those, then being tough on crime is a way of not looking at the entire picture at all. Because if you're taking these crimes in response to a bigger problem, putting the people who commit the responsive crimes in prison and not addressing what they're naming is the cause of it, then you essentially can say that you solve the entire problem by putting away the people who commit crimes that are responsive to this bigger problem in their lives.
Mike: But isn't domestic abuse also a crime? That's what's weird, everybody wants to be tough on crime, but they never want to be tough on particular forms of crime. Spousal abuse, spousal rape, is also a crime, so shouldn't he be arguing, let's really crack down on the spousal abusers and make those dudes do 50 years in jail? It's this selective worrying. It's like it's only a slippery slope when we start being nice to women when we're like, let's just let men get away with stuff like that. The slope is not slippery.
Sarah: Cause we've always been letting men get away with stuff.
Mike: And everything's going fine.
Sarah: Right. We're not able to entertain hysteria about, what if we start letting men get away with stuff? And it's like, well, we've been doing that this whole time.
Mike: Yeah, we can't forget about it cause it's already the situation.
Sarah: I feel like the hallmark of the nineties media scandal is that at the time there's all these New York magazine articles and highbrow editorials about this and various other scandals of the period of how America becomes such a cheap tabloid frenzied, circusy kind of a place? Aren't we above all this? And the people who were doing all the Pearl collection don't seem to realize that they are being presented if they choose to take the opportunity with narratives that are about all of the issues that they want to talk about. These are stories, so many of these tabloid nineties stories, what are thought of as tabloid stories, are about domestic abuse. They're about the lack of recognition of marital rape legally. They've about complex legal issues, there about all of these serious things that are at the forefront of feminist thought and sociological thought and legal thought, and us trying to define ourselves and deal with our biggest problems as a society, and instead, we were able to see them as just this funny thing that happened.
Mike: I think it's also the inability. It's really difficult for people and especially people in the nineties to leave public figures complex. To me, Lorena Bobbitt is a complex figure. She's clearly the victim of some form of abuse. She also clearly did something wildly inappropriate. To reclaim her as a feminist hero is bullshit because she's more complicated than that. And to reclaim her as a vicious revenge queen is also stupid because it's also more complex than that. And it's these cases that fall somewhere in between what we want them to be, we're very bad at dealing with those. And so we craft this narrative around somebody, but then in the specifics, almost nobody ever fits. So we're left with these misconceptions about complicated people that have been pushed into these square little boxes.
Sarah: Yeah. And everyone's too complicated to be a hero. John and Lorena Bobitt we're just two people who kept making bad choices until they ended being the focal point of the entire country's attention. They are just people who sort of wandered over to the spotlight, basically.
Mike: I’m glad that I've made terrible decisions my whole life, but have never wandered into any spotlights. I think that's the trick. Don't don't-
Sarah: Don't get famous.
Mike: Just make dumb decisions under the radar for your whole life.
Sarah: Yeah. And love yourself. Love yourself and your bad decisions. Love yourself. Make bad decisions quietly.
Mike: And live near a seven 11 with ice available, if need be.
Sarah: There it is.