As a civilization, we're kinda obsessed with penises. Japan has penis appreciation festivals and here in the U.S., penis crowns, straws, balloons and cakes are prerequisites at bachelorette parties. Golly gosh, every meat laden goodie from BBQ fare to ballpark munchies are shaped like the organ of pleasure; throughout history, penises have represented dominance in various forms of art. Even buildings amp up urbanscapes with penis-like structures; in short, it's a phallus's world, not a man's.
So, when it was reported today that Wu Tang associated rapper Andre "Christ Bearer" Johnson chopped off his own penis and jumped out a window, social media exploded with jokes, fear, frenzy and general horror.
"Now #AndreJohnson 'has nothing to fuck with.' #WuTang" remarked one user.
Ouch! Even us ladies are squeezing our thighs together in horror. What what what compels a man to do something so heinous to himself?!
But here's the (hopefully) good news: whatever johnsonless Johnson (sorry!) is "going through" will hopefully pass, but his member can potentially be reattached to his body.
Back in 1993, young Lorena Bobbitt was really done with her asshole husband's abusive ways. Things escalated one night—she cried rape, he claimed drunken misunderstanding—and Lorena slashed off John's penis in anger. Even though she threw it in a nearby field and it had to be recovered by police, surgeons successfully reunited John's schlang with his body. The surgery took close to ten hours and the recovery was close to a year, but John has come a long way since. Not only has he starred in pornos—one cleverly dubbed John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut—but John brags that he's banged 70 women since the bloody incident.
It's totally possible that Johnson will get things, ahem, re-situated, but why'd he do it in the first place? We can't really speculate until more information trickles out into the social straosphere, but Lorena's reasoning might provide some insight. She indicated that frequent abuse and John's "selfishness" in sex (coupled with her chronic depression, mind you) drove her to chop-chop down south on her man.
Perhaps Lorena noted the phallus-soaked dominance in her life as well as the world around her, both physically and metaphysically. Maybe she wanted to even out the playing field...even if it was just in one small way? But ff that's the case—what does it say when a man does castrates himself? While Freud had a theory—the ever-cited Oedipal complex—that young boys fear their fathers' penises because of their impressive superiority. Their fledgling penises simply can't measure up, and they fear someone will take away what little they have (so far) to offer the world. And, thus, little boys begin to fear that someone will castrate them. Wow.
Castrating yourself is another story, however. Going off Freud and the Bobbits, it's clear that the penis means something far more than a sex organ: it possesses a unique power. Eliminating said power, willingly, is puzzling. There's definitely a piece missing in Johnson's dick-cutting puzzle. Friends say that he didn't do drugs, but this may be a sign of a bigger issue at play. Although he only jumped two stories, rumors suggest he may have been attempting suicide.
The simultaneous annihilation of sexual prowess and life itself is baffling to most. And while we can't say what was going through his mind, he's not the first dick destroyer in history. Clearly, there's something uniting them all in their self-destruction and genital fixation—we'll have to wait this one out and see what he's got to say.
Image: OMG, don't they look like . . . Courtesy of, Wikimedia
