That's not funny! (Selected Skirmishes)

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.

A painful double standard

I'm dating someone new, and I'm pretty excited about it. Her name is Lorena. She's impetuous, but just a tad moody. Quite an edge on her. I have this little problem when we're together. Call it a fear of intimacy. Oh, maybe it's just me.

I ADMIT TO BEING PERPLEXED BY THE Bobbittry wracking America. I'm concerned, of course, about the lengths to which some women will go in the spirit of penis envy. Yet more amazing still is how uproariously funny all this is to women in general, feminists in particular. These are the grim ideological reapers who ordinarily tolerate not a smirk, grin, or giggle--not to mention a wayward glance. You trying to make a joke, buster? Well, that's contributing to an environment hostile to women!

It appears that Mrs. Bobbitt's veg-o-matic is the sole route to a feminist's sense of humor. If we had sent Leonard Nimoy in search of the Women's Movement funnybone, he would have come back with videotape of Lorena tossing it out the car window. Cokie Roberts, hardly among the militant wing, could barely contain herself when Messrs. Will, Donaldson, and Brinkley squeaked their punditry ever so anxiously on ABC's This Week after the verdict. They squirmed while she doubled over.

If you've never seen a feminist activist howl in delight, just cut off a male organ or two. Slice of life is apparently the one irresistible satirical art form, the feminists' comic Kryptonite.

The standard, off-the-shelf explanation for such mutilation jubilation is that women have been getting their collective hearts ripped out for 500,000 years, give or take an Ice Age. It's about time those bastards got theirs! John Wayne Bobbitt has apparently been hoisted high and laid low to pay for our macho sins, and by his martyrdom sexual justice will be done on earth as it is in...hell.

Mr. Bobbitt is not our lone sacrifice, as an inventive Mrs. Macias made sure. The Los Angeles woman employed a pair of household scissors to surgically remove those parts of her hubby without which he is said to have been castrated. While he slept. (I've heard of sound sleepers, but this guy takes his Z's in a coma.)

Yet the couple have now reconciled and are once again ensconced in blissful wedlock, indicating that even those who have made the supreme sacrifice are willing to concede that angry women with sharp implements have a claim to moral legitimacy. For her part, Mrs. Macias may find her husband much gentler now than he used to be, more...