In the Foreword to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, feminist extraordinaire Gloria Steinem does not once use the term “vagina envy,” nor does Eve, that I can discover. Yet this term came to my mind first when thinking of a title. It’s not just fairplay after my recent movie review of High Society called “Is This Princess Envy...Or Just Penis Envy?” Indeed how can anything not be envied or worshipped if a whole play, book, website and annual celebration on Valentine’s Day (called V-Day) is dedicated to it?

All throughout the quick-reading, 184-page book, including the Foreword, the vagina is talked about by women from all walks of life as a major part of themselves that they have never seen, loved, talked about, called by its right name or laughed about. There are no chapter titles on the Contents page, but only as you read this ongoing revelation of Ensler’s interviews with a lesbian prostitute, a lesbian, a woman in her 70s, a woman remembering her menarche, a woman masturbating, a woman discovering sexual desire, another taking a vagina workshop and using a hand mirror to see what hers looked like.

Then there was the woman preparing for sex, but the guy just wanted to stare and stare at her beautiful vagina (for an hour!). That seemed pretty unreal and a definite case of vagina envy. A few minutes doesn’t surprise me, having a beautiful vagina myself, but anyway…After that is a chilling monologue by a village woman who was ruined by six monsters, soldiers and then doctors, she said, invading her with bottles, steel rods and broom handles, then leaving “their dirty sperm inside me.”

Ugh.

You get the idea. There are a few more monologues that promote getting to know the wonder and beauty of vaginas, ending with the author watching in transfixed awe as her granddaughter is born vaginally. She closes her intro tellingly with:

If I was in awe of them (vaginas) before the birth of my granddaughter Colette, I am certainly in deep worship now.? P 120

In between these monologues are vagina facts researched by the author that are relevant to the women’s experiences. One that has especially dismayed me is that, in these here United States, the last recorded “female circumcision,” where doctors cut off the cl!toris to prevent her sexual pleasure, was performed in 1948. 1948! This is still a tragedy today in radically religious, Mid Eastern countries, but not for boys. So why it has taken so long to stop little boys from being cut routinely here is truly beyond me, yet it’s still going on in as*-backward states like mine (Nebraska).

Finally Ensler adds about sixty pages, first an explanation of the conception and birth of the V-Day College Initiative by Karen Obel, Director, (before this, celebrity women got involved when it played Broadway), followed by a good number of letters from college students who helped put together The Vagina Monologues play on their campus. They all had life-changing, thought-provoking experiences, but what caught my interest was a letter by a girl from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who enthused about how it was such a HUGE deal to have had the play in this “ultra-conservative town …famous for ‘Husker Mania’ where during college football season most people go to church twice a week…where a retired football coach/demigod is running for the U.S. Senate…” Maybe Osborne won, but I don't even know.

Final Thoughts

I’ve never been sexually abused, (well, not intentionally), so I don’t have as much passion as these women for stopping the violence and degradation of women throughout the world. Just like I cannot in any way relate to lesbian sex (or gay sex in general) because that is not how I have come to understand and appreciate my sexual identity, so I cannot relate to being disrespected, invaded and in general sexually dominated by power-seeking brutes who destroy a woman’s self-worth.

Ensler doesn't seem to be comfortable at all in an interview with a frank lesbian (Ensler's partner’s name is Ariel who she dedicates the book to, but no pronouns so I’m not sure), so maybe she was a closet lesbian, but she obviously is a feminist with Steinem writing the Foreword and references to help from Feminist.com, probably in providing the facts.

It’s understandable that she does not include a woman having an abortion, but what she does include is sometimes pretty traumatic and always honestly and fervently told. Ensler even asked women what their vaginas would wear or say, a somewhat humorous attempt that may work well in the play, but seemed to me out of place in a more serious book. It could, however, be another woman’s way to relieve tension that I don’t have.

Is it only for women, though, who still call their vaginas “down there” or who have been violated sexually? Not at all. As a college male pointed out, most people seeing the play had never before understood the suffering women have endured and would leave…”with a new respect…” I’m anxious to ask my biker sweetie if he attended the play, but the vast majority of letters were from excited females, so I kind of doubt it. As Steinem explains in the Foreword, there are still female deities worshipped for their creative or “superior spiritual” energy in Hinduism, Sufism, Gnosticism and Tantric Buddhism, but patriarchal religions kept women from the altar for centuries (and still in the Roman Catholic Church) because “only by obeying the rules of patriarchy can we be reborn (free of original sin gotten from being born of woman) through men.”

Sort of like wanting to be women and creators, or like God.


Final, Final Thoughts...

So whoever you are, The Vagina Monologues will be a worthwhile, fascinating journey for a couple of hours. It may change the way you think about vaginas and free you to call it that or a c*nt, which at its Indo-European root means kin or country and is shortened from a fertility god named Kundi, it seems.

Anyway, I learned some amusing things from this book, too, like loud moaning during sex can make a man “lose his focus…and then he loses everything” and that pubic hair is there to make sex more comfortable and “less spiky.” I also know that I will never “be my c*nt,” which is just fine with me. I identify with my soul.

Check out v-day.org if you’re curious about its start and history. I imagine campuses will still be performing it on Valentine’s Day this year, but first maybe some of you should check out Ensler’s book from the library. It might disturb or even offend conventional-type people.


Recommended: Yes