The Nation's Pulse / Sharia Feminists

...In a Vanity Fair account, Kim Masters tells of "the Lorena supporters who have transformed the V-for-Victory sign into a symbol of solidarity by making scissorlike motions with their fingers...

...Virginia NOW Coordinator Denise Lee...

...On "20/20," she said: "And the depth of anger that was plumbed by this and the response of support that comes for Lorena Bobbitt comes from that depth of anger, of feeling there hasn't been adequate resources and recourse and redress of the terrible violence that women face...

...But it looks more like an argument for vigilantism...

...Were one-tenth the attention given to this given to rape, battery, and all the women chopped up into pieces all the time, we'd be in good shape," she told New York Newsday...

...Lord...

...So I certainly think that explains the number of women who have said, 'Yeah, well, he got what he deserved.'" Gandy may well be merely characterizing, rather than commending, what she perceives to be a prevalent attitude among women...

...Feminist leaders have now rallied to Lorena Bobbitt as a martyr and an avenging angel for America's battered women...

...What she did was a crime...

...JARRIEL: She never thought of killing him...

...You use the word "vengeance," Hugh, and you, you knowJARRIEL: And you, Barbara...

...I mean, I do think that men and women see this very differently...

...counters that the contiguous wall is not a bedroom wall, and reasserts that neighbors closer to the Bobbitts' bedroom heard no...

...In an ABC "20/20" segment on the case, correspondent Tom Jarriel quoted a resident of the Bobbitts' apartment complex to buttress his portrayal of John Bobbitt as a sexually vain and predatory action hero manqué: JARRIEL [voice-over]: John spent a lot of time keeping physically fit in the bodybuilding room next to the pool where he was also frequently seen...

...JARRIEL: She said she'd never thought of killing him...

...Shades of the Weather Underground's index-and-pinkie "fork salute" in solidarity with the Manson Family's stabbing to death—with a fork—of the pregnant Sharon Tate...

...I never said anything to him, and my girlfriend never thought he was hitting on her at all...

...I include it only to convey that caution is in order for those who would simply assume Bobbitt's guilt) T he feminists supporting Lorena add a second, more extreme assumption on top of the one that John is guilty: that her violent revenge was justified because women who have been battered or raped by their husbands cannot rely on male-dominated courts for justice...

...Masters also reports that Christine Sehn, wife of the surgeon who hooked John Bobbitt's penis back on, has been hounded by women angry that he did so...

...And what went through my mind was, 'He's trying to hit on my girlfriend.' But that was just a thought that ran through my mind...

...Because, as Udovitch puts it, "It confuses something you might want to support metaphorically with something you would not support in actuality...

...Unless you've agitated against the misogynistic shtick of Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay or the current crop of tasteless Hillary 'Clinton jokes, you probably don't have standing to gripe about such Bobbitt jokes...

...If you wish to express support for her, you can call Daniel Wattenberg is an investigative writer for The American Spectator...

...This is the same thing...

...Barbara Walters may ape Patricia Ireland's tacit approval of vigilantism and sadism, but the unreflecting anchorwoman hardly personifies contemporary feminism...

...I asked him to describe it...

...WALTERS: I would not...

...Jarriel presented this as evidence supporting Lorena's rape allegation...

...She just made an embittered enemy...

...In a colloquy between Jarriel, Hugh Downs, and Barbara Walters that followed Jarriel's piece, the info-tainers took sides, without reference to the crucial question of whether individualized, extrajudicial retribution is ever warranted, regardless of the provocation...

...DowNs: It was vengeance of a high-voltage nature...

...It is assumed that he raped her the night she castrated him...

...This was something that came upon her in a moment, in a moment of passion...

...I said, 'Where was it coming from?' And he pointed in a direction ninety degrees away from where the Bobbitts' apartment was...

...sees our world...

...But if so, is it in the interest of women to be thus characterized...

...Many women see it as a woman abused to such a degree that she struck out at the area that was doing her the most harm...

...And that's another story...

...She said she wanted to write about the case, and I said, 'Okay, that's good, that's very ambitious, that'll be difficult to do, what do you want to do?' And she said, 'Well, I'm really interested in how everybody is acting like he's the victim.' I said, `You've got it wrong...

...It just shows how, when you have idiots espousing your philosophy, you are never well off...

...D ibley also told "20/20" that he heard "strange . . . piercing screams every four seconds" from a woman next door on the fateful night...

...He is the victim!— Early on, the incident provoked among some women a fair amount of sharply edged humor, the theme of which was invariably, "Now do you get it...

...I have not seen Dibley's deposition, and so can't corroborate Murphy's account of it...

...He said, `Yeah, I did say that' And the irony there is that [Lorena] told the police twice she never screamed...

...The Virginia chapter of the National Organization for Women has set up a Lorena Bobbitt support line...

...Then, he seemed to argue that if Lorena had only killed John to preempt further abuse, that might have been acceptable...

...None of the neighbors who were closest to it ever heard the screams...

...It was kind of the icing on the cake when someone's hitting on your girlfriend in front of you...

...Lord," Downs began...

...And then," he continues, "they spliced that together with this 'I'd never let him in my apartment or around my girlfriend or anybody.'" But that Dibley quote, says Murphy, "was in response to a question, `How do you feel about him now that he's been charged as a rapist, if they find he's a rapist?' and in response to that, he said, 'I wouldn't want him in my apartment or around my girlfriend.' And they put the two together...

...She said under oath she never screamed...

...Sharia Feminists by Daniel Wattenberg M im Udovitch, the feminist columnist at the Village Voice, told me a story about a young writer who approached her to pitch a story after the first news accounts that Lorena Bobbitt of Manassas, Virginia, who would later claim abuse, had lopped off her sleeping husband's penis...

...Fair enough...

...WALTERS: —between men and women...

...and she said, 'Go back to sleep, it's just people making love,'" according to Murphy...

...MIKE DIBLEY, Maplewood resident: I said to my girlfriend, "That's one person I didn't want in this home, I don't want to be around," just from the three months that I'd known him, his actions—too strange...

...It's like when the rapist is considered really the ideal man, the heroic man, not because he's innocent, but because he's guilty...

...DOWNS: I guess I can't help looking at it that way...

...JARRIEL: I think it points outWALTERS: And I think this is why the piece goes beyond the sensational story...

...And despite his putative conversation with his girlfriend, he says that she no longer remembers anything about waking up that night...

...Here, the he-said-she-said accounts will be sifted and probed in real adversarial criminal proceedings...

...It's like when you see Mike Tyson T-shirts, or William Kennedy Smith groupies, which you saw both of...

...But at some point, around the time we learned the names of the unhappy Manassas couple, the table-turning black humor became feminist dogma...

...And as a matter of fact, when detectives investigating the case asked if he had ever heard anything from the Bobbitts' apartment, he said that he never had at any time...

...The only thing we knew was, Mike Dibley's apartment had a contiguous wall with the Bobbitts...

...El...

...screams...

...JARRIEL: Right...

...Tendentious media accounts will be exposed and mooted in the course of the Bobbitt trials...

...There may be surprises...

...And this is a retaliatory act of great dramatic value, where a woman has returned, retaliated in a way that is equally as violent and dramatic as the violence done unto her...

...Are we witnessing sharia feminism...

...Dibley] said they took it totally out of context," says Murphy...

...I went to find the couple, and their bedroom, which I think he inadvertently thought was the Bobbitt's room or something, is like right next to his bedroom," says Murphy...

...Also, despite the fact that he said that he heard penetrating screams at 4-second intervals for 45 minutes, he concedes he never called the police...

...This was not self—it doesn't seem to—I mean, it couldn't have been self-defense...

...Or simply sadism...

...Correspondent Jarriel introduced Ireland's statement, weirdly, as an opinion on "the deeper meaning of a penis-cutting...

...Murphy took sworn testimony from Dibley on this point, too...

...That feminism would want to have anything to do with this as a good-for-women story doesn't make sense to me...

...Murphy...

...When I asked him to describe what he heard, he said he heard penetrating screams from a woman and heavy breathing from a man, who was breathing like he was thrusting himself inside a woman...

...The only world in which such acts can conceivably have a place is one in which acts of sadism against women are commonplace—and this, I take it, is how Robin Morgan, feminist author and contributing editor to Ms...

...Yeah, there was a time, it was a very minor incident, but [John] was sitting around the pool talking to me and my girlfriend...

...They asked me a question about 'Well, what's John like—is he out here flirting around and stuff?' And I said, `Hey, John's a very nice guy, we've been friends, we get along great...

...He ended it by saying that now he can't even be sure that what he heard was coming from the Bobbitts' apartment...

...DOWNS: You can still be very sensitive to the need to cut down on abuse of women and see this act as different from the act of many women who are abused who may kill their husband...

...Rather a big concession...

...Furthermore, Murphy says, "`20/20' didn't even call me to ask about it, [even though] I think they knew Lorena had said there were no screams...

...WALTERS: You know, it is interesting—and you pointed this out in the earlier part of your piece—the different reactionJARRIEL: Yes...

...Dibley further testified that "his girlfriend woke up because he was thrashing around...

...So, where did the screams and heavy breathing come from, if not from the Bobbitts...

...published an account of the incident in its September-October issue that does not mention that John Bobbitt denies his wife's charge that he raped her...

...Jarriel did not return phone calls, but "20/20" spokesperson Lucy Kraus said, "We were not aware that this guy gave a deposition following our broadcast...

...DOWNS: Never did...

...But the two trials in the Bobbitt case will not be a reprise of Clarence Thomas vs...

...She added, "We stand by our story...

...All ["20/20"] took was 'hitting on my girlfriend,"' says Murphy...

...6 6 hT ere are a lot of women who have gone through this and probably wish they'd had a chance to get their own revenge," Kim Gandy, executive vice president of NOW, told the AP...

...It is assumed that he routinely beat his wife over a period of years...

...WALTERS: If you're a man, you may, and you are...

...Witnesses will be deposed and cross-examined under oathby professional litigators, not by inept politicians fearful of "backlash" or by axe-grinding Senate staffers...

...Although I feel for her in human terms, I don't consider what she did to be a political action," says the Village Voice's Udovitch...

...Murphy paraphrases what Dibley told him under oath: "First off, I did say he was hitting on her, but I prefaced it...

...M aybe the assumptions are right, maybe not...

...Sehn told Masters: "I've heard women say, 'I wish she'd put it down the garbage disposal.' " Pronouncing the mutilation "a critical event in the history of women," Judith Olton Mueller, executive vice president of the Women's Center, a non-profit counseling center in Vienna, Virginia, told the AP, "Violence is done to women continuously and pervasively...

...I think it points out a huge gulf between men and women and communicating about sex that we almost hate to admit...

...Some are not eager to associate themselves with the politicization of a private tragedy (a reluctance shared, incidentally, by Lorena Bobbitt herself...

...An airline employee and resident of Maplewood, Mike Dibley, complained about John flirting with his girlfriend right in front of him...

...But still too male-centric for the "different-voice" feminism of Barbara Walters, who held out, it seems, for a little bit of torture: DOWNS: You know, if in her mind the next abuse would have killed her, and she had killed him instead of doing what she did, you could think in terms of a self-defensive move...

...But Gregory Murphy, John Bobbitt's lawyer, recently deposed Mike Dibley...

...This guy's apartment is on the other side of the building...

...Anita Hill...

...This, apparently, is NOW president Patricia Ireland's view...

...And they're off on their honeymoon right now...

...And I walked to the bathroom or clubhouse, came back out, and I could see him sort of flexing his muscles...

...Under Islamic sharia law, a thief's hand is cut off...

...And men see it as a man being mutilated, I think, in a most awful way a man can imagine...

...It is assumed, at the very least, that he was an irredeemable philandering pig...

...Fascinating, Thank you...

...He signed in with a pseudonym—Jean-Claude Van Damme, an action film star...

...While Olton Mueller reportedly did not condone the act, her thinking illustrates one widely noted feature of the thinking of those who have condoned it: a presumption of John Bobbitt's guilt...