"THE VAGINAMonologues" expresses the ecstasy of a human existence without the false separation of love from sexuality. They are where the power of love -- formerly constrained by the false dichotomies and labels of a patriarchy that cannot persist in the presence of exuberant expression of hope and possibility -- is released.
"The Vagina Monologues" is not about vaginas. It is the proposition that an idea can break down a social order that rests upon the ruins of the full expression of love.
The patriarchy maintains control through the construction of taboos: women should not experience sexual pleasure, lest they be whores. Women should not expect pleasure from sex or psychological fulfillment from relationships, lest they be nags or bitches. "To attract the notice and win the attentions of men, by their external charms, is the chief business of fashionable girls...Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or mere instruments of pleasure... " (Sarah Grimke, "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes"). Women must not touch themselves, see themselves, feel themselves, masturbate or talk amongst themselves, lest they explode the foundation of a patriarchal order. This order is subservience from the half of the populace that has been effectively socialized to be puritanically self denying, that has been taught that it exists solely as a luxury (a luxury that can be discarded: careful) for the other half of the populace.
Touch yourself, not because it feels so damn good, but because of the implicit message that you are human, that your existence is its own justification, that you do not exist as a consumer or a laborer or a mother or a wife, but as a woman in all her erotic, life-giving glory. The pleasure of the vagina is the most radical act in a culture that denies personhood to women (manifest in unequal pay rates, assaults on female health and reproductive freedoms and the lack of proportional female representation in government and business), because it suggests that if sexuality is not the province of men, then neither is any other facet of existence.
A century and a half previous, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton made the same fundamentally radical demand for enfranchisement. Says writer Adrienne Rich, "Anthony understood that the demand for the ballot was a radical demand because she sensed a profound symbolism embodied in the denial of suffrage to women: the same kind of symbolism which... has surrounded the concept of 'separate but equal' toilets, drinking fountains and schools."
It is not merely the appreciation of the vagina, the act of voting or attendance of an integrated school that justifies lifetimes of activism, but the idea that humanity is not the province of an socioeconomic elite alone.
That liberation requires moans, requires screams, requires a language that lies dormant within each of us. Liberation necessitates breaking every taboo, of shocking our sleeping selves into wakefulness (credit to playwright Henrik Ibsen: "When We Dead Awaken"). A radical dislocation is essential for us to recognize the barrenness of a culture that denies each individual her and his humanity, that destroys human relationships in favor of economic ones. "The Vagina Monologues" awakens the language of the erotic, the quintessence of both our individual and common humanity. When we allow that language to speak, according to Lorde, "we touch our most profoundly creative source... that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society."
By so doing they allow us to envision a world of limitless possibility, a world in which the compromise of principle need not be considered, a world in which we actively live the ideal of a culture that affirms human life.
Zack Fields' column usually appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at zfields@cavalierdaily.com.
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