Looking Good, The Adonis Complex, and The Vagina Monologues

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

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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

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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

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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

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