The Woman Who Liked To Make Vaginas Happy said, "I love vaginas. I love women. I don't see them as separate things." With this unfortunate observation I wondered how an audience so enraptured with The Vagina Monologues as Duke's--and apparently the rest of the country was--could possibly be receiving this "art" with a discriminating intellect.
For those who missed the play by Eve Ensler (who was not credited in the program of Duke's production) and were wondering what the controversy was all about, ask someone else--I honestly can't tell you. As a work of art, I found the play to have little merit (although I did note that such talents as Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei had participated in other productions), and as a political statement--well, it didn't really offer any new thoughts. We already have talked about masturbation, vagina-viewing, marital rape, wartime and peacetime atrocities, sexual oppression, the anatomical uniqueness of the clitoris and the fact that a woman's wearing a miniskirt does not justify rape. I know that these topics are never closed for discussion--we need to revisit them--but we need to discuss them in ways that offer new perspective.
Perhaps Ensler's intention was merely to get people talking, which, somehow, she has managed to do, but the topic of conversation seems to be about how liberating it is to say the word "vagina" 128 times. Ensler asserts that, "No one had ever talked about this before." Anyone who believes that has been under a rock for the past 15 years.
The vaginal fixation puzzles me. To begin with, it's the wrong body part to focus on. I keep being told that my womanhood is contained in my vagina, but if you want to know what I consider so miraculous about female anatomy, keep traveling up the birth canal. I have a womb. My body can fully nurture another life for nine months. (Certainly, I can nurture growth for the years after birth but not because I'm a woman.) If the synecdochephiles must pick a part of my body to represent my gender, let it be my uterus. My vagina is an orifice; it's a tunnel. What makes my body so special is my womb.
The play intently defies the notion that a woman needs a man for completion, yet, curiously, it revolves around a piece of anatomy that is essentially a hole. Vaginas are functionally designed to be filled--with menses, a penis or a baby.
Anyway, I don't see the need for women to identify themselves with a piece of anatomy. We criticize men for reducing us to body parts. If a man said he looked at a woman and saw nothing but a "cunt," we'd be outraged. Emulating the bad habits of some men can't be progress. Being a woman is far more complex than just being a piece of anatomy. It's hormonal, neurological, emotional, familial, cultural. I think what I like most about being a woman is that femininity defies definition--it's a mystery.
Let me frame it another way. When we reduce a woman to a body part, what are we saying to survivors of cancer or to a woman born without a uterus? Is a woman who has had a hysterectomy or a vaginectomy any less a woman? What would The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy say to a woman who didn't have a vagina? The two can't be separated, according to her. I guess the woman was autoclaved and destroyed along with her vagina and the rest of the biohazardous waste from the pathology lab.
The recent expression of so-called feminist thought on this campus is not liberating. It is inhibiting. What does asking what my vagina would wear or say have to do with stopping rape and abuse? Contrary to the belief of a representative of the Durham Crisis Response Center, who spoke before the Duke production, American men are not terrorizing American women. Someone please tell me how we're going to "end violence against women by 2005," as it urges in the play's program. We can start with a realistic goal. For example: stop blaming men for the things we don't like about our society. How are flyers like the ones in the bathrooms in Perkins Library, depicting a happy newlywed couple, smiling bridesmaids in the background, above the caption, "Not an excuse for rape," supposed to foster a healthier, more peaceful society?
The Vagina Monologues was a step backward in the progress of the women's movement. The dramatic vignettes merely scratched the surface of bigger, darker, more interesting issues, overshadowed by "comedic" pieces that elicited the cheap laugh and sixth-grade giddiness of saying "vagina" out loud. Its shock value is only in that so many people thought this production had something relevant to say. Women have not freed themselves nearly as much as I had hoped.
Emily Streyer Carlisle is a master's student in the Department of Economics and the health policy certificate program.
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