Feminism Confronts Bobbittry

By Barbara Ehrenreich

To read the volumes of outraged male commentary, you'd think Lorena Bobbitt had got her training in a feminist guerrilla camp and her carving skills from the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto. "Go out into the world," her trainers must have told her, "find some sexist lowlife, preferably an ex- Marine named John Wayne, and, you know, cut it off!"

But Lorena Bobbitt is in many ways just your typical small-town multicultural manicurist, a woman whose ideas of political science are summed up in a statement she made about Venezuela, where she grew up: "I have a patriotism . . . We do have McDonald's. We do have Pizza Hut." Nor are the women who harassed Dr. James Sehn's wife in a McLean, Virginia, beauty parlor because he had helped reattach the offending organ known to be commandos from the National Organization for Women. In fact, the really interesting thing about the Bobbitt affair is the huge divergence it reveals between high- powered feminist intellectualdom, on the one hand, and your average office wit or female cafeteria orator, on the other.

While the gals in data entry are discussing fascinating new possibilities for cutlery commercials, the feminist pundits are tripping over one another to show that none of them is, goddess forbid, a "man hater." And while the pundits are making obvious but prissy-sounding statements like "The fact that one has been a victim doesn't give one carte blanche to victimize others," the woman in the street is making V signs by raising two fingers and bringing them together with a snipping motion.

If the feminist intellectuals seem slightly out of touch, it's because they're preoccupied these days with their own factional matters, such as the great standoff over the subject of victimhood. On the pro-victimhood side are the legions of domestic-abuse specialists who see Lorena Bobbitt as one more martyr in women's long, weepy history of rape and abuse. On the anti side are feminist authors like Naomi Wolf and Wendy Kaminer, who claim that women have been turning away from feminism because they're sick and tired of hearing about victims and "victimology": foot binding, battering, genital mutilation, witch burnings and the like. Time to stop whining, the anti- victimhood feminists say, and go for the power.

Both sides make valid points. It's just that neither seems to grasp the brazen new mood out there represented by, among other things, all the grass- roots female backing for Ms. Bobbitt. The retail clerks who send her letters of support, the homemakers who cackle wildly every time they sharpen the butcher knife are neither "tired of hearing about victims" nor eager to honor them. They're tired of being victims. And they're eager to see women fight back by whatever means necessary. Probably it all started when Louise -- or was it Thelma? -- dispatched that scumball would-be rapist in the parking lot of a bar. In fact, we can't get enough of warrior-woman flicks: Sigourney Weaver in Alien, Linda Hamilton in Terminator II, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. These are ladies who wouldn't slice anything off, one suspected, unless they meant to put it straight into a Cuisinart.

In the real world, the new mood was manifested by all the women flocking to gun stores and subscribing to Women & Guns, the magazine that tells you how to accessorize a neat little sidearm. And, without any prompting from NOW, thousands of women are sporting bumper stickers identifying themselves as BEYOND BITCH and buying T shirts that say TOUGH ENOUGH or make unflattering comparisons between cucumbers and men.

The new grass-roots female militancy is not something that a women's studies professor would judge p.c. In fact, it looks a lot like your standard conservative anticrime backlash, but with a key difference: crime in this case is defined as what men have been getting away with for centuries.

Organized feminism, of course, had a lot to do with the emergence of the new beyond-bitch attitude. Feminism raised expectations, giving millions of women the idea that makeup is not the solution to chronic bruising and that even males may be endowed with coffee-making skills. But for most women, especially the kind who don't do book tours and talk shows, the feminist revolution just * hasn't come along fast enough. A sizable percentage of them have to work every day with guys whose notions of gender etiquette are derived from Howard and Rush. And all too many women go home to Bobbitt-like fellows who regard the penis as a portable battering ram. So the ripple of glee that passed through the female population when Lorena Bobbitt struck back shows that feminist intellectualdom has it wrong. In polls, American women are strongly supportive of feminist issues, and if they nonetheless shrink from the F word itself, this is not because they think it means man-hating militants from hell. On the contrary, the problem with "feminism" may be that it has come to sound just too damn dainty.

Personally, I'm for both feminism and nonviolence. I admire the male body and prefer to find the penis attached to it rather than having to root around in vacant lots with Ziploc bag in hand. But I'm not willing to wait another decade or two for gender peace to prevail. And if a fellow insists on using his penis as a weapon, I say that, one way or another, he ought to be swiftly disarmed.