On Saturday a friend and I set out for the primetime performance of The Vagina Monologues in Old Cabell Hall. The chocolate vagina pops being sold at the door were the first indication that we weren't in for the subtlest of innuendo.
The skill and passion of the performers exceeded my every expectation. The message of the play, however, did not.
There certainly have been more objectionable things performed on stage, and at least the money goes to a worthy cause. In addition, some parts of the play are genuinely poignant. These moments are overshadowed, however, by a tirade of crude and disparaging themes and stories.
For instance, there is the monologue where a child is interviewed about her vagina, and one where the entire audience joins in chanting the word "cunt."
One of the more ridiculous monologues is about a woman who gave up her successful law career to become a "sex worker" because the law job didn't involve "wetness" or "moaning."
Then consider one monologue from a teenage girl who had been sexually abused as a child. Who is the hero of this story? It's an older woman who plies her with vodka, undresses her, and has sex with her. The young girl says the woman "makes me play with myself in front of her." The audience erupted into laughter when the girl assures her concerned mother in a phone call that there are "no boys" around.
Perhaps I'm still using an antiquated definition of "empowerment" but it doesn't include drunken child molestation, even if the incident supposedly makes the girl feel good about her body.
Something tells me that if it were a man taking advantage of a young boy or girl, or a man asking a young child about his or her sexual organs, the situation wouldn't have been so funny.
But aside from being an all-out assault on common decency, the play also unravels much of the positive work done on the feminist front in the past century. For decades feminist fought so that women wouldn't be judged by their bodies. The Vagina Monologues, however, declares that women are their bodies.
One poem declares at the end "my vagina, my vagina, me." One women says that her clitoris "was the very essence of me," while another says "I love vaginas, I love women; I don't see them as separate things."
The play
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