Truth Stranger than Fiction

Sometimes the darker fantasies of the mind spill over into
reality, in these cases based upon it. They can be stranger than 
fiction and more fascinating.

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Even the mention of Lorena Bobbitt, and subsequent efforts to 
reassert male primacy through phallic imagery, sometimes emerged in 
unexpected places. Ann Risley Strawn recounted the following incident:

"Our Cub Scout Pack was having a cook-out. I walked up to the serving 
table and noticed that my friend Betsy was holding a steak knife in 
one hand and an uncooked hot dog in the other, at which point I 
inquired if this was the Lorena Bobbitt Invitational Barbecue. The 
conversation continued as we conjured up the idea for a Bobbitt 
Wiener Toss and a Memory Skills Test (you have to remember where it 
landed, of course). We noticed that suddenly the men were all looking 
quite uncomfortable about these uncooked hot dogs and their proximity 
to the knife-wielding wives and mothers. The best moment was looking 
at the campfire and seeing fifteen men and boys peacefully roasting 
their 'wienies' (the term used by the scouts)--but we noticed that 
they had placed the hot dogs the long way on the sticks, rather the 
standard cross-way mode. We thought it was a rather poignant ending 
to a humorous situation."



Just the mention of Lorena Bobbitt made some men nervous. As one 
journalist commented, "It serves, first and most frighteningly, as a 
man's scariest fantasy of Feminine Revenge, worse than any plot of 
Lysistrata" ("Ballad" A20).



Editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich captured this feeling in his 
depiction of "Thanksgiving at the Bobbitts," in which a woman raises 
a carving knife in the air, and the men and boys hide under the table 
in terror. The woman in the cartoon is faceless, she is everywoman--
neither young nor shapely, and she appears in a traditional domestic 
role. With this image in mind, people joked that after the Bobbitt 
incident, men were less likely to insist that women belong in the 
kitchen or quipped that millions of men had suddenly taken to 
sleeping on their stomachs.