‘The Butcher of Bega’: a deviant doctor

But this media focus leaves the power to address such heinous acts in the hands of a protected and virtually anonymous elite who by their own admission don’t really know which of their lot is getting up to what out there. It’s really like the protection of Jack the Ripper because he may well have been a demented royal. And clearly not the right tree or only tree to bark up in order to prevent Reeves committing more amputations of women’s genitals.

This is because even though he now has no access to victims as patients since he is not permitted to “practice”, he has still carte blanche to walk among us. This is because we did not raise a loud, horrified and united voice from the outset of the revelation of his acts to sufficiently criminalise and pathologise him. We didn’t demand - until they did - that the authorities should keep him under lock and key. This means that all that has been accomplished to date is that Reeve’s plentiful supply of victims has been truncated.

But what of Reeves’ extraordinary and sadistic appetite for mutilating women’s genitals? People may be compelled from fear to wish it away or to try not to think about and hope it will go away - but such virulent hate can never just go away. For both Reeves, and the people he has horrifed, the “return of the repressed” is inevitable.

By averting our gaze from the tormented Medusa, indeed by beheading and silencing her, her very cursed powers of petrifying horror are depotentiated. But Reeves has bypassed the symbolic head and gone straight for the actual place of feminine power and projected source of his own horror: women’s genitalia.

And now, in the west, fashionably depilated labias are being revealed: they seem to frighten people to such an extent that, increasingly, they are being subjected to cosmetic surgical alteration in order to re-conceal them. What lunatic doublings.

So is our - and by “our” I mean the interdependent and mutually informing relationship of persons/society and media - (mis)management of the Reeves abominations a case of acute and shared anxiety doubling the mirror of reflected atrocity so that the focus is directed away from the actual victims and their anguish? Perhaps this was one horror-show that witch-hunting enthusiasts found too abject, beyond their regular capacity for bloodlust and the general thrill of the hunt.