Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues is one of my favorite stage productions. Last Thursday, with a few girlfriends and colleagues, I attended my university’s production sponsored by our V-Day group and Gender and Women’s Studies program. We warned the most conservative young woman in our group that the language might be a little cutting-edge for her taste, but she wanted to go anyway and we encouraged her to step outside her box.
While we cheered, applauded, and laughed, she sat through each scene with a stone face. She was unresponsive not just because of the choice of language but because of the subject matter discussed: women. I just do not understand how a woman in 2009 could sit red-faced and embarrassed at the discussion of aspects of femininity, not just a woman’s unique anatomy.
The Vagina Monologues embraces a topic that is brushed under far too many rugs: the multifaceted lives of women. The monologues highlight pleasure, pain, abuse, education, enlightenment, love, sharing, culture, and confidence among countless other subjects related to women. Let us not blush at the discussion of that which we should hold closest to our hearts, our womanhood. Let us assert ourselves and educate the world on what makes us individual. We must also balance the knowledge by voicing that what makes us individual does not handicap us or by any means make us lesser beings. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and levels of comfort, but shouldn’t we celebrate our individuality, our femininity?
What are your thoughts?
This post was written by Taqwaa Falaq Saleem, member of the 2008–09 AAUW Student Advisory Council.
Not too long ago, I sat with my mother in the audience of “The Good Body” while Eve Ensler exposed the truth about her on-going relationship with her stomach. A complicated, self-loathing, and, sometimes, self-loving rollercoaster that everyone in the room — young and old — seemed to identify with. It was powerful, too, but in a different way than the Vagina Monologues. I remember it sparking great conversation with my mother afterward!
I have great memories of Vagina Monologues too!! I saw it off-Broadway in NYC when I was in college and it was the first time I too felt such power in a room of open-minded women!