| Hating the Man, Loving Your Body |
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| Written by Nicholas P. Hawkins | |||||
| Sunday, 01 March 2009 18:36 | |||||
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The eleventh annual “V-Day” (V for vagina) performance of the The Vagina Monologues was ostensibly to support programs to prevent violence against women. But the issue of violence against women was only a small part of the two-hour ordeal and the rest was served only to dilute and confuse the message. This is ironical in that Eve Ensler wrote the play in 1996 to “celebrate the vagina” and stop violence against women.
While the play does irreverently praise the vagina in a way only a product of the women’s liberation movement could, its anthropomorphic treatment of female genitalia left many in bewilderment. The play is an intermingling of vignettes that range from powerful denunciations of violence and rape to whimsical anecdotes about what a vagina would wear and what personality it would have; yet never the twain do meet. What results is a whirlwind of fast-paced rants during which the validity of the play’s antiviolence message is diluted by discussions about the need for hair on a vagina and how to find the clitoris.
In addition to women describing what their vaginas would do and say to the crowd that piled into 105 Dartmouth Hall the Thursday of Winter Carnival, there was an appeal to the women in the audience to “look at their vaginas” and get to know themselves through it. Ms. Ensler’s play suggests that women should self-identify with their genitalia; however, the monologues fail to explain why the vagina hs any more to do with who a woman is than any other part of her anatomy. But, to be fair, the idea that the vagina is the defining feature of womanhood is logically impeccable, but it is just not groundbreaking and it is wholly impertinent to the issue of sexual abuse.
Ms. Ensler’s obsession appears to be not with the end of violence against women, but with the domination of feminism. Each year Ensler adds a new monologue to stay current with the issues faced by women around the world, but largely the play continues to run through the exploitation of these causes. The militant feminism supported by Ensler’s monologues is the real message to be spread. Throughout the play Ms. Ensler extols the virtues of lesbianism, sexual assault by females, prostitution, sadism and masochism, frequent masturbation and transgender lifestyles—a practice with which one could easily confuse gender mutilation.
Sexual abuse and the worldwide effort to prevent it is the only important issue which Ms. Ensler addresses, but it is only the central theme to a noticeably small number of scenes. Those of note were “Say It,” a monologue performed from the perspective of one of the Japanese “comfort women” during World War II and a monologue performed from the perspective of a Bosnian woman who was subjected to “rape camps” during the Bosnian War. Both scenes were very similar in that they recounted the experiences of the women in gruesome detail and brought attention to this years V-Day supported cause: the rape and exploitation of women and children in the African Congo. However, once again the power of these scenes was diluted by Ms. Ensler’s crude and often inappropriate subject matter.
The most offensive of these supposedly light-hearted monologues was one entitled “The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could.” It was given from the perspective of a sixteen year-old girl (thirteen in Ensler’s original play) who hates her “little coochie snorcher” (read: vagina) because of myriad reasons including an over protective mother, a deadbeat father and an earlier sexual assault described in far too much detail.
Then one glorious day she meets a nice twenty-four-year-old lesbian who takes the girl away from her mother, gets her drunk and sexually abuses her further. The girl, however, describes the encounter in positive terms saying of the assailant: “[she] turned my sorry-ass coochie snorcher into a kind of heaven.” The same phenomenon is seen in those suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome.
It should be noted here that in the original script of the scene the young girl acknowledges that it was a rape, but it was a “good rape”. While the V-Day organizers deserve kudos for the alteration to the original, what remains is far from an appropriate scene in a play that claims to be for the prevention of sexual abuse. Just imagine the riotous uproar that would result if it were a twenty-four year-old man and a sixteen year old girl, much less a thirteen year-old.
The outrageous contradictions of ideology emanate throughout this play, whether it be simultaneously denouncing the sexual assault of a girl by a man while applauding the same act by a woman, or deploring militaries that rape and pillage young women while demonstrating—at length—the fine arts of sadism and masochism.
The very idea that the original play made a distinction between a “good rape” and a “bad rape” should have led the faculty at the Center for Women and Gender to determine that the play was inappropriate to perform under the guise of preventing sexual violence.
It is unfortunate when those who sit in positions of power push liberal feminist ideologies ahead of legitimate pro-female initiatives, and it is even more so when they try to package the former as the latter.
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