Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 26, 1993 TAG: 9401140026
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
So dark is the phobia, sez Sig, that male dreams are flooded with images of the loss - symbolic images, that is, such as dreams of tooth loss and the loss, say, of marbles spilled on the playground.
Freud may be right or wrong, and who could prove it either way, but it remains to say that no less an authority on the absurd than the late Rebecca West notes somewhere or other that when an Italian man is threatened, or even taken by surprise, his reflexive response is to grab his crotch.
I bring all this up not to be lewd, let alone to stir the primal dreads of my fellow victims of feminist scorn, but in the purely impersonal desire to call attention, like an anthropologist, to the sudden rise and apparent respectability of a curious new form of social interaction.
It is, unless I wholly misread and misheard the news, the fairly definitive revenge of depriving an offending male of his, uh, membrum virile. Or, if that doesn't seem suitable, of depriving him of his cojones.
While we postpone shudders of dread - or, as recently happened in Northern Virginia, demonstrations of approval by chanting feminists who wish they'd done the same thing, and may still - let us note that metaphors for what happened there have been common currency for a long time.
Lawyers like to speak of ``castrating women'' in divorce suits, sometimes of ``emasculating women,'' and the notion has stuck that certain women, driven by a hunger for revenge, are often inclined to take as much as they can.
It seemed to remain a metaphorical exaggeration until recently, when in our own fair state the wife of John Wayne Bobbitt took a knife and severed the, uh, member of her sleeping husband.
He awoke, not surprisingly, and cops eventually found and surgeons reattached the, uh, member, though whether or when it will regain its full function remains unknown. Bobbitt was acquitted of provoking the attack and her defense against charges of malicious assault will not be heard until she goes to trial.
Meanwhile, however, it became nationally known that a California woman charged with the literal castration of her husband will be tried in a Los Angeles court in January.
She too struck while hubby snored, though in her case using scissors, and the severed parts were not, this time, reattachable. James Macias will thus sing in a higher register henceforth, though why he was willing to spend Thanksgiving with her, knowing her ways, is a mystery only the judge, who allowed her to do so, could solve.
It is all, of course, a bit troubling - not only because it is scary in itself but because one cannot help wondering how surgery can proceed so far with no more anesthetic than a good nap.
It is equally disturbing that T-shirted feminists demonstrated outside Bobbitt's trial not only urging his conviction but calling, like Republicans, for further cuts.
In short, if you will forgive the expression, nearly half of America's population is no longer safe.
To quote the immortal Jeff DeBell: This could be bigger than herpes.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB