Just before the performance starts, there’s a moment where you wonder if you’re seriously about to watch a series of monologues about vaginas. Then you hear the words “I bet you’re worried. We were worried. We were worried about vaginas.”
It’s only a moment of disbelief because once you hear those words and the monologues start, you can’t imagine not watching it. You can’t imagine not talking about vaginas because you realize for the first time that there’s nothing wrong with talking about your vagina.
The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written by Eve Ensler that is composed of monologues based on the stories of real women. They deal with everything from sex to menstruation to female genital mutilation to sex work to masturbation and orgasms to birth. It tackles all the subjects that women are usually encouraged not to talk about. As well, it says vagina five times as much as your regular high school sex education would. It makes the word okay to say.
The monologues are typically performed between Feb. 1 and April 30, as a part of V-Day, a global activist movement that strives to end violence against women. As such, the money made by the performances and fundraising during this time is donated to places that assist with this goal such as rape crises centers and women’s shelters. Typically, casts will pick where they would like to donate their funds too. This allows them to get more involved in their community and to help women around them.
The Vagina Monologues opened my mind and many others to the idea that it is okay to have a vagina. This idea was not something I grew up with. Society told me growing up that having a vagina made me inferior, that there was something wrong with me because I had one. I couldn’t do the same things as those that didn’t. I was told that because I had a vagina, my job in the world was to bear children and sexually pleasure those with a different sex organ. These monologues changed that.
They told me that I wasn’t the only one who had felt like this. They told I wasn’t the only one who had hated my vagina, but they also told me it was okay to not hate my vagina. They told I should learn to love it and helped me to do so.
The Vagina Monologues do have some problems. They are not necessarily inclusive of all women, as there is a lot of emphasis placed on women being only those who have a vagina. This is, of course, not true. As well, there have been a lot of concerns over how the play portrays women from Third World countries and women of color in general. To address these concerns, Ensler has been adding more monologues to the performance. Additionally, some casts have attempted to make changes on their own. For instance, in Feb. 2004, Jane Fonda and Deep Stealth Productions with Ensler produced and directed the first all-transgender performance of the monologues. In 2014, Columbia University production’s cast was composed exclusively of self-identified women of color.
Despite these numerous issues, the play is still worth watching, though the audience should keep in mind these concerns and strive to educate themselves further on the issues presented in the monologues. Casts performing the monologues should also keep these problems in mind and attempt to adjust their productions in order to fix them as much as they can.
The reason I say it is still worth watching is because it has helped many people to become more accepting of their vaginas. Things like The Vagina Monologues are needed. Those with vaginas need to know that it is okay to say the word vagina. We need to know that it is okay to have a vagina.
