The vagina Monologues: a guide for the clueless non feminist (i. e., people like me)

Normally, I'd be doing a long training walk as the weather is beautiful. But I have a 24 hour walk coming up in two weeks, so it is time to cut back and taper (only 5 miles today; perhaps 14-15 more tomorrow). I've gone quite a few miles (by my standards) this year, have done a couple of 100 mile walks, and have had several weeks of either back to back 20 mile walks, or a 50K race without easy weeks. So it is time to taper.
Hence, I am writing in my blog this morning. I've decided to venture into unknown territory for me.
I teach at a small university. What I noticed is that sometime during winter, I start seeing advertisements (including posterboards and stuff written in chalk on the sidewalks) about something called the Vagina Monologues. At first, I thought it was a fraternity prank of some kind. Later, mostly through my wife, I came to find out that the Vagina Monologues was some sort of women's play.

She was involved in setting up mini-productions at various women's UU camps (church camps) and told me it was something to do with women "getting in touch with their vaginas" or something to that effect; I didn't get it. I kind of rolled my eyes and thought "here we go again; it is one of those 'we were oppressed for years by those horrible misogynist men and were ashamed of our vaginas; now we are comfortable with them and want to say it LOUD" sort of thing. So, it became something we just didn't discuss.

Eventually, she was asked to try out for a part in a local production and ended up winning the part. For those familiar with the current edition of the play, she played the part of the "down there" woman; basically, while on a date in her younger years, she had an unexpected vaginal discharge while engaging in petting in a guys car. She was embarrassed by it and hurt by the guy's reaction; so she more or less shut down sexually. Though this part was written for a city woman, she played it as a southern woman. I learned this monologue rather well as Barbara constantly practiced her lines with me. The (poor) photo is of her after the play; in lieu of flowers I gave her that green stuffed frog.

There were many other segments; basically this was a multi act play where either one woman, or there was once scene with 2 or 3 women (I forget) and they talk about various vagina related topics. One of the monologues consisted of a young woman wearing black clothing that was designed to be sexually provocative. She, if I remember correctly, was a lesbian prostitute. What she did was to roll around on the floor and imitate various types of orgasims, much to the delight of most of the crowd.

The play was written as a one woman play by Eve Ensler in 1996 and has evolved into its current form (where local groups do it a bit differently). Currently there is a V-day movement which claims to be working against things that are abusive to women (standard sexual assault, genital mutilation, women's rights, etc.)

The play has sparked some interesting reactions, both positive and negative. Personally, I don't see it as harmful; I see it as some sort of a female bonding experience: a "NFL game for female intellectuals" sort of thing. Yeah, those involved probably take themselves way too seriously; it appears that they think it is some sort of achievement that they can say the word VAGINA!!!!

Well, congratulations ladies. You arrived at the same place that my daughter did when she was a year and a half years old! Once, while I was changing her, she pointed and said "that's my vagina." I responded: "yes, you are right honey. Very good!"

To read more about it I suggest starting here:

http://www.dazereader.com/vaginamonologues.htm

This is the official "V-day" page:

http://www.vday.org/main.html

Part of an interview with the playwright: (see the link for the whole interview)

http://www.newmassmedia.com/art.phtml?code=wes&db=art_fan&ref=15560

What's So Scary about the Word Vagina ?"
An interview with playwright Eve Ensler.
By Christopher Arnott Published 04/12/01

When Eve Ensler began performing The Vagina Monologues in 1996 at the intimate Off Off Broadway spot HERE, she was already an established playwright who'd used progressive small-theater techniques to create intimate, topical dramas about refugees from Bosnia, women in the American prison system and nuclear disarmament. She'd worked with major stars, gotten glowing reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere, and was receiving regular workshops and productions. But it was her unassuming and open-minded series of short monologues about how various women view their vaginas that made Ensler not just an internationally recognized playwright/performer but the lightning rod of one of the most successful anti-violence social movements in years.
The show doesn't shy away from outrageous humor and strays into some familiar female stereotypes, but it is also refreshingly complex and realistic and openly confrontational. It's that rare theatrical experience that can attract and hold the attention of a vast audience without cheapening, overplaying or sensationalizing its subject matter.
When Ensler left the New York production in order to take the piece on the road and pursue future projects, The Vagina Monologue's New York producers replaced her with a rotating cast of celebrities, a move that greatly expanded the show's notoriety. By then, the monologues had already been used as the centerpiece for anti-domestic violence fundraising. Annual events, held on Feb. 14, led to a "V-Day" movement centered on community performances of The Vagina Monologues. A V-Day fund, drawing from those benefits as well as a percentage of the receipts from The Vagina Monologues' book sales and commercial productions, was established in 1998 to support "groups that work to end rape, battery, incest and genital mutilation."
[...]
The interview starts and continues:
I think that The Vagina Monologues is an inherently political piece, and I think that because of V-Day and because the piece really spurred this social movement--which it is; V-Day is a huge global movement right now--I think that's why it's had this sort of impact. I also think that women really need to be talking and thinking about their vaginas and their bodies, and empowering themselves and finding their voices, and not being violated anymore. There is a time for certain things, and it is crucial that this movement to end violence against women happens right now. Who knows why this time? But it's time.

Q: Have there been any other interesting reactions to the show?

I feel for the most part that, whether it's the creation of beautiful vaginal products, or art, or books or photographs or just things people send me, saying they were spurred by me or just thinking it, I just think it's fabulous. I go to towns and people invite me to their homes, and they make me vagina salads. It's like this vagina world--I had no idea it existed. I don't know how much existed before, and how much has come since, but it's so fantastic. I feel so honored and so privileged to know about everything, and to be inside all of this.

Q: How do you not like the show to be represented [in a visual context]?

That's a good question. There's been a real discussion through the whole process of visuals, and I have really been not very strong for showing literal vaginas. Because I feel like the piece allows women to go into their vagina and have an idea of what it looks like for themselves. Once you put a vagina there, it's a defined thing, and your imagination then becomes stifled in a way. And I think images which are suggestive or images which are provocative or images which are sensual or images which are beautiful, those are the kind of images which are right for this piece. I think graphic, specific, literal vaginas--I don't know, I just don't think it works with this. You know, in the same way that I made this decision to make a simple black dress and not something really provocative. The piece isn't about the objectification. It's about getting reattached and realigned with one's vagina.

"Getting reattached and realigned with one's vagina"? Probably best not to comment.

Finally, come commentary from Camille Paglia (from Salon Magazine; she was recounting the recent death of the Harvard Scholar Emily Vermeule:

http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/02/28/bush/index2.html

I was saddened to read of the recent death at age 72 of Emily Vermeule, the distinguished professor of classical philology and archaeology at Harvard University who represented the rigorous standards of scholarship that have been abandoned by the trendy humanities academics who came after her, not only at Harvard but elsewhere in the elite schools. With her first-rate work in the Bronze Age, notably in Mycenaean culture, Vermeule represented a view of learning that is grounded in the analysis of artifacts, that knows how to reason from ambiguous evidence and that is genuinely historicist (unlike the slick, ideological style that calls itself "New Historicism").
Vermeule was among the stellar woman academics of the old school whom I've always found profoundly inspiring (and whose portraits, dating from before and after World War I, still hang in the steadily declining Seven Sisters colleges). Vermeule held herself to the highest standards created by great male scholars of the past; she did not advance by genuflecting before Michel Foucault or by spouting the simplistic social constructionist dogma that has made academic feminism such a morass of ignorance, fakery, gimmickry and bullying careerism.
That feminism is not yet out of the woods, despite the triumph in the 1990s of the pro-sex wing to which I belong, is shown by the garish visibility of Eve Ensler and her "Vagina Monologues," which have apparently spawned copycat cells on many campuses. (The students and faculty at my urban arts college are far too busy and sensible for this kind of thing.) With her obsession with male evil and her claimed history of physical abuse and mental breakdowns, Ensler is the new Andrea Dworkin, minus Medusan hair and rumpled farm overalls. Wasn't one Dworkin quite enough?
The perversion of feminism that Ensler represents -- turning Valentine's Day, the one holiday celebrating romantic harmony between the sexes, into a grisly memento mori of violence against women -- has been well demonstrated by the ever-alert Christina Hoff Sommers, who gave early warning in her Feb. 11 article in the Wall Street Journal last year (as well as in her campus lectures, media appearances and an article in the Feb. 8 USA Today). That the psychological poison of Ensler's archaic creed of victimization is being spread to impressionable women students is positively criminal.
The buffoonish hooting and hollering incited by Ensler's supposedly naughty play is really the hysterical desperation of aging women who have never come to terms with the cruel realities of nature and who cannot face the humiliating fact that, despite their accomplishments, they will always be culturally swept away by the young and beautiful. That in the year 2001 the group chanting of crude four-letter words for female genitalia is viewed as some sort of radical liberation implies that the real issue in the "Vagina Monologues" isn't male oppression but bourgeois repression -- the malady of the dainty, decorous professional class that was created in the first century after the Industrial Revolution.
Today's upper-middle-class Western women, with their efficient, schematized lives, are so removed from elemental mysteries that they are naively susceptible to feverish charlatans and cultists like Ensler, who encourages the delusion that they are in full control of their reproductive system and that everything negative or ambivalent about it has been imposed by the prejudice of misogynous males. I wrote the controversial first chapter of "Sexual Personae," which dwells on the horror and brutality of natural cycle, as an attack upon this sentimental complacency. (Probably because of its disturbing material, that chapter, called "Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art," has gone on to have a life of its own, republished as a bestselling paperback in England and then translated into similar small-format European editions.)