With its irresistible mix of tabloid hysteria, true crime and intelligent sociological analysis, I knew ITV’s I Cut Off His Penis: The Truth Behind The Headlines would be right up my street. I was rapt for the full 80-minute documentary, and, no, I don’t want to know what that says about me.
On the face of it, the film did what it said on the tin. From the infamous 1993 case of Lorena Bobbit, propelled to international notoriety after cutting off her husband John’s penis following years of alleged abuse, to waves of penis-cutting in Thailand and Kenya, I Cut Off His Penis explored the societal and personal factors that fed into these shocking incidents. What could drive a woman to such violence? And how might our attitudes to gender, sex and power influence things?
Bobbit herself appeared in the doc to articulately and straightforwardly recount her crime 30 years after the fact. Exhausted one night after work, she had woken up to find her husband on top of her. Next thing she knew, Bobbit was driving down the highway with his severed penis in one hand and a knife in the other. “I cut his penis off, there’s no way for me to candy-coat it,” she said.
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But she was also clear about the appalling behaviour that led to the incident. “The abuse was not only physical, but it escalated to the point that I was raped,” she explained. “He made me feel like I was his property.” In the end, Bobbitt was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was released from a psychiatric hospital after 45 days. Even John emerged largely unscathed – his penis was successfully reattached and he went on to be a porn star.
We were also introduced to Brigitte Harris from New York, who had cut off her father’s penis after years of sexual and physical abuse which she had endured since she was just three years old. As an adult, she worried that her dad would subject her five-year-old niece to the same abuse. “My plan was to prevent him from hurting anyone else,” said Brigitte. “I made up a plan to take away his weapon.” To hear her recount her suffering was harrowing, and it was hard to feel like her actions were anything less than proportionate. Eventually sentenced to second-degree manslaughter after her father died, she spent five years in prison.
Using these individual stories as scaffolding for a wider analysis, I Cut Off His Penis was peppered with fascinating commentary – not only from professionals, like the lawyer who represented Brigitte or a doctor who treated men in Thailand during a penis cutting “epidemic” in the 70s, but also academics and women’s rights experts who offered welcome insight into the crimes’ abundant cultural significance.
While there’s no question that cutting off someone’s genitals is objectively awful, it’s thanks to our society’s patriarchal structure that penises are so bound up with masculinity (and power) in the first place. Founding director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, Harriet Wistrich, was surprised that there weren’t more cases of “penicide” given the organ’s masculine significance.
Certainly, the media frenzy that followed the Bobbit case exemplified our outsize reverence for penises – and outrage at their removal. After all, as Jacqueline Helfgott of Seattle University pointed out, women are constantly being killed and injured by men. Yet, rarely does such an incident provoke even a fraction of the reaction that penis cutting does.
Penis cutting and our hysteria about it are fuelled by the same idea, that a penis = man = power. As such, patriarchy was ultimately revealed as the villain of these stories. And although that’s not a problem any one documentary is going to solve, this film did an admirable job of looking this particular crime straight in the eye.
“Lorena Bobbit shocked the world for a short period, and then we did not continue the conversation,” said Helfgott. Thanks to this documentary, we’re talking about it again.
‘I Cut Off His Penis: The Truth Behind the Headlines’ is streaming on ITVX
