I Cut Off His Penis, review: made-you-look title disguises a documentary of surprising depth

Lorena Bobbitt is the main attraction in ITV1’s sober film about why women decide to carry out ‘penicide’ against their partners

4/5
First and foremost, I admired the cheek of the title I Cut Off His Penis: The Truth Behind the Headlines (ITV1). Because that’s using a headline (“I CUT OFF HIS PENIS!!!”) to make you look, make you stare, while simultaneously scolding you for not looking behind the headline. It’s like shouting at someone and then saying, “Why did you turn round, you idiot?”
Yet given its classic tabloid have-it-both-ways title, I Cut Off His Penis turned out to be a remarkably sane documentary. It did look beyond sensationalist snickering to try and unearth deeper truths about why, when a woman cuts off a man’s penis, it’s such a shocking headline, but when a man dismembers a woman it’s the opening scene of a thrilling new crime drama.
The film centred, inevitably, around an interview with Lorena Bobbitt. Thirty years ago she woke to find her husband John on top of her and so she fought back, cut off his penis, drove off and threw it out of her car window. It’s telling, as the film rightly noted, that only the last two details are widely known: “They talk about what I did but they don’t talk about what he did to me,” she said.
That was the through-line of the whole documentary: yes, it did catalogue the many cases of what it called “penicide” around the world with some glee and no, it wasn’t entirely immune to a little jaunty music and sensationalism of its own (see title). We probably didn’t need to know that in a recent outbreak of penicide in Thailand the phrase “cut dicks for ducks” was coined, to remind women wanting to dispose of a severed penis that their flock would eat anything.
But in the main this was a sober and worthwhile analysis. It asked the right questions and put them to the right people. What makes a woman do such a thing? What does it say about society that we tend to fixate on the sliced member and respond with laughter (at the Bobbitt trial there was, one grizzled hack recalls, “a carnival atmosphere – there were hot dogs”).
What it says, the film concluded, is that people’s obsessions with male body parts stems from a media that is, or was, run by men. So the focus, as it often is with men, is always on the severed parts, rather than what drove women to sever them.
Footnote: lest we forget, John Bobbitt had his penis re-attached and became a porn star.