Dear Lorena Bobbitt

In dismembering your husband, you forced your adopted country to re-examine its prudishness about sex. At last, Americans no longer talk of sexual appendages, members, Wally, Willy, Alastair, King Gustav V or Mr Belvedere. They now call a penis a penis.

You also provided the reading and viewing public with a great selection of memorable headlines: A Night to Dismember, A Slice of Wife, Hanging by a Thread, The Sad Saga of a Wife's Attempt to Free Willy.

You have given cartoonists a joke for all seasons: Thanksgiving at the Bobbitts' showed you, carving knife in hand, ready to assault the turkey. The male guests were, of course, under the table.

You have enabled the lesbian comic Lea Delaria to be published outside her circle and beyond the gay journal Out There. We now know her latest: 'It's not that I don't like penises. I just don't like them on men.'

As a professional manicurist, you have surely shown you are capable of making a clean cut with more than a pair of scissors.

And you have given the Virginia police an unchallenged reputation for being able to find a penis-head in a hedgerow, something that will be noted by anyone asking the police to find their stolen car. And you assured the two clever microsurgeons, Dr James Sehn and Dr David Berman, who reattached your husband's penis during a nine-and-a-half-hour operation, that they have a place in the history books rather than a quiet life of suburban anonymity.

However, enough is enough. The infamous act took place on the night of 23 June. It is now January, and people are still talking, joking and wincing about it. Now you're facing assault charges in court, we will have to hear the sordid story all over again. Then there will be the divorce. And after that, no doubt, television docudramas of every man's nightmare and many women's occasional fantasy.

It is not as though you have a monopoly on turning Casanovas into 'sexually challenged' males. Women have been doing it in Thailand for years. (I don't know about your native country, Venezuela). Although some American feminists claim that your act has focused attention on marital rape for the first time in any meangingful way, and is therefore worthy of prolonged publicity, the fact is that since 1975 all 50 states have passed laws against marital rape.

So kindly spare us yet another rerun of your and your husband's ordeal and do the decent, patriotic thing, which is to admit that you assaulted his penis with a knife, plead temporary madness, anger, rejection, victim-of-male-supremacy or whatever you felt like at that moment. It's time to concede that there is a world out there beyond the male distal end. I mean penis.

(Photograph omitted)