Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2006/03/03/i_am_pussycat_hear_me_roar.php
Friday, March 3, 2006
“My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal. Which bothers some men…the word itself makes some men uncomfortable: Vagina.”
Maude Lebowski, The Big Lebowski
The Vagina Monologues visited Dartmouth on “ V-Day .” What is V-Day, you ask? Vagina Day. To you rubes who haven’t kept up with the program, Vagina Day has bumped Valentines Day off the holiday circuit—the cognoscenti of the gender and queer studies crowd having found the original festivities to be too ‘romantic’ to long endure. The problem: all those icky, creepy, ying and yang affections between flirtatious boys and girls, between men and women—soon to be mothers and fathers. The indignity of having to rear the snotty-nosed consequences of an orgasm, yikes—men!
To the monologues’ creator, Eve Ensler, the vagina is the teleological fount of the female psyche; the beginning and end; all she wrote. Ensler and her acolytes believe our vaginas not only provide petite pleasure, they seduce and circumscribe us as women, or as sexually charged material beings. They are personified objects; talking vaginas on acid trips.
Armed with good intentions, Ensler, in her effort to unite womankind, confuses pleasure and pain as she rails on looking for that one thing that unites the rape victim, the prostitute, the “transwoman”, and nothin’ but a ho-hum straight girl. It is, she divulges, those petals that long to be disabused of what madam calls “vagina motherf*ckers” or, blandly and precisely, bad-boys (extending the metaphor de jour , penises).
This is the “progressive” world view of Ensler’s tiresome and “bourgeoisie- raunchy” Vagina Monologues, and welcome to it.
Ensler’s view is, to be generous, dialectical; an inheritor of the cultural shizzle of those wack materialists K. Marx and S. Freud. Still, sadly, mental health workers and those not already oohhhing and aahhhing away in the pews may, soberly and fully clad, regard Ensler’s crack method as a bit psycho-schizophrenic. Expressly, while deliriously describing the solitary triumph of the sin of Onan, Ensler’s titillating little-engine-that-could runs off the erotic rails with her misplaced and half-hearted denunciations of genital-mutilation, molestation, and rape—thereby pulling the plug on the campy decadence of the diddle. Sure, they’re great causes, but talk about a buzz-kill. Poor girls were almost there, too.
Thus, for the past six years Dartmouth has hosted The Vagina Monologues in the name of “sexual abuse awareness.” It’s an intellectual stretch-and-pull suitable only to postmodern contortionists. Everyone else: as you were, and don’t try this at home. To be clear, The Vagina Monologues , constrain their political enthusiasms and activities to ending “physical and sexual violence against women and girls” perpetrated by men, while simultaneously endorses same-sex violence committed by passionate women against young girls as an enlightening coming-of-age experience (as yet, no word from Ms. Ensler on man-boy love-trysts).
Of course, it’s a canard. It mixes stories of child abuse with monologues that celebrate the use of the word cunt. It attaches stories of gang rape with monologues that praise lesbian prostitution. It asks thoughtfully “if your vagina could talk, what would it say.” Each makes no more than a mockery of sexually and mortally abused women. Too often, the monologues endorse the same barbarity that they claim to overcome.
So let’s be honest— The Vagina Monologues fit all too snuggly into the soft-porn one-upmanship common to B-movie sexploitation, gangsta-rap, and Madison Avenue marketeering. The female body is reduced to the bells and whistles of Ensler’s innovation: plumbing. Sexual intimacy with men ranges from meaningless inadequacy, to punctual-penetration, to vicious rape. Physical-emotional intimacy is distinguished by nothing more or better than the carnal convulsions of the self-obsessed “orgasms that come in waves; instead of jerks.”
The marketing here is only too clever by half. Re-coining the difficulty of such bromides as work for peace into the self-indulgent cheer of rub for peace, Ensler makes her move for celebrity sainthood—a la Bono, Bob Geldof and, alas, Larry Flint of Hustler Magazine and First Amendment fame—by being a woman with a libidinous and sanctimonious cause. Although, Howard Stern may be the true analogue. That is, Ensler is a puerile Howard sans a serviceable sense of humor.
Supplementing the PC razzle-dazzle, the monologues are staged with the support of a non-profit group aptly named, “V-Day,” with a mission to “stop physical and sexual violence against women and girls.”
Of course, it will surprise no one to know that the only actual relationship praised by the talking-vagina is the same-sex groping of workaday lesbians. To be clear, not the potential emo-spiritual relationship, but simply the orgasmitronic kind.
Call me naïvely Victorian, if you dare, but it’s unsettling that among these monologues, one glorifies lesbian prostitution and another applauds the rape of a teenage girl by a 25 year old woman, while none give even a nod to a physical relationship based on an emotional and spiritual union. Apparently, since Ensler has “discovered” that women can pleasure themselves, in tandem or solo, her men are either turned aside as blundering and useless, or condemned as brutish barbarians at the gate. Her gyno-battle-cry is “reclaim [your] cunts.” It’s gonna be big!
Remarkably, the garish language of the monologues would make even a locker room full of pumped and sweaty bad-boys blush. No surprise here. Successive generations of well meaning feminists and dullards have sent femininity to the guillotine for women’s liberté, egalité and fraternité . Now with every “V-Day,” Ensler turns her dull lemmings into mannequins who, upon encouragement, contemplate turning their vaginas into babbling hand-puppets.
Yet, it doesn’t take a physiologists’ degree to know that by anthropomorphizing the “raw, red fresh layers inside layers” brewing in the “damp clamminess” of “mildew and sour milk” of the vagina into the woman herself, a crime is being committed against the spirituality and being of women and young girls. The monologues not only remove the grace and grandeur of being a woman, they remove the dignity that civilization attaches to being a human-being.
Consider:
The monologues spin a quintessentially feminine fashion of modern times—short skirts—into the militancy of a waving “liberation flag in the women’s army that declare these streets my vagina’s country” which are, Ensler promptly notes, nonetheless not “a legal reason for raping [women].” Legal reason!? As I understand these things, an “army” is assembled for war, and war for violence. Ensler is all over the place; it’s hard to know whose side she’s taking when it comes to the sinister union of violence and sex.
The monologues dictate that women must “be their clitoris.” The monologues berate the beauty of child-birth for “forgetting the vagina…what else could explain our lack of reverence for it?” The monologues ask a six-year-old girl, “if your vagina got dressed up, what would it wear?” Recently relieved of diapers—how about panties, genius.
In the name of liberation and transgression, women—potential mothers—view interviewing a six-year-old about vaginas, both universal and particular, as tantalizing, edifying, and sexy stuff. I figure the dark implications, the edgy perversity, and the allusions to child pornography were somehow lost upon the cackling audience of Collis Commonground at the time. In any case, it should be clear that women (people) don’t need “freedom” from civility. Women and girls—all people—need maturing, depth and responsibility, both physical and spiritual, when navigating the rapid white-waters of Eros and Psyche. They do not need more exploitation and self-aggrandizement by those of our cultural elite, represented by the likes of Ms. Ensler and Mr. Flint and Mr. Stern.
Self control brings us freedom from that which would otherwise claim and control us: desire, peer-dominance, half-witted elite cultural paeans to amorality and the common denominator. Simply strip-mining the palisade that separates civilization from barbarism by buoyantly sexualizing a six-year-old girl serves no moral or civilized purpose.
Essentially, the Monologues remove Eros from the erotic, the Human from humanism, the Feminine from feminism, and leaves us with a bit of porn & ism better suited to the cold sermons of a dogged ideology than the fragile ephemera of human nature.
Queen Victoria had her secret while women today have cunts , or clits , or coochies , twats , nappy dugouts (oh my god!). And we’re led to believe that the spirit of sexuality has progressed; better off today than it was two hundred years ago. Once it was about traditions adjusting, now it’s merely what the market will bear. Hard to know if Eve just felt the need to sing a song of herself, or maybe howl . The anxiety of influence, indeed. Good call.