Read my lips, not my vagina

The primary problem with The Vagina Monologues is not the administration's refusal to sponsor the event (although seeing as they allow HBO's Sex and the City to play in McPhail's every Sunday evening, I don't see what the difference is at this point). Let the defenders of academic freedom take up that cause. Instead, what is disturbing about the Monologues is its deeply conflicting message. On the one hand, it claims to empower women, expose social injustices, and dispel the notion that sexuality is inherently bad, disgusting or sinful-in themselves all good and worthy objectives. However, the Monologues does so in a way that is not only pointlessly crude at times, but results in reducing women and their sexuality. Ironically, the production is, at heart, anti-feminist.

Portions of the Monologues approach social injustices towards women seriously and thoughtfully. In last year's production, there were monologues that addressed the horrific treatment of women in countries like Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and even in our own country. These monologues approached truly difficult and even sickening violations of women in the form of rape, incest, genital mutilation, and domestic violence with an incredible amount of sensitivity. No one can deny that these are all terrible violations, and as a society, we should work to the utmost to eradicate them as well as provide proper treatment to those who have already been victimized by these evils. To its credit, PC's production of the Monologues donates its proceeds to aid victims of domestic abuse.

In a bizarre juxtaposition to the serious and sensitive discussion of violent acts like rape and genital mutilation, the Monologues uses crudity to empower women. This empowerment consists of "reclaiming" the word "c-t" by chanting it over and over again as a group as well as by using a variety of anecdotes which end up reducing the entire personhood of women to crude and base sexuality. How is a word "reclaimed" ? The word "c-t" is still a filthy word, no matter how many rooms full of people repeat it at productions of The Vagina Monologues. Perhaps the purpose is to make women who have been insulted by this word realize that they, themselves, are not dirty, nor is their sexuality. If so, this intent is not clear. Instead, a roomful of chanting adults revel in saying an unacceptable word, strangely similar to small children who curse for the sheer pleasure of breaking the rules. It has no true redemptive value.

And what is the redemptive value in the glorification of masturbation or promiscuity? This empowers women? The Monologues, rightly so, tell women that they are not mere sexual objects and that their sole purpose is not the sexual fulfillment of men. Yet, they do this while telling women to embrace the notion that "my clitoris is the essence of me." The Monologues condemn the sexual objectification of women by men, but glorify the objectification of oneself. "My clitoris is the essence of me" has reduced a woman's entire personhood not only to her sexual anatomy, but to one small part of that anatomy. The core of my being, of my existence as a woman, is my clitoris? Hardly.

On a more fundamental level, while claiming to dispel the notion that sexuality is evil, the Monologues only produce a very limited definition of this assertion. One of the monologues throws a hackneyed insult at the Christian view of sexuality by saying, "we all know Christians don't have vaginas." What is even more insulting is that during last year's production, the whole room laughed. I'd much rather subscribe to the Christian view of sexuality, which upholds the innate goodness and beauty of human sexual relations (within their proper context) as a creative act given by God himself and does not say that my final end as a human being is pleasuring my clitoris.

What a limited view of women as human beings-with hearts, minds and souls! If feminism grants women equality, then the Monologues represent fake feminism. Women have struggled throughout history to gain equal footing with men in so many spheres and the best they can do with that hard-fought status is to proudly proclaim that their clitoris defines their existence? I thought this was what women's rights movements disputed. Yet from the start, the very title The Vagina Monologues implies that it is not the complete woman speaking-heart, mind, soul, and sexuality-but her vagina. Well, excuse me, but my vagina does not speak to you. Stephanie Pietros does.