Inhumanity Costs Those Who Indulge

Tell me if you think this is funny. It happened three years ago.

A Nigeria-born woman comes before an American judge, asking that she and her two daughters not be sent back to Africa. The woman is desperate to spare her girls an ordeal she herself suffered as a child. In Nigeria, as in some other nations of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, there is a custom of female circumcision. That is, they cut off the clitoris with a razor.

I’ll bet that while you can think of a great many words to describe that practice, “funny” doesn’t make the list. You reflect on what those girls and women go through and you can only cringe.

But, how to reconcile our empathy for their suffering with something that happened last week on “Vibe,” the late-night talk show. The host, Sinbad, mentioned a man who’d had his penis cut off. Scattered women in the audience laughed and applauded.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the incident in question and know that it turned out that the man had actually mutilated himself. Perhaps you think that’s a mitigating factor.

But the point here is that the women in the audience started laughing before they knew anything about the circumstances, other than that a man had lost his penis. Evidently, that was enough.

Their laughter harkened back to the most famous sexual maiming in recent history. Meaning, of course, the night in 1993 that Lorena Bobbitt took a knife to her abusive husband John. Some women laughed at that, too. They saw it as an act of empowerment - vengeful womanhood striking a decisive blow at the center of male prerogative and pride.

Granted, men also laughed, but it was a queasy, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God laugh. A nervous, how-well-do-I-really-know-this-woman laugh.

Me, I didn’t see what was so funny. Still don’t.

This is not about male-bashing, an “issue” invented by men who, as far as I’m concerned, had way too much time on their hands. Women can crack till dawn on the foibles and foolishness of men, can loudly excoriate male oppression and insensitivity, and never hear a peep of protest from me.

But the response of some women to the violent emasculation of men goes beyond that, crosses a line none of us should wish to see transgressed. The issue has less to do with bashing men than with treating them as if they were something less than human. As if their suffering did not deserve our empathy.

It is one of the oldest tricks of war propagandists: Paint your enemy as a broad caricature of monstrous inhumanity against whom even the cruelest measures are somehow justified. And make no mistake, men and women have been at war these last decades.

Not the genteel “battle of the sexes” of generations past, but all-out combat over issues of sexual harassment, glass ceilings, the feminization of poverty, date rape and more. I accept the need for the struggle. I even accept that some women might look at the maiming of an abusive man and offer reasons such a drastic action is defensible.

But to laugh about it? That I don’t accept at all. It’s as if the man were not real at all, but only an abstract figure representing bad men everywhere, and his pain not real pain, but only a point emphatically made.

Heaven help us - heaven help them - if any women are truly that angry and cruel.

I think it’s worth noting that Lorena Bobbitt was back in trouble a few days ago, accused of assaulting her mother. According to at least one report, it wasn’t the first time. Suddenly, Bobbitt looks less like womanly righteousness personified than just a person with a short fuse and a tendency to lash out in violence. Which is, perhaps, all she ever was.

If she serves any purpose at all, beyond her own unseemly circumstances, perhaps it is to draw women back from the edge, help them understand that they diminish themselves when they laugh at violence and pain.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? To deny the humanity of another, you must first lose a little of your own.

xxxx