the book club: New books dissected over e-mail.

Looking Good, The Adonis Complex, and The Vagina Monologues

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

from: Christopher Caldwell

Feminism: An Upper-Middle-Class Network

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2001, at 1:38 PM ET

Dear Jodi, Erik, Katha, Marjorie,

Like Erik, I expected more of The Vagina 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 The Vagina 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?

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

from: Christopher Caldwell

Feminism: An Upper-Middle-Class Network

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2001, at 1:38 PM ET

DISCUSS

E-MAIL

Looking Good, The Adonis Complex, and The Vagina Monologues

This 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.

Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum

What did you think of this article?

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Reader Comments From The Fray:

[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.)