The Vagina Monologues are important. Not because of what they are, but because of what they represent.
I don’t believe in much, but I do believe in the power of women. Specifically, in the power of women working together, believing in each other, and learning from each other’s experiences.
The patriarchy would have us believe that these experiences—to be clear, the experiences of half the world’s population—can be summed up into easily commercialized generalizations.
We like wine, pink, and teddy bears. We watch Sex and the City, rom coms, and each other (a critical gaze is only applied to one of these categories). We’re impressed when dudes can play Wonderwall on their acoustic guitars, when they run after us, when they’ve read Virginia Woolf. We handle break-ups with celibacy (taking ice cream to bed in lieu of a lover) or by sleeping with anything that can make us laugh, because we’re just “such fucking sluts.”
Perhaps you do like and love these things. There is nothing wrong with that.
Fuck a dude you just met in your pink bed while Sleepless in Seattle plays in the background. Belt Celine Dion when you’re drunk off Smirnoff Ice in your ‘Birthday Bitch!!’ hat. As long as you’re doing these things for you, and not because that is what culture has prescribed to your genitalia, I don’t see a problem.
What is wrong is the assumption that women (i.e. individual, autonomous human beings) all enjoy these narrow, gendered activities. The story of womanhood we are fed by the mainstream media is one envisioned by men, unrooted in reality, and untold by its subjects.
This is why The Vagina Monologues are so important—it gives women a place to congregate and tell their stories, fragments of their existence on this earth under the gaze and oppression of men. Inside every woman is a cosmos of experience that is unique unto her that, while individual, has the ability to aid the collective. Sometimes these stories are peppered with laughter, other times with tears. Both are equal and crucial reactions.
Perhaps this sounds cliché and a little too Ya Ya Sisterhood for all us Gen Y’s sapped of empathy and rife with sarcasm, but it’s vital that women, especially twenty-something women who are constantly pitted against each other, understand that other women are not the enemy.
In fact, in the daily struggle against the patriarchy (for it is hourly), women are your allies.
In light of the disgusting and enraging events that have taken place at the University of Ottawa, I think it is more apparent than ever that post-secondary institutions need to invite these kinds of gatherings and to be hot beds of female conversation and problem solving.
Perhaps there is nothing radical in saying the word “vagina” over 300 times in two hours. There is a fine line between story-telling and spectacle the performance traverses (albeit in combat boots or six inch heels, both equally aggressive).
But, there is the possibility for radical action when women come together to speak their minds free of the constraints of men (or more likely on campus, boys).
This is where things become profound, because without the fear of being called a “bitch,” or “crazy,” or being accused of “not getting it” or being told that it was “just a joke,” women speak.
And what they say, and what they hear, can start a revolution.
