Body Modification: Blood and Knives

Neither Lorena nor John Bobbitt is going to help me in my pro-sex campaign, except by providing examples of the sorts of people I’d like to see on the endangered species list. In fact, these people are on the endangered species list.

Women like Lorena get hurt or killed every day. John obviously had never been warned that abusive guys are asking to have their dicks cut off. It actually happens more rarely than you’d expect. Nobody deserves to have his dick cut off, sure—and nobody deserves a life of spousal rape and battery, either. The whole deal is disgusting. Anybody out there still laughing, gloating or defensive about any of this? You’re just trying to drown out an incessant buzz of cultural pain. It hisses, “These people are all asking for it!” The Bobbitts blew the lid off a vat of soup that’s been on high simmer for…how long? Decades? Better make it centuries.

I glimpsed only one teensy ray of light in the Bobbitt case (and I’m not talking about them sewing John’s penis back on. Why don’t they take as much care with female-to-male transsexuals?). I mean the fact that nationally televised courtroom coverage revealed to everyone watching the news that when you have anal sex, you’re supposed to use lube. Can you think of another instance in which Americans gleaned something so profoundly useful from watching TV?

No, give me consensual body modification any day. If it had been Bobbitt’s own idea, no problem. Lots of my friends have modified themselves physically, usually with a tattoo or piercing, sometimes via cutting and scarification, and some with gender-reassignment surgery. (John Bobbitt clearly wouldn’t have been a candidate for the latter—too testosterone poisoned—even though it happens routinely to little kids who get reassigned from boy to girl when penis accidents like botched circumcisions befall them. Just put ’em in a dress and hope they catch up.) When my friends alter their bodies they do so most often for reasons having to do with art and aesthetics, spirituality or identity. A few—strippers with breast augmentation—have also done so for financial gain.

It’s rather sobering, actually, to reflect that the ladies down at the grange hall in the little town where I grew up probably think my friends, not John or Lorena, are the freaky and unacceptable ones. That abuse and revenge shit—that’s normal.

But my friends who consort with cold steel and inked needles have nothing on French performance artist Orlan. Several years ago she undertook the first of a series of plastic surgeries to change the appearance of her face into a composite figure blended from the features of several women in famous Renaissance paintings. Unlike the creations that usually result when plastic surgeons use the female body as canvas, the point of what she’s doing isn’t so much to look different as to undergo the process.

I saw Orlan when she visited San Francisco to lecture about her project. While she talked about her artistic philosophy, she also showed us videos of the plastic surgeries themselves.

Picture a scene surreal even by San Francisco standards: a hip audience, most of them cooler-than-thou artists, experiencing waves of emotional tumult as we all watched Orlan’s face get cut open and rearranged, right up there on the big screen. It was extremely gory, of course—you didn’t think the secret wiles of the cosmetic surgeons were bloodless, did you? It was also garishly circusy, because Orlan has her doctors dress in strange outfits, reads from her favorite theoretical French psychoanalyst’s philosophy (the simplest gist of which is “The body is only a costume”), and waves stuff like crucifixes and plastic lobsters around. Oh, and don’t forget the camera crew.

Does this sound hard to take seriously? Never underestimate the power of a French conceptual artist. Most of the audience seemed to find her quite gripping, even if they hadn’t yet figured out what she was trying to get at. Besides, there was the spectacle, concurrent with her lecture, of big needles, bloody incisions and the very real physical process of plastic surgery. Most artists stick to red paint, you know, so I guess a lot of us felt a little one-upped.

If Orlan has a sound bite to go with her project, it’s “The body is obsolete.” Hence her willingness to use her own in the service of Art. Fundamentally she is a futurist, getting off on the technology that makes her metamorphoses possible. Besides, she demonstrates an unnerving cross between indifference and distaste for her own flesh and blood. “I wanted to move the bars of the prison a little bit,” she said, and audience members who wanted her to give them a hint that this has had some emotional or psychological impact got no more out of her than, “It amuses me very much to have a new head.” Someone tried another tack and asked whether her project had spiritual meaning to her. In spite of the almost religious faith she has in the philosophical importance of her project, she replied only, “It has been important to do something of which I thought myself incapable.”

I was not unmoved by this not unspiritual statement, even though I wondered why she hadn’t perhaps taken up skydiving; I appreciate a good critique of conventional standards of beauty as much as the next woman, and that’s clearly one of the points Orlan is using the changing costume of her skin to make. (She said it quite confused her plastic surgeons that she didn’t want them to make her look “cute.”) But I had a nagging question: Does this woman have orgasms?

A brave young art student was wondering the same thing. “Could you also say something about your experience of eroticism and pleasure in the body, since you’ve discussed your response to pain?” the student asked. You’d have thought from the huff Orlan flew into that she’d been asked what her grades were in art school. “Oh, I suppose I could tell you all about my private life, and then you could tell me something about yourself, in front of all these people!” she sneered. “I could tell you what the press says about me, that I have a husband who is twenty-four [she’s twenty years older] and that we fuck all the time! I have had many lovers, tall, short, old, young, fat, thin, it doesn’t matter to me!”

Geez, she was acting like Zsa Zsa Gabor talking to the Highway Patrol. It’s not like we hadn’t just seen the inside of her face! I guess we felt a little more intimate with her than she did with us.

Lovers don’t always equal pleasure, Orlan. Tall, short, old, young, fat, thin, they could just be part of an ongoing art project. I left shaking my head and musing, “Understanding someone else’s conceptual art is like trying to describe someone else’s orgasm.” You can only get so far with it.

I’ve never thought much of social norms whose reason for existence is to make people fit in, and I really dislike social norms that exist to prevent us from doing things like exploring our sexuality. Why then were over eighty percent of today’s adult men circumcised shortly after birth?

I’ve been watching videos about routine infant circumcision, you see, and it’s not pretty. It’s a bit like watching an Orlan video, in fact—except Orlan is a grown-up, with a world view. Same blood, though; similar knives; same dull instrument to separate layers of tissue. In Orlan’s case, it was all her idea—that’s the real difference. Oh, yeah, and another little thing—with Orlan they used anesthetic.

Can it really be that we still live in a culture that would rather snip part of an infant’s penis off primarily because when he washes it, he’ll figure out how to masturbate?

This is astonishing. No, insane.

And don’t tell me about smegma and cervical cancer and penile disease. Those were all late-breaking theories to help justify the proliferation of routine circumcision in this country. Until the Victorian era’s dawn sent the country into a tailspin of panic over the deleterious effects of masturbation, Americans, like virtually all our world neighbors, were circumcising a small percentage of males for religious reasons and an even smaller number for reasons of health. Today the medical industry lines its pockets with this most unnecessary of surgeries. In fact, we lose more males to circumcision accidents than to penile cancer—and I don’t just mean the ones who are changed into “females.” I mean babies die of this.

Here’s the other part that’s really upsetting. The foreskin is the most richly enervated part of the penis. It’s the true center of male sexual sensation. When we watched the video, my circumcised partner wailed, “They cut off my clit, didn’t they?”

Well, yeah, honey, sort of. Actually, they skinned it. Like the majority of men his age, my lover’s first sex-related experience involved blood and knives and happened when he was a few days old, strapped to a board, without anesthesia. This is a recovery movement waiting to happen, folks, and frankly, I think it’s overdue. Is it any wonder the Bobbitt case strikes a nerve for men?

Some people—mainly of the ilk who are tempted to lionize Lorena Bobbitt (and don’t get me wrong, I’m surprised she stopped with the bastard’s penis)—cast the phallus as an instrument of abuse, indeed gender warfare. While plenty of gender hostility has been acted out by a stiff dick (and perhaps just as much acted out by a dick that stubbornly won’t get stiff), let’s back off the metaphor for a minute and talk about reality. No crime has ever been committed for which a penis was to blame. Typically it’s the men attached to them who bear that responsibility, clever cries of “Disarm rapists” notwithstanding.

I’m sensitive to this because I myself was, for many years, no friend to penises. Why should I be? In those days I found them mildly scary to look at and to touch, unpleasant to put in my mouth, and all too often insistent about gaining entry to my cunt before I was aroused enough for that to be fun. In fact, I expect I had a few sexual encounters involving penises that were almost as disagreeable as the things Lorena had to put up with on a day-to-day basis. Only once did I ever threaten to cut one off (this involving an incessant obscene phone caller), but when I started to run with women who said nasty, unkind things about dicks, I didn’t argue. I once laughed for days about an exchange I’d overheard between a friend and a drunken youth who was putting the make on her at a party: “I don’t go out with men, dear. I don’t like their plumbing.”

It didn’t occur to me until years later to empathize with that man—to wonder why, if feminists excoriated men for being insufficiently respectful of and devoted to female plumbing, it was perfectly okay for women to trash tender male bits. (Yes, I know, in a misogynistic and phallocentric culture it can feel intensely liberating to make fun of a penis—that’s how I reacted at the time—but I’m convinced now there was nothing remotely revolutionary about the incident; it was a petty knee-jerk cruelty that didn’t make the slightest dent in patriarchy, and women are going to have to learn to stop congratulating themselves on games of charades.)

The fact is, the penis is the part of most men that’s invested with the juju of sexual desire. It craves sexual touch, stirs and twitches to remind him that he’s alive and horny, and acts as a barometer of love or desire, fear or resentment. Partners expect him to wield it like some sort of miraculous living dildo, make it responsible for their orgasmic pleasure, and often don’t bother to learn how best to pleasure it. Beneath male braggadocio, the penis can be a hurt little creature indeed. The very culture that teaches a male that his dick is sign and signifier of his manhood is also so sex-negative and phallus-phobic that it inflicts an excruciating sexual injury on him when he’s only a few days old.

When my lover is sad, scared or very tired, he grabs his penis and holds it as if to keep it safe, to comfort himself that it is still there. This gesture, reflexive and usually unconscious on his part, is as old as he is. I imagine that the first time he did it, the bandages from his circumcision had just come off. It makes me want to cry.

Occasionally I argue with women about circumcision. Many of these women say they don’t find uncircumcised penises attractive, or that they want their sons to look like their fathers. I point out that if circumcision weren’t routine and near-universal, intact men would look normal, would be seen as erotically attractive, and sons would look like fathers. Furthermore, I’d encourage all current and prospective parents to value the son who looks like himself (and, naturally, the daughter who looks like herself); the notion that kids are little dolls that are supposed to match your collection is quite repugnant to this grown-up who used to be a one-of-a-kind child.

Then there are the women who say they worry about leaving a boy child intact because they’d have to teach him to clean himself.

Really, if I ran the bureau that gave out Okay, You May Have A Child licenses, those prospective moms would get screened right out. I’m not even certain I’d want to okay them to have a cat.

Friends, if in the future you have any kids, leave your son intact. If you can’t figure out how to teach him to wash, I’m sure the doctor will help. If the kid wants to go cutting his foreskin off later, it’s his art project.

I could go on and on about that, but I’m afraid you’re crossing your legs uncomfortably already. Let me take just one more poke at this steaming pile.

In a Minnesota library an employee pinned a cartoon from the New Yorker to his cubicle wall. It showed two guys at a lunch counter, one saying to the other, “What’s the big deal? I lopped off my own damn penis years ago.” Get this: The library employee was ordered to remove the cartoon because having it on his wall constituted sexual harassment.

Why? Because it referred to penis removal?

No, because it referred to the penis, period.

Now, this is the other side of the coin: the motivation for guerrilla theatre weenie roasts, the sentiment that turned poor loser Lorena into Thelma and Louise’s knife-totin’ little sister. Someone in that library thinks penises per se equal sexual harassment. Maybe that person came to her or his conclusions in much the same way as Lorena Bobbitt’s subconscious did. Some folks just have ba-a-a-ad associations with penises.

This shit, ladies and gentlemen, is deep.

What the Bobbitt case offers us is similar to the spectacle of Orlan: a chance to look into the body. In Orlan’s case, it’s literal. There are very few images that can’t be looked at, she says: the opening of the body, death, great suffering, certain kinds of pornography. She’s right. The body we peer into, disgusted and perhaps sort of fascinated, in the Bobbitt case is not John’s physical body—it’s our social body of gender suspicion, cruelty, wrongdoing and hatred, and it’s fucking putrid.

When the Bible popularized “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” no prophets expected the Bobbitts to come along, but Lorena’s act sprang directly from her devout, traditionally feminine upbringing, its church-sanctioned helplessness waiting to run amok. My dad used to call this sort of thing “an accident waiting to happen.” We have the opportunity as men and women right now to witness this sad, sick circus act, more media-driven than Orlan’s, and acknowledge that our gender roles put us in danger of deep cuts when, like John and Lorena, we mindlessly accept them, live them out.

We have a chance to reject crimes against women and against men; we have a chance to demand that the norm change to something less oppositional, more respectful, and make sure our own lives reflect the change now. If we don’t, we’ll keep sowing the seeds, generation after generation, of enmity between men and women—as surely as we keep taking it out on our little boys’ dicks and our little girls’ self-esteem.

Sure, they sewed John’s penis back on. Being a cross between a sideshow attraction and a Frankensteined porn star probably suits him. But cuts this deep don’t heal by themselves. More accidents are happening every day.