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Looking Good, The Adonis Complex, and The Vagina Monologues

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from: Jodi Kantor

More Pep Rally Than Play

Posted Monday, Feb. 12, 2001, at 4:23 PM ET

Chris, Erik,

I'm going to save men for later, if you don't mind. I just saw a performance of The Vagina Monologues, and I want to discuss it while my ears are still ringing from all the moaning and chanting.

Do you remember Gloria Steinem's 1978 essay, "If Men Could Menstruate"? Steinem imagined that men wouldn't be shy or embarrassed about their reproductive hydraulics. "Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much," Steinem suggested. Feminine hygiene products would include "John Wayne Tampons, Muhammad Ali's Rope-a-dope Pads, Joe Namath Jock Shields--'For Those Light Bachelor Days.' "

On Saturday night I saw Steinem, along with Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, Calista Flockhart, Glenn Close, and dozens of other actresses, perform The Vagina Monologues in front of 18,000 people at Madison Square Garden. You may have found the book insultingly modest, but this event sure wasn't: It lasted several hours, included elaborate costumes and musical interludes, and generally felt like equal parts workshop, Academy Awards ceremony, and Borscht Belt comedy routine.

I wonder if Steinem thought back to her essay amid all the hoopla. After all, The Vagina Monologues gives us women behaving very much like Steinem's menstruating men: cracking bawdy jokes about their anatomy, swaggering about their secretions, and generally congratulating themselves on the beauty and vigor of their reproductive hydraulics. Even the celebrity endorsements and the product pitches were there. Milling around before the show, I was reminded of the scene at the Lilith Fair, another event that proves--as my former colleague Judith Shulevitz has pointed out--that feminism has, among its myriad other incarnations, become a potent marketing force. The event was sponsored by Lifetime, Liz Claiborne, Marie Claire, Tampax, and other businesses that sell heavily to women. Out of these, Tampax made the most of the marketing opportunity, with young women wearing t-shirts that said "Celebrating Vaginas Since 1936" and "Tampax: The Revolution Continues" and handing out free tampons (which was pretty funny: Tampax has long marketed itself as the soul of discretion, purveyor of a device that would help you keep your period a secret).

Chris, of course you're right about the play's dramatic shortcomings: It's triumphalist and self-congratulatory, and as with most expressly political art, its medium is only a weak receptacle for its message. The Vagina Monologues is less a play than a pep rally. Whatever subtlety it has was sucked out by the audience. Take the narrator who sarcastically mouths off about the p.c. script for feminist body worship: "I mean, I know it should have happened in a bath with salt grains from the Dead Sea, Enya playing, me loving my woman self. I know the story. Vaginas are beautiful. Our self-hatred is only the internalized repression and hatred of the patriarchal culture. It isn't real. Pussys unite." The audience cheered after every line, the irony--and the narrator's bitterness at the failure of this rhetoric to do anything for her--completely lost.

Since you two couldn't attend, I took my boyfriend, and he giggled pretty hard at a couple of passages that had left him cold in print. Surprisingly, I squirmed a few times. It's a little terrifying to hear your privates discussed in Madison Square Garden, and there were moments when I wasn't sure that I wanted the actresses on stage as in touch with my own vagina as they clearly wanted to be. And I couldn't get into the audience participation, the call-and-response stuff. The Vagina Monologues, like Take Back the Night, operates on the theory that the best way to combat silence is to be extremely vocal, as if a bunch of marchers could ameliorate the private shame of a rape victim, or as if women shouting in New York City could compensate for, say, the enforced silence of women in Afghanistan. I've always found that kind of math well-intentioned but unconvincing, and Saturday night wasn't any exception.

And yet I want to defend the show, to explain why Chris is wrong to say that the play owes its popularity only to a bunch of overheated extremists, wronger to say there's nothing of quality of in it, and wrongest to compare it to The Turner Diaries. (Isn't that a hate-group bible? Chris!!) I can think of lots of reasons why hundreds of thousands of women have flocked to watch The Vagina Monologues, and most of them revolve around what a reassuring experience it is. The play is like a late-night pajama party where girls get to trade notes about their most secret shames and frustrations. The sympathetic, forgiving tone of the play is balm to any woman who's ever stumbled over what to call her vagina or leaked an embarrassing fluid. It's immensely comforting to hear familiar rituals like gynecological exams subjected to Seinfeldian "what's up with that?" treatment, with comediennes cracking wise about paper gowns that rip and cold instruments that freeze your insides. Finally, the play seems like good medicine for the depressingly high number of women--most estimates hover around 20 percent--who can't experience orgasm. Indeed, the piece you quote with such disdain may overreach in comparing orgasm to self-fulfillment. But how many guys do you know who have never come?

Most of all, I really dug the play's silliness--not its intellectual silliness, but its silly sense of humor. The Vagina Monologues presents a kind of sexual slapstick that's usually reserved for guys: Think of the hilarity of Portnoy jacking off into the family liverwurst or of Ben Stiller's fly-snagging accident in There's Something About Mary. I'm not suggesting that we need more of this kind of comedy simply for equality's sake. Rather, it's the service it performs--reassuring us that we're normal, that our experiences are shared even if they aren't discussed. Portnoy, Stiller, and their kin allow us--well, allow men--to re-imagine their own sexual fumblings, often their first ones, as even more absurd and disastrous than they really are. I can't think of many female examples of the genre, can you? (The best one I could summon is the scene in Slums of Beverly Hills in which Natasha Lyonne and Marisa Tomei dance around with their vibrator.) Maybe The Vagina Monologues isn't quite as hilarious as Portnoy's Complaint or There's Something About Mary, but it's a start. Or maybe the reason you don't find it funny is that this kind of humor depends wholly on identification.

Anyway, Erik, I'm eager to hear what you have to say, especially since you know so much more about smut than Chris or I. If you had a daughter, would you want her to see The Vagina Monologues? How about the way the play is now being turned into a social crusade, a sort of Take Back the Night for women older than college age? And does the strange congruity between Steinem's essay and The Vagina Monologues mean that the former has aged poorly or well? To say nothing of the beleaguered men in Looking Good and The Adonis Complex, who are working just as hard to achieve physical perfection as Ensler's women are to achieve physical sensation. Let's hope to start in on them soon.

Yours,
Jodi

the book club
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from: Jodi Kantor

More Pep Rally Than Play

Posted Monday, Feb. 12, 2001, at 4:23 PM ET
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Looking Good, The Adonis Complex, and The Vagina MonologuesThis week, Chris Caldwell, Jodi Kantor, and Erik Tarloff examine three books about body image: Looking Good, The Adonis Complex, and The Vagina Monologues. Click here for a word on our format. To read this discussion from the beginning, click here.
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: All right, calm down everyone. Let's just say, the Fray reflected the Book Club. Strong words, strong feelings, and a lot of comment on sex, relationships and vaginas. And on childbirth, some of it from those who are never going to experience it. Yes, that Natalie Angier post (below) did provoke comment. Yes, the views held were somewhat, but not wholly, gender-predictable. Yes, having an opinion on what women think during childbirth is apparently a valuable debating skill. Yes, we at the Fray keep remembering how much we enjoyed those tips on making grilled cheese sandwiches that came with the John Le Carre Book Club a few weeks back.

Some nice posts below. A good discussion on phallocentric writing started here. And it was a relief that all Goatgut wanted to tell us tell us was that it's Visa which is 'everywhere you want to be'; whereas Mastercard is 'priceless'.]


Chris Caldwell says:

"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."

Demented perspective?!? Demented perspective??!! For the nearly two hours of delivering my kid, the only goddamn thing I thought about was my vagina, and my anus, too, because they felt like one and the same conduit throughout the ordeal. As Shulamith Firestone put it, childbirth is "like shitting a pumpkin," and for the average heaving vagina in labor, the baby counts for nothing until it has been expelled, ejected, dumped! Which takes forever! And then you still have to push out the placenta! Eve Ensler has it exactly right:

Childbirth is really about vaginas. Except when it's about assholes.

Chris Caldwell must have been watching a C-section

--Natalie Angier

(To reply, click here.)


I think the Adonis complex is lodged firmly (excuse the pun) in the upper-middle class. The upper class can woo and succeed on money and collections alone. The upwardly mobile, however, need an extra edge. Or perhaps I'm completely wrong, but has anyone ever studied whether non-college college-aged women are as susceptible to eating disorders as those in college?

Btw: what's the problem with the Vagina Monologues? They may not work as literature, but I don't know of anyone who's ever seen them (I haven't) and not enjoyed it. I also understand that a couple of rapists and Bob the Curious are the only males that show up, but isn't the whole point that it is not about men? I mean, who but the most cynical of Hollywood producers would insist that some vagina-loving men be inserted to counterbalance the vagina-hating ones?

--Fletch

(To reply, click here.)


Christopher Caldwell asks, "And what kind of sad person prefers power to romance?" Well, any person who has no power, or any person who has only a very indirect kind of power. Frankly, the power versus romance thing sort of smacks of the ethics versus a full stomach. Only the people who have the basics (and power is a basic for a human being, regardless of gender) have the time to focus on the nice things like romance. Is it sad that people lack these basics? You bet.

--Dea

(To reply, click here.)


Jodi Kantor and Katha Pollitt seem to see The Vagina Monologues as simply a female counterpart to something that men have always done--publicly exploring their sexuality and taking pride in their bodies. But where exactly do they see all this male celebration of male anatomy and male physiological functions? (That's why I've always thought Steinem's "If Men Could Menstruate" essay was the height of silliness. After all, men can masturbate, but it's hardly something that has been traditionally celebrated in our culture.)

Yes, one can find some passages in D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer exalting the generative and creative powers of male genitalia. (In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett cites a hilarious Lawrence passage on the mystical powers of balls.) Still, this is fairly marginal stuff. Kantor cites Portnoy's Complaint and There's Something About Mary as male parallels of sorts to Monologues. But these works, in facts, are expressions of sexual shame, not of "penis pride."

Since I haven't seen or even read The Vagina Monologues, I don't know whether or not it has a lot of male-bashing...I have to wonder, however: doesn't it bother Kantor and Pollitt that the play celebrates an adult woman's seduction of a 13-year-old girl? The girl is even shown saying, "if it was rape, it was a good rape." No need, I think, to ask anyone to imagine what the reaction would be if this was an adult male seducing a 13-year-old girl...

--Cathy Young

(To reply, click here.)


I take issue with the writers' assertion that women do not like the bodybuilder's body. The pictures to which the women so negatively reacted probably were of professional bodybuilders in full contest mode. Most men would never think that this level of size would attract many women. But show those same women pictures of professional fitness models, or Chippendale dancers, and the reaction would be quite different. These are men who are in reality very large and very defined, just not as much as the guys who do anabolic steroids for the whole off-season. Think Brad Pitt in Fight Club and you know what most men in the gym are trying to achieve. Please do not tell me that women do not find it attractive. Since I have been working out significantly, my dating prospects zoomed through the roof.

Oh, by the way, the female orgasm plays can play a role in impregnation: the woman is more likely to be inseminated after an orgasm, so don't say that it has no reproductive function

--Bruce Garrison

(To reply, click here.)





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