WARNING: There are going to be words in this article that you might consider “bad.” These words mostly concern the female anatomy. You have been warned.
Editor's note: This performance of The Vagina Monologues benefited the UTC Women's Center Transformation Project and the Partnership's Sexual Assault Center. The intent of this post is to raise awareness of V-Day and the work of the Women's Center and the Partnership. Some content from the original post has been edited. For the full version, please contact hashley@partnershipfca.com.
I wasn’t looking forward to last weekend. Classes had been intense, the weather had blanketed the whole city in slate gray clouds with no sign of relief, and my legion of neuroses were piling up all at once – but that was par for the course, really. What finally tipped the scales was when I realized Valentine’s Day was coming.
(Is there a person on Earth who actually looks forward to Valentine’s Day? Don’t answer if you do - the rest of us might have to come deal with you.)
What was going to be a weekend spent entirely in my pajamas, curled up with a good video-game while I felt sorry for myself was changed at the last minute when I was asked to go check out the UTC Women’s Center and their production of the Vagina Monologues. Ordinarily I would have been excited to see the show. I consider myself a feminist, or a pro-feminist man, or whatever you want to call it, and I’d heard about Eve Ensler’s opus and missed two of the school’s previous annual performances. Remember that it was Valentine’s weekend however – unlike the rest of the year, I was more interested in moping and sighing than I was in social justice.
I went anyway, of course, because it’s kind of my job and honestly what else was I going to do? It would be a good excuse to get out of the house and be sad instead of being sad at home. It turned out that sitting at home was exactly what I would be doing on Friday night anyway thanks to another of this Winter’s sudden, city paralyzing bursts of snow. The next night, however, I arrived at UTC’s Fine Arts Center two hours early, met up with a group of women decked out in awesome pink shirts that read “Vagina!” and got to work.
Work, as it turned out, made use of the “skills” I picked up at terrible retail jobs that I thought I would never need again. We put out t-shirts from three different years of The Vagina Monologues where everyone could see them, as well as sign-up sheets for the Partnership’s "Walk a Mile in Her Shoes" event, and…nobody took the bait.
“Nobody’s buying any shirts,” Sara Peters, head of UTC’s Women’s Center, lamented.
Well of course they weren’t buying any shirts, we weren’t pushing the product*. It was time to see if I still had that retail magic, so I set to work! No-one who passed by that table was free from my aggressive tactics, not even classmates; the money from these shirts went to the Partnership and the Women’s Action Council after all, so decorum could take a back-seat as far as I was concerned.
“Would you like to take a look at our ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ shirts?” I said to a group of men, holding one up for display. “Use them to demonstrate fifteen dollars’ worth of devotion to gender equality, use them get points with a girlfriend, use them to keep relatives you don’t like from talking to you at reunions, use them to cover your abdomen if you’d like, they’re good for all that and more!”
“If you’re as excited about vaginas as I am after that show,” I said to a crowd of people I’d already tried once before the performance, “why not take another look at these fine shirts?” I waved my hand over our whole selection like Vanna White lighting up vowels and smiled. “All the profits go to causes that support vaginas and the people attached to them!”
I don’t remember exactly how many shirts we sold by the end of the night, but it was an integer greater than zero and we got some direct donations besides from particularly charitable theatre goers. So that was nice.
The main event was the show, though, and that’s where my weekend went from, “horrible mope-fest,” to “galvanizing reminder of the work left to do.” However, before I talk about UTC’s performance, some history is in order:
Eve Ensler didn’t intend to write a play at all when she took her first step down the road that would lead to the Vagina Monologues – she just wanted to have a dialogue with her friends. As the conversations with friends went on, she realized that these were things women desperately wanted and needed to discuss but felt too ashamed to or were simply prohibited from it in their daily lives. Then the friends started relating anecdotes from their friends, and friends of their own friends. And then the referrals began. By the time all was said and done, Eve had interviewed over 200 women about their vaginas, and so in 1996 the Monologues were born.
At first Eve performed all of the monologues herself, but within two years the show had become such a phenomenon that others wanted to get in on the action. This is how the V-Day event got started; Miss Ensler, who was approached after nearly every performance by women desperate to share their own anxieties and experiences of sexual violence, began working with Willa Shalit to organize a weekend centered around performances of the Monologues and other, similar works nationwide to raise money to benefit female victims of abuse and rape and to pursue an end to those phenomena. Twelve years later the Vagina Monologues and V-Day are still going strong, and have actually grown since their birth – the Monologues have added new sections over the years to reflect the developing concerns of women, and V-Day has spread out of New York to encompass not only the United States but the whole world.
While I knew about the Vagina Monologues before last weekend, I didn’t know about V-Day, which was tragic because it was exactly what I needed. I think it was what even more women needed, too. Valentine’s Day might be something that everybody cringes and mopes over, but a movement that seeks to co-opt the date in pursuit of social justice and freedom of women from violence? If you can’t get a little excited about that then I don’t really know what to say. Some people apparently criticize V-Day for being misandrist, or for trying to remind people of gender and sex-based injustice at a time when the sexes are supposed to be coming together in love, but I don’t think they get the point. Or maybe they’re the people who’ve never had trouble getting dates in February.
Anyway, back to the show! It started with three of the performers coming out to tell us a little about vaginas; namely, what they’re called all over this great nation of ours. This checklist got everyone laughing, and I think that might be part of the purpose of the show, to take us all back to that simple, childish state where people’s bodies simply existed, some were different from others, and we all had a good-natured giggle over how funny some of the words were before getting back to the important business of torturing our parents.
One of the monologues was a newer addition written by Eve Ensler about her witnessing the birth of her grandchild. It was remarkable to me for the same reason I imagine the experience it was based on was remarkable to her: I forgot that women can do that, and even when I think about it now the logistical and mechanical concerns are so great that I get dizzy. The whole process really is miraculous.
The monologues reflected the experiences of real women with their sexuality and their bodies, so while many of them tempered their grievances with humor, wit and whimsy some of them showed, just like the lives of many women in the world today, a history of the most gut-wrenching sorts of tragedy or oppression without much relief to speak of. There was the story of the Bosnian girl who fell victim to the systematic rape of the women in her country as a tactic of war, whose words still make my hands shake with grief. There was the Congolese girl who told the audience, through the frame of her two years as a sex slave, the eight rules necessary to survive such an ordeal. There was the story of the woman in the burqa, which is of course at the center a very complicated debate, but which reminded us that however we might feel about Islam and the dress and behaviors that sometimes follow from it, it is a religious choice and we are a nation that prides itself on religious tolerance. The problem, we were told, is that for a great many women the burqa and things like it are not a choice, and if the monologue was any indication of reality under those circumstances then my heart goes out to those women.
Look, the piece is controversial. It’s not politically correct. And I assume
people are going to have responses to it. I interviewed women, and I told
their stories. I didn’t make them up. People are going to have problems with
people’s stories.
For the record, I agree with Eve. Really you should see the show anyway, but that’s neither here nor there.
I still didn’t have a date for Valentine’s Day, but you know what? Who cares! I got to take part, even if it was a tiny little inconsequential part, in an even better V-letter event that made me happier than I’ve ever been on Valentine’s Day, even with a date. I think I’ve found my February holiday of choice from now on!
*I feel like every boss I ever hated just typing those words out.
THE VAGINA LINKS
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