Tag: Eve Ensler

Uganda Bans “Vagina Monologues”

In February, the Ugandan government stupidly banned a scheduled performance of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” that country.

The Uganda Media Council demanded that changes be made to the performance before it could go forth. Specifically, the UMC wanted the performance to emit all references to homosexual acts. The play’s organizers refused, and the performance was canceled.

The UMC issued a statement saying that,

The play promotes illegal, unnatural sexual acts, homosexuality and prostitution, it should be and is hereby banned.

Ensler for her part told the BBC that Uganda is afraid of vaginas,

There is obviously some fear of the vagina and saying the word vagina. It’s not a slang word or dirty word, it’s a biological, anatomical word.

No word on whether or not the version of the play that was to be performed in Uganda included the scene of in which a 24-year-old woman has sex with a 13-year-old girl and the girl proclaims that “if it was rape, it was a good rape”, which has been cut from most recent U.S. performances of the play (presumably we’re all afraid of young vaginas or “good rape”.)

Sources:

Uganda ban on Vagina Monologues. The BBC, February 18, 2005.

Don’t mention the V-word: Uganda bans Monologues. Jeevan Vasagar, The Observer, February 20, 2005.

Mike Adams’ Viagra Monologues

University of North Carolina-Wilmington associate professor Mike Adams wrote one of the most amusing looks at The Vagina Monologues in July. In his op-ed, The Viagra Monologues, he describes his experiencing reading the feminist play.

Adams uses humor to puncture much of The Vagina Monologues,

In the very first chapter of TVM, author Eve Ensler tells the reader that she wrote the controversial play because she ?was worried about what we think about vaginas . . .? and because she ?was worried about (her) own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas-a community, a culture of vaginas.? I suppose it takes a village to raise a vagina.

But his conclusion about one of the more bizarre (and that’s saying a lot for this play) parts of The Vagina Monologues really drives home mindset of the people who wrote, produce and laud this play,

Perhaps the highlight (or lowlight) of TVM is an interview with a six-year-old girl, which asks (among others) the following questions: ?If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?? ?If it could speak, what would it say??, and ?What does your vagina smell like?? Of course I wondered why Ensler would ask these questions of a six-year-old girl. Maybe she got the idea from Michael Jackson. Well, maybe not.

After nearly 120 pages of this obscenity, the author does ponder the possible ill effects of her research by asking whether ?talking about vaginas ruin(s) the mystery.? But then she dismisses that conclusion as ?another myth that keeps vaginas in the dark, keeps them unknowing and unsatisfied.? Finally she admits, ?I realize I don?t know what?s appropriate. I don?t even know what that word means. Who decides??

Of course, many people would like to see TVM banned from college campuses. I disagree with that approach. Instead, I?m going to write my own play called The Viagra Monologues. That way, I won?t be accused of censoring campus feminists. And I won?t have to interview six-year-old boys.

Source:

The Viagra Monologues. Mike S. Adams, TownHall.Com, July 24, 2003.

Glenn Sacks on Bogus V-Day Statistics

Glenn Sacks wrote an interesting article about a lot of the statistical claims that Eve Ensler‘s nonprofit V-Day was spreading around about domestic violence. The entire article is worth reading, but I was especially intrigued by this claim which Sacks debunks,

1 in 3 murdered females are killed by a partner, versus 3.6% of males.

This statistic is both impressive and absurd at the same time. It is absurd because, of course, it is completely misleading, but impressive nonetheless because somebody obviously spent a great deal of time thinking about the best way to spin the fact that very few women are murdered and then turn that on fact on its head.

As Sacks notes, very few men or women are killed by a partner. According to Sacks the figures are about 1,300 women killed by intimates as opposed to 600 men murdered by intimates. In absolute numbers, of course, almost 2,000 people killed by intimates is a horrific tragedy, but in a nation of 260 million or so people, the risk of being killed by an intimate for both men and women is very low and, more importantly, the rate of intimate murder has steadily been declining (along with other murders).

Few people will look at that statistic, though, and realize that what it really means is that only about 4,000 women are murdered in any given year in the United States compared to almost 17,000 men.

So a completely different way to frame V-Day’s claims about violence against women is that almost 81 percent of murder victims are men and that we have a crisis of male murders and need to respond as a society to do more to reach out to the underserved male population with specialized violence programs offering men help and counseling.

But, of course, Ensler and her ilk take the opposite view and insist that violence (both being a victim of and a perpetrator of) is strictly a male vs. female phenomenon. Or as Sacks sums up his article,

Ensler, whose popular play “The Vagina Monologues” is the primary financial and public relations force behind V-Day, says that, for women, “Afghanistan is everywhere.” Unable to find an Afghanistan for American women, Ensler has used discredited statistics to invent one.

The obvious question being why do radical feminists prefer to live in this dark fantasy land of their own making rather than face the world as it is and work to improve it rather than simply regurgitating back their ideology through false and misleading statistics?

Source:

Eve Ensler’s V-Day: For Women, Afghanistan is Everywhere. Glenn J. Sacks, GlennJSacks.Com, February 22, 2002.

Betty Dodson Rips “The Vagina Monologues”

Eve Ensler’s controversial play, “The Vagina Monologues,” includes a scene in which a woman attends a Betty Dodson-like seminar (if you don’t know what I mean, visit Betty Dodson’s web site — warning, though, parts of the site are sexually explicit). Based on that I had assumed that Dodson would like the play. Wrong. She hates it for much the same reason that a lot of critiques of radical feminism dislike it.

Dodson posted an article about the play, “V-Day, Inc.,” on her web site. According to Dodson, when she originally saw the play in 1996 she disliked elements of it and made some suggestions to Ensler. By the time she saw it again in 1998, however, the play had changed dramatically for the worse. As Dodson aptly describes it, the play represents the worst form of anti-male, anti-sex feminism:

Now in the nineties they had done it again. V no longer stood for vagina. It stood for violence. Sex and violence, never sex and pleasure. Talking about sexual pleasure when there is so much sexual violence against women would be inappropriate, insensitive and politically incorrect. And who is to blame for all the sexual violence against women? According to Ms. and other fundamentalist feminists it’s still the patriarchy. Does that mean daddy or our brothers? Is it the stranger who raped us? Or is it the first man who broke our heart or the first one we married who cheated on us? Maybe it’s the pope or God himself, but it’s definitely mankind.

That night I wondered how men in the audience felt after being nailed as “the enemy.” It’s my bet that the men attending V-Day were all staunch supporters of equal rights for women. But here they were, faced with the same old male bashing of the sixties and seventies.

As far as I’m concerned, Dodson is right on the money about Ensler,

Eve is no longer the disarming young woman delivering her monologues. She has become an evangelical minister shouting and gesturing and admonishing us to demand an end to violence against women as the crowd roars in agreement. Toward the end of the evening Eve asked everyone who’d ever been raped to stand up. There was a smattering of women standing where I was sitting. Then she asked for those women who had been beaten to stand. Many more stood up. Finally she asked all those to stand who knew any woman who’d been raped or beaten which included most of the audience. I refused to stand as an insignificant protest knowing she would never ask those of us who had never been raped or beaten and who loved having orgasms to stand.

That’s the main problem with V-day. Women end up celebrating sexual violence and not the creative or regenerative pleasures of erotic love. Ending violence is a worthy cause and I’m all for it. But consistently equating sex with violence offers no solution. V-day promises us that awareness plus education equals prevention.

In an article last month for The Nation, Katha Pollitt couldn’t understand “how anyone could find The Vagina Monologues antimale…” At least Dodson gets it, even if the usual suspects don’t.

Source:

V-Day, Inc.. Betty Dodson, BettyDodson.Com, 2001.

Camille Paglia on “The Vagina Monologues”

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.

The “Good Rape”: The Vagina Monologues Returns

Even if I tried, I don’t think I could write a parody of the contemporary feminist movement that accomplished half of what The Vagina Monologues did last year. For those of you who haven’t yet heard of this play, the Vagina Monologues features women representing vaginas who talk about their experiences onstage. The premise is typically wacky, and meant to focus on issues of domestic violence.

The play earned a lot of criticism, however, for its positive portrayal of the statutory rape of a 13 year old girl by a 24 year old woman. At the conclusion of that scene, the 13 year old girl tells the audience that it might have been rape, but “well, I say if it was rape, it was a good rape.” If a male playwright depicted the statutory rape of a 13 year old girl by a 24 year old man and then had the girl say that if it was rape, it was a good rape, feminists would never stop grousing about the play (and rightly so), but as is typical among leftist movements, the same rules simply don’t apply to feminists. That part of the play reached national attention when a male columnist at Georgetown’s student newspaper was fired for writing a column asking if there was such a thing as a “good rape” (in the official explanation of his dismissal, the paper complained the student had attacked “a women’s issue on campus.”)

Anyway, Feminist.Com is trying to arrange for colleges and universities to perform the play on V-Day. V-Day is the radical feminist attempt to redefine Valentine’s Day. According to a Feminist.Com press release, “V-Day is still Valentine’s Day. But the “V” now also stands for vagina, anti-violence and victory.”

With backing from Planned Parenthood and others, the goal is to have The Vagina Monologues produced at campuses around the nation. The open question is whether or not they’ll get to portray the “good rape” scene. Wendy McElroy in a column for LewRockwell.Com notes that the Feminist.Com press release specifically warns colleges thinking about performing the play that they will be given a special script and,

You must use the version of the script of “The Vagina Monologues” that is included in the Performance Kit that you will receive. No other version of the play is acceptable for your production. Do not use the book of the play or versions of the script from previous College Initiatives. The new script must be followed. You may not edit any introductions or monologues. And you may not exclude or change the order of any of the monologues.

McElroy speculates that the V-Day folks want to do a little rewriting of history and exclude the now infamous “good rape” scene.

Either way, the play and the reactions to it will provide yet more examples of the intellectually bankrupt nature of the radical feminist enterprise. Take this quote, included in the Feminist.Com press, from a woman who staged the play, release intended to show the life altering potential The Vagina Monologues possesses:

“Overall, I loved how I felt being part of a movement that empowers women. During the months leading up to the performances, and especially during the few weeks just prior to the event, I relished in the fact that I was able to use the word “vagina” in my everyday vocabulary. Every time I saw a cast member on campus, we would speak loudly and confidently about how excited we were to be part of “The VAGINA Monologues.” During staff meetings and in casual conversation with College Deans, I would ask of they were going to attend “The VAGINA Monologues.” In dining halls, the campus store, in libraries, bars and restaurants, it was my favorite topic of conversation. Because of the College Initiative, I said VAGINA at least a dozen times a day for two months, and I was able to reclaim it as a word.”

All that rhetoric about seeing women as more than sex objects and respecting women as moral, social and political equals; now it turns out that the big message of radical feminism is that women are nothing more than sex objects after all (who can benefit from a “good rape” even), and the path to liberation is saying “vagina” three times.