Dear Jodi, Erik, Katha, Marjorie,
Like Erik, I expected more of TheVagina Monologues. That one can write world-class monologues about vaginas is made clear by the talking vaginas who populate Diderot’s wise and funny classic, Les Bijoux Indiscrets. That’s more along the lines of what I was looking for.
Hi, Katha. Wow, you and I are just miles apart on the questions of this play’s merits. I think it has none. I should probably go through some of my objections.
Ensler assumes, as in the Bosnian rape monologue (“My Vagina Was My Village”), that it’s somehow more “poetic” to drop articles and run words together: “My vagina was green, water soft pink fields, cow mooing sun resting sweet boyfriend touching lightly with soft piece of blond straw.” (All I can say is, “Send it to Zoom!”) As for the rape itself and its psychological aftermath, a 9-year-old boy or a 70-year-old man could have written an account just as convincing. (“There were sticks, and the end of a broom.”) Ensler gives us nothing outside of what a person of average intellect and imagination would think a rape was.
We know Ensler visited Bosnian rape victims. Did she not listen to them? Or is she empathy-deaf? To compare this to a serious poem about rape–like “Deceptions,” by Philip Larkin, hardly one of the great feminine empaths of our time–is to see that good writing is about hard work rather than I-was-there-I-looked-into-these-women’s-eyes p.c. bona fides. Having looked without seeing anything, Ensler is talking without saying anything.
Or that poem about being in a room when a baby was born–which has nothing about a baby being born. The poem is all about the vagina–a really demented perspective, for anyone who has ever watched a delivery. And it happens to be the perspective of every single other person in the play about every single subject. Take “Bob,” the guy who picks a woman and stares at her vagina for an hour without doing anything besides making grunting and groaning noises. “He stayed looking for almost an hour,” the narrator says. “I began to get wet and turned on.” (Most women I know would say, “Bob … You’re giving me the creeps.”)
The idiom of this play is agitprop, if we can use that word to embrace a rare ability to be boring and dishonest at the same time. Makers of products “hate to see a woman having pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure.” (Really? That goes against every principle of marketing I’ve ever heard.) Or when Ensler describes the “women we call ‘homeless people’ so we can categorize and forget them.” (Em, no … they’re actually called homeless people because people like Ensler objected to our calling them “bums.”)
I simply cannot conceive of how any person could derive any nonpolitical enjoyment from of this play. (On my likening TheVagina Monologues to the Turner Diaries, which both Katha and Jodi deplored: I did not realize the latter was about neo-Nazis and haven’t read it. I was comparing not the works but the target audiences’ willingness to shed their literary discrimination in order to bask in ideology. With that proviso, I still like the metaphor.)
Now, whether I’d feel differently about The Vagina Monologues if I were able to watch Glenn Close get thousands of women to chant “cunt” in unison is another question. I suspect not. Having lived with groups of women, I can’t agree with Jodi that women seldom get to make “bawdy jokes about their anatomy.” The cunt-chanting sounds less like what women–even “empowered” women–would do naturally than like what a gang of sex-starved Frat Boys would do at 2 a.m. when kegs ran dry.
One of the tragedies of feminism is that it’s so often based not on a critique of gender roles but on a critique of a parody of gender roles. “Male” gets defined as anything a woman wouldn’t do naturally. The more extreme the male behavior–the more reprehensible it is to decent men–the more likely it is to get recast as a feminist categorical imperative.
Gloria Steinem’s introduction strikes me as a pitiable example of this kind of feminism. She complains that the (vaginal-looking) heart symbol lost its original meaning and “was reduced from power to romance by centuries of male dominance.” How? By a dictate from the Central Semiotic Committee of an all-male country club? And what kind of sad person prefers power to romance?
At some point in any discussion of feminism, a sauce-for-the-goose-and-gander question arises. If feminism isn’t just a) vindictiveness or b) the attempt to replace one unjust order by another, then it must be heading toward a set of gender-neutral rules about what is polite to say and what is not. In this light, Ensler is actually hiding behind a pre-feminist idea that what ladies do in their spare time is ultimately of little concern. What would you think of thousands of men who crowded an arena to come up with names for their penises? You’d think they were a bunch of aggressive perverts. What would you think of a man who wrote that he asked a 6-year-old boy how his penis smelled? You wouldn’t think anything–you’d investigate him for child pornography.
In one of the testimonial letters about V-Day, “Eman,” a UC-Santa Cruz student writes, “One of our cast members noticed one of our flyers that had been defaced (the clitoris one). The word ‘clitoris’ had been scratched out and a penis had been drawn in, and not just any penis, but a penis ejaculating.” So? I think this is gross and aggressive, but there’s no reason on earth that a person producing The Vagina Chronicles should consider it anything more than healthy penis-loving exuberance.
Having brought up Glenn Close, I don’t want to sign off before saying that the use of celebrities to perform The Vagina Monologues seems integral, not incidental, to its message. I’m not up on all the different schools of feminism, but the feminism that I read about tends to be more about class exclusion than about gender. It’s the upper-middle-class, bien-pensant, big-fish-in-a-small pond network. (It was this, Katha, rather than prudery, that I was getting at with the WCTU crack, although we could discuss the prudery some other time.) The point of this kind of sex talk–particularly in a time of class confusion–is that it throws up barriers of delicacy that the tacky middle class is unwilling to cross. So you can create the ideal world: No one here but us “intellectuals”!
Best,
Chris.
P.S. Jodi, I’m almost certain Portnoy jerked off into liver, not liverwurst. How do you jerk off into a liverwurst?
