Plucky Letters to US soldiers in Iraq

My Review of
THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES


This past February my husband, Rudy, and I ventured forth from our exurban middle class neighborhood to see the Illinois State University production of The Vagina Monologues.

I had seen an ad for the show in the local newspaper and decided it was high time we found out what all the hoopla was about. Perhaps this was an opportunity for us to get in touch with our feminine sides and gain a cultural understanding of feminist art and literature. Perhaps I would come away with a new appreciation for my body, mind, and spirit. Perhaps I just wanted to say “vagina” a whole bunch of times without having to earn a medical degree or wear latex gloves.

As for Rudy, perhaps he would get a thrill at seeing nineteen-year-old feminist coeds talking dirty in loud, cheerful voices. (Frankly, I could think of no other reason that a red-blooded American male who spent his formative years listening to Rush Limbaugh would so readily agree to attend.)

Thus did we make our way to the Bone Student Center Ballroom, where the “V-Day” event was being held. We paid for our tickets ($8 each) and had our hands marked with a Magic Marker- “V” for VAGINA!!! We were then allowed to wander around the periphery of the Ballroom and visit tables set up by various campus interest groups seeking to promote their agendas and push their various forms of vagina-related propaganda. I thought of this as the “Vagina Fair,” although no specific title was indicated for the pre-performance set-up.

Everyone who is anyone in the world of vaginas was there, of course. The Rape Crisis Center had a booth. The Women Take Back the Night Club was all over the place. Our local chapter of the National Organization for Women was there, too. (They being the famous NOW, of whom I recently read there are only 150,000 actual dues-paying members. Those NOW babes make a lot of noise for such a small group, don’t they?) Planned Parenthood had a really nice booth with lots of freebies. I couldn’t resist picking up a handful of condoms and yelling, “Hey, look Rudy, YOUR BRAND!”

There were a few questionably vaginal groups getting in on the action. PRIDE, the ISU gay and lesbian organization had a booth. I was very tempted to ask what usefulness an actual vagina might have for homosexuals of either sex, but I couldn’t work up the nerve. I had no fear of the friendly gay-guys manning the booth, but it looked to me like the lesbian on duty could have knocked the snot out of a pesky girly-girl like me with one swipe of her enormous wristwatch.

I noticed another booth called BROTHERS AND SISTERS TOGETHER, which seemed to be all about affirmative action and racial equality. Call me an idiot, but what the heck does the civil rights movement have to do with vaginas, per se? I asked the bored-looking black guy standing there and he told me that vaginas, much like the black man, are “gettin’ dissed all the time.” Oh, really? I had no idea! Seemed to me it was the penis that got most of the bad-mouthing, what with being such a “dick” and all. “Yeah, well, it’s my woman’s thing, that’s what I’m here for,” he told me while looking three feet to the left of my head and clearly wishing I would crawl into a vagina and get out of his face.

I took the hint, grabbed Rudy, and got moving right along to find a seat for the show. After we were seated I noticed that lots of people were showing one another the pretty pink “V-DAY” T-shirts they’d just purchased at a booth on the other side of the ballroom. I asked my neighbor if I could take a look at hers, as I was thinking of maybe getting one for myself. On the back of the shirt in small type were printed about 500 alternate words for vagina. Similes, I suppose you could call them, although I doubt that if I checked “vagina” in my thesaurus I’d find any of the words the V-Day people had printed cutely on those T-shirts.

For a few wildly enticing moments I actually imagined myself sashaying around the house, pretty in pink, with 500 vulgarities printed on the back of my T-shirt. I could see myself wearing it while doing housework: “I have a vagina, hear me roar!” my T-shirt would stoically proclaim while I scrubbed the toilets of the men in my life. It was a brief and idiotic, though provocative, fantasy. Brief because I realized that I could hardly wear such a thing in the presence of my son, especially now that he can read. Idiotic because there is no way I would wear the thing outside the house either. Provocative if only for the shock value of seeing the look of utter revulsion and horror on Rudy’s face when I said I might buy one of those T-shirts.
(T-shirt; $15. Reaction of shocked and disapproving husband; priceless.)

While I was craning around looking for the source of the T-shirts, I noticed there was a whole other “Vagina Fair” taking place on the other side of the ballroom. What caught my eye was a large screen of pink fabric that at first appeared to be a tent of some kind. It was stretched on an oval frame, about 5’x5’, and had a rough vertical opening about a foot long. The opening was embellished with fluttery red fabric sewn on to create a jagged-looking ruffle effect. People would stand behind the screen, stick their heads through the opening, smile real big, and have their pictures taken. I suddenly realized this was the “giant vagina replica” that I’d heard Dr. Laura Schlessinger rant and rave about on her radio show a few years ago.

Based on Dr. Laura’s description, I had assumed the thing must be a massive, anatomically correct paper-mache sculpture of a hideously embarrassing nature. Based on Dr. Laura’s disgusted outrage, I had mentally pictured it to include coiled strands of piano wire pubic hair and other gruesomely realistic touches that perhaps only a mind as warped as my own could formulate sans actual descriptive details. By comparison to my prior mental image, the “Big Vagina” itself isn’t the least bit shocking.

What’s shocking- at least to me- is the notion that self-respecting feminists think having people stick their heads out the thing for a photo op is in any way a homage to womanhood. Were they stoned when they thought that up, or what? Did some erstwhile Betty Friedan Wannabe jump up at a NOW meeting and yell, “HEY, YOU GUYS, I’VE GOT IT! We’ll depict the vagina as a big pink clown-suit-on-a-frame and take pictures of people sticking their heads out of it! THAT will get us women the respect we deserve!”

Alas, before I had a chance to dash over there and stick my arm in up to the shoulder and shout, “HOLD MY LEGS- I’M GOIN’ IN!” the lights went down and the show started. I can tell you in all honesty that I was prepared to love it. I wanted to love it, I wanted to be “wowed,” I wanted to get caught up in the sheer force of pride in my own feminine nature and love of my fellow woman. Instead, I am sorry to report, I was mostly bored out of my mind and couldn’t wait for the thing to be over.

The show opened with a young woman dressed up like an old lady sitting in a rocking chair recounting, in a supposedly humorous manner, a supposedly anguished tale of how she somehow managed to pee her pants during her first quasi-sexual experience in the front seat of a 1939 Studebaker. (Or some such nostalgic vehicle.)

From there the audience was dragged through various other sentimentally rendered reminiscences of everything from lesbian pedophilia (no kidding) to incest and gang rape. Along the way we were treated to various diatribes against men in particular (brothers, boyfriends, husbands and fathers) and men in general (society, government, culture and morality.) One act portrayed a Native American woman who, having been beaten senseless by her boozed-up husband for years, finally got the revenge she desired by cutting off his… braids.

Midway through this seemingly endless parade of pathetic self-described victims, there was a round of prideful shouting of the most common (and I do mean “common”) dysphemisms of the noun “vagina.” There was also a ditsy little number in which women stood around in goofy poses shouting out cute answers to fatuous questions such as, “If your vagina were going out tonight, what would it wear?”
(I was disappointed that the Pants-Peeing-Old-Lady-In-The-Rocking-Chair vagina who opened the show did not quip, “Depends”)

In yet another searing indictment of patriarchal misogyny, we heard the story of an Iraqi girl blown half to bits by an American bomb. Her father, looking down upon her melted face, despises her for being now unmarriageable. My first thought at that point in the program was, “What ethnocentric [simile for vagina] wrote this slander and how DARE she fictionalize such a horrific scene to serve her own propagandist purposes, and where does she get off portraying an Iraqi father as an unfeeling monster while no doubt thinking of herself as enlightened, progressive and compassionate?” My second thought was, “Why can’t this chick recite her lines without spraying the audience with spit?”

I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone, let alone a feminist, could imagine that this parade of victims interspersed with adolescent “vagina comedy” would inspire women to feel “empowered.” There was a sort of bunker mentality at work that was supposed to embolden all the vaginas in the room to declare, “Yeah! I’ve been screwed!” By the same token, all the penises in the audience were expected to hang their heads in collective shame.

It didn’t work for me. I found The Vagina Monologues to be more a gimmicky bid for pity than a poignant expression of solidarity. The entire production seemed to be aimed at convincing us of two things: that a vagina is good, and that you are your vagina. I was reminded of the expression, “Methinks thou doth protesteth too much.” After all, if vaginas (women) are so wonderful, as most of us know them to be, why would anyone need to be convinced in the first place?

Rudy claims to have detested the entire experience. However, he did come up with a catchy jingle he thinks The Vagina Monologue sponsors ought to adopt.
Sung to the tune of the famous Oscar Meyer commercial, it goes:

“My vagina has a first name, its P-U-S-S…”

Well, never mind, you get the idea. My advice is save the $8 and rent a UFC fight video instead. You’ll find it more entertaining with a much lower level of absurdity and bloodily violent histrionics than The Vagina Monologues.

Go figure.