Monologues speaks for objectification

The month of February brought more this year than unusually cold temperatures. It also provided an excuse for many Rice students to broadcast their love for a specific part of the female anatomy.

If you were on campus at all last month, you were inevitably bombarded with posters, fliers, buttons and T-shirts bearing the slogan “I heart Rice Vaginas.” The intense campaign was in honor of V-Day, a worldwide movement inspired by activist, Eve Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues.

Since 1998, Valentine’s Day on college campuses heralds not only the arrival of hearts, kisses and cupids, but also vaginas. While I am partial to candy hearts myself, support for the vulgar tribute to private parts was disturbingly ubiquitous on campus this year.

Advocates define V-Day as: “an organized response against violence toward women. V-Day is a vision: We see a world where women live safely and freely. Triggering far-reaching awareness, it will lay the groundwork for new educational, protective and legislative endeavors throughout the world. We proclaim Valentine’s Day as V-Day, to celebrate women and end the violence.”

The aim of the cause is more than commendable. I encourage the objective wholeheartedly, and I long to help the pursuit of this vision. However, I am troubled by the means by which supporters of the campaign have attempted to achieve their goal.

Central to the V-Day festivities is a benefit production of The Vagina Monologues, a play written for the supposed empowerment of women. Put mildly, the play is a far cry from the liberation the early feminists envisioned. The Vagina Monologues objectifies women in the most crude of manners, essentially reducing girls to a single body part: the vagina.

In the fight for an end to the subjugation of women in all forms, the content of the play fails and, in fact, hinders its cause. The production focuses on women more with regards to sex than on such qualities as talent or intellect.

Despite what some might have us believe, empowerment does not emanate from the vagina but rather from the heart and the mind of any given woman. I thought that was the goal of women’s rights — for women to be respected and seen for more than their bodies. After all, the earliest organized American feminists fought for the vote — for the right to voice their opinions, thoughts and beliefs. These are products not of the vagina, but of their wits.

The problem comes out very clearly in a scene where a former lawyer describes her journey toward liberation: “I started out as a lawyer, but in my late 30s I became obsessed with making women happy … You could say I found my calling. I started getting paid for it. I wore outrageous outfits when I dominated women: lace, silk, leather. I used props … whips, ropes, handcuffs, dildos. There was nothing like this in tax law.”

While I suppose it is important for pre-law students to know what else is out there, I have to question the notion that this play represents support and advancement of women. What is the oldest profession again? And in what year did the first woman graduate from law school? If anything, this story represents regression. And I am still confused as to how encouraging sexual domination over other women will reach the goal of women’s liberation.

Some of my favorite scenes include a portion where the narrator recommends repeating the word “cunt” for relief and empowerment. Advice such as this is accompanied by further probing questions such as: “How would you dress your vagina?” “What is the most vagina friendly city?” “What does a vagina smell like?” “If your vagina could talk, what would it say?” Such questions prove only to undermine women and perpetuate stereotypes, namely that women dwell on the trivial.

The play itself provides little to no realistic information on how to protect against the violence that V-Day supporters are attempting to combat. Instead, viewers are treated to pornographic descriptions of sex and vulgar conduct. In fact, there is one scene in which a young girl “learns” about her sexuality when she is raped by an older woman: “She transformed my sorry-ass coochie snorcher and raised it up into a kind of heaven.” I feel this glorification of statutory rape and exploitation of a girl is somewhat contradictory to what V-Day claims to be its mission.

The cause people speak for on V-Day — to end violence against women — is an honorable and extremely important one. And while the funds from Rice’s production did go to Houston Area Women’s Shelter, I question the values that were stressed to raise that money. Women cannot end violence by continually reducing other women to sex objects. We ought to find ways to raise awareness by encouraging positive values to lift the heart and soul of each woman, rather than force her attention downwards toward her lap.

Caroline May is a Will Rice College sophomore.

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