In her latest Salon.Com column, Camille Paglia dismisses the “garish visibility” of Eve Ensler and “The Vagina Monologues.”
The perversion of feminism that Ensler represents — turning Valentine’s Day, the one holiday celebrating romantic harmony between the sexes, into a grisly memento mori of violence against women — has been well demonstrated by the ever-alert Christina Hoff Sommers, who gave early warning in her Feb. 11 article in the Wall Street Journal last year (as well as in her campus lectures, media appearances and an article in the Feb. 8 USA Today). That the psychological poison of Ensler’s archaic creed of victimization is being spread to impressionable women students is positively criminal.
…That in the year 2001 the group chanting of crude four-letter words for female genitalia is viewed as some sort of radical liberation implies that the real issue in the “Vagina Monologues” isn’t male oppression but bourgeois repression — the malady of the dainty, decorous professional class that was created in the first century after the Industrial Revolution.
Like Paglia I’m not quit sure how an auditorium full of people chanting “cunt” — as 18,000 people did at Madison Square Garden this month — is empowering.
Sources:
The Bush look. Camille Paglia, Salon.Com, February 28, 2001.
Clit Club. Sharon Lerner, The Village Voice, February 14-20, 2001.