"The Vagina Monologues" is — at long last — not a fertile text.
Young people have moved on and need to write their own plays, express their own ideas. They should feel free to steal the secret of the structure of Eve Ensler's play: 1. a set consisting of nothing but stools (it's cheap, actors conserve energy, and there's none of that crossing about the stage that requires directing and rehearsal), 2. lines read from index cards (so no one has to memorize lines or even pretend that they're not just reading), and 3. a series of monologues (so the actors just take turns instead of having to relate to each other, and the audience is distracted from the absence of a story arc).
When I wake up in the morning, I look at Memeorandum to get up to speed on what stories everyone's blogging about, and I see this one about Mount Holyoke ending its annual V-Day production of "The Vagina Monologues" because — as one blogger has put it — "it's not feminist enough," and I think: 1. This is the ready-made bloggable story of the day (the story that prompts commenters to profess incredulity about its not yet having been blogged, so that I feel dogged into blogging it to keep you from thinking I'm out of touch), 2. The usual anti-feminist crowd is going to blog this the wrong way (so even though I could resist the pressure to blog it because it's the bloggable story of the day, it feels like my job to push back the inevitable misblogging), and 3. "The Vagina Monologues" was ALWAYS a bad play (certainly undeserving of annual productions everywhere, so congratulations to the young people who finally got the guts to say NO).
January 16, 2015
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56 comments:
"The students’ drama decision is a perfect match with Holyoke’s recent announcement that it would accept male students who identify as women"
And if such a student has sex with a classmate while intoxicated, what shall we call that?
At this rate, in 10 years, the monologues will feature only men!
I think you missed the most important point. Its not feminist enough because it excludes women without vaginas....just typing that made me laugh.
In a hundred years, will those people seem crazy or will my views seem crazy?
"I think you missed the most important point."
No, I did not miss that. That's all at the links. My post says what I want to say about the subject.
First thought is "This is the ready-made bloggable story of the day..." Why? Because it is much ado about (lit and fig) nothing? Is a topic's bloggability (blogaciousness?) a function of its prima facie absurdity, its obvious status as froth on the cultural tide?
Really? People here would ask you to blog about the Vagina Monologues? Yikes - there are more crazy people here than I thought!
Did people ever attend the Vagina Monologues because they enjoyed the "play"? (The "actors" don't even memorize their lines?) Isn't it more along the lines of attending self-examination sessions in communist countries, or mandatory celebrations, in which woe to the person who stops clapping first? Isn't it simply required to attend to show the requisite support for the cause?
Best case scenario, the only way to construct this as less than mind-numbingly stupid, the individuals staging this production found a sufficiently PC excuse to not do something they didn't want to do anyway.
By the way, what is this Memorandum of which you speak?
Clearly the play itself is a micro-aggression against those male students who identify as female. Who says you have to have a vagina to be a woman?
"Transphobic"
Ha ha ha.
As if lousy art value were enough to put off feminists.
"a set consisting of nothing but stools (it's cheap, actors conserve energy, and there's none of that crossing about the stage that requires directing and rehearsal),
lines read from index cards (so no one has to memorize lines or even pretend that they're not just reading), and
a series of monologues (so the actors just take turns instead of having to relate to each other..."
100% pure ideology, none of this "drama" or "stagecraft" filler.
I often think that future historians will look back on this era as a time that experienced the death of craft, in most fields where prior ages would have assumed the importance of craft to be paramount. Can't draw? No problem. Can't sing? No problem. Can't write? No problem. As long as you can emote and express your grievance to the world.
Most art is bad art and political art has a particularly bad batting average. Are there examples of feminist art that is actually good art? (I'm willing to be pretty broad in the definition of "good," but not broad enough to include "Monologues" which always struck me as "The Clothesline Project" with actors standing in for t-shirts.)
2. The usual anti-feminist crowd is going to blog this the wrong way (so even though I could resist the pressure to blog it because it's the bloggable story of the day, it feels like my job to push back the inevitable misblogging). . .
I guess the wrong way would be not seeing it from your point of view?
I think the quote "blatantly transphobic" pretty much guarantees how it is going to be blogged, as one more over the top, ridiculous, utterly stupid, statement by over-indulged post adolescent children.
Any play that involves a bunch of people reading while sitting on stools isn't a finished play. It's a read through of a draft.
"Are there examples of feminist art that is actually good art?"
-- Define "feminist" and "good art" first, and there probably is. If we go by sheer competency of execution and acceptance of the public as a measure for good art, for example, there are a lot of recent, popular songs that both ding as "good art" and "feminist."
Some can read feminist themes into Macbeth; Macbeth is undoubtedly good art. So, yeah. You can have art that is feminist and is good.
The problem is how you go about defining those terms, your Venn Diagram overlap is going to get smaller or bigger.
I think the quote "blatantly transphobic" pretty much guarantees how it is going to be blogged, as one more over the top, ridiculous, utterly stupid, statement by over-indulged post adolescent children.
So what's the wrong way?
The asshole monologues would be inclusive.
I think Althouse is giving these kids way too much credit. It's like congratulating the proverbial broken clock, twice a day.
Tawkin Pussy Play or Gotta Pee Lena?
Must blog topics so we get the right take.
"Really? People here would ask you to blog about the Vagina Monologues? Yikes - there are more crazy people here than I thought!"
People here would say I should blog about how a college has gone so deeply into feminist madness that "The Vagina Monologues" has been deemed insufficiently feminist.
Go to the Memeorandum link I gave (the second link in the post) and see who's blogging it and why -- Daily Caller, PJ Media, Reason....
I'm willing to let anyone define "good art" for themselves. "Feminist art" means art in which the primary point is a commentary on feminism in the same way that Animal Farm is anti-communist art. (One of the many great things about Shakespeare's plays is that none of them can be accused of having a primary point.)
So, again, commies have Eisenstein, Nazis have Riefenstahl, feminists must have someone better than Ensler. Who?
These comments show that I got out ahead of you. I knew what you would say before you said it, and you never got the chance to see that's what you would have said.
My work here is done.
That is, I'm responding before you knew you'd say that, and you don't understand my response.
Later, you'll see that's what you would have said. Whitney said it, above.
What the hell, I'm moving on.
I saw that play back in 2002 (only because I was visiting somebody who was assigned to go see it in a class), and I've always disliked it. When it was originally published, and I was at the height of my radical feminism, I thought it was old-fashioned and commercial.
I'm done!
Fishing is fun. Choose the right spot, pick the right lure and cuss that dumb-ass fish!
Fishing is not fun if you don't catch a full stringer.
I'm pretty sure we will have more fishing trips.
These comments show that I got out ahead of you.
Ha ha ha! Like the reaction wasn't instantaneously obvious.
1. a set consisting of nothing but stools
I read the play some years ago when it was all the hot topic. Didn't buy it, sat in the Borders comfy chairs for an hour or so.
I would argue that the entire play, not just the set, is pretty much stools. In the fecal sense.
John Henry
The other thing that jumped out at me was about admitting men who claim to be women.
I thought that was all in the past? I had not realized that we still had gender segregated schools.
Why can't men have schools just for people claiming to be men. Most of them will have penises but that doesn't need to be a strict requirement.
If women do not have to have vaginas, why should one have to have a penis to be a man?
Women can be total dicks too.
John Henry
1. a set consisting of nothing but stools
Dang, PuertoRicoSpaceport beat me to it! "Fecal" was my first thought as well.
"Monologues" is a musty, cobwebbed text.
Potty parity is where it's at now.
He makes a good point, too: What are the rules on transsexuals at women's colleges? FTM, untransitioned? OK or not? MTF, ditto? The former has a vagina; the latter has a penis. But one "identifies" as female, the other as male, and in neither case does the plumbing correspond to the identity.
I imagine that the bathroom lines at Mt. Holyoke &c. are rather complicated.
Its so dumb.
What defines a woman socially as the sine qua non (and it IS a social definition) is not the clothes she wears or her hair length or how she pees but the expected and normative capacity to bear a child in a womb.
Whether she wants to do this, never does this, has an impairment that makes it impossible or not, hates the idea or not, we will always act in accordance in our social order with that reality, or we will fail to understand the thing that fundamental distinguishes the lived experience of women.
Trans women are not "women full stop" they are 'social women' or women who lack any real possible social experience of potential childbearing in the womb. that makes them have a different socially constructed reality than physical women.
I think we should start saying physical women or biological women and social women or women-in-law or something if we need this to continue and not break reality's relation to reason.
What pduggie said.
What pduggie said.
Our language is supposed to provide a map. Old maps aren't working. New islands have appeared, teeming with harpies, and mariners keep crashing there.
Breathe some new air into the Monologues. Perform it as-is, but with men reciting all the parts.
That should be good for getting blog conversation going: is it showing how far men have come into accepting feminism that they can feel the truth of the words? Is it totally missing the point? Does it make people uncomfortable?
I am Laslo.
Any confusion to be found is because all of you cheap, heartless bastards do not fund education.
You let these kids starve in school, use 40 year old texts, fade teacher rape daily because you can't find decent people to work for the slave wages and 'benefits' offered.
Now, when you don't like what you see, you whine and moan about what you've sown.
We need more money cheapy!
K - 12 then University then grad school all takes money, money which is to be found NOWHERE on American campuses.
"The Vagina Monologues Monologues." Bunch of guys sitting on stools, reading index cards explaining how their lives were changed by sitting through the first 20 minutes of 'The Vagina Monologues.' Who wants to go first?
Angry women is the theme.
The cable guys are out back upgrading the cable I don't have to fiber optics.
It's a race with the telephone company.
If everybody lit just one little candle, somebody would probably light two.
- Roger Price
The question is could the light be tapped for illumination, like the 48v Princess phone dial light power could be used to heat fish tanks.
Will the Vagina Monologs go fiber or always be on index cards.
"a set consisting of nothing but stools"
So, indeed, several steaming piles.
I'm not sure if the first time was tragedy, but this time is definitely farce.
I knew what you would say before you said it, and you never got the chance to see that's what you would have said.
Not so fast professor: I knew how you'd blog this before you even blogged it, and you never got the chance to see that's how you would blog it.
We're not the only utterly predictable ones around here.
mic drop
Two rival businessmen meet in the Warsaw train station. "Where are you going?" says the first man.
"To Minsk," says the second.
"To Minsk, eh? What a nerve you have! I know you're telling me you're going to Minsk because you want me to think that you're really going to Pinsk. But it so happens that I know you really are going to Minsk. So why are you lying to me?"
I am a robot but I was assigned humanity at birth.
3. "The Vagina Monologues" was ALWAYS a bad play (certainly undeserving of annual productions everywhere, so congratulations to the young people who finally got the guts to say NO).
Uh, your congratulations may be misplaced. They're not saying "no" because it's bad, but because it's not bad enough.
Rocketeer:
I knew what you would say before you said it, and you never got the chance to see that's what you would have said.
"Not so fast professor: I knew how you'd blog this before you even blogged it, and you never got the chance to see that's how you would blog it.
We're not the only utterly predictable ones around here.
mic drop
1/16/15, 9:58 AM"
^^^This. Heavy Meta!
We're not the only utterly predictable ones around here.
Trolling is a one-way Althouseville.
Occasionally Althouse adopts a bizarre attitude, along the lines of "I know what I'm saying doesn't make sense, and I know you know it doesn't make sense, and I know what really makes sense, and I don't care."
The crazy ass-cracker debate is, of course, the apotheosis of this attitude.
I suppose there's something honest and refreshing about it.
We should have a production of it with men who are "queer and transgender," you know, Lesbians trapped in a man's body.
In the background we could run a Vine of Fonzi jumping the shark.
Bob R: My vote for "the feminist Eisenstein" is Jane Campion. Her work is clearly feminist but it's also really really good art. Try The Piano or
Top of the Lake (the best Twin Peaks homage ever)
After reading the comments I'm beginning th think the only reason most people go to see the Vagina Monologues is for the chance of seeing a talking vagina.
"These comments show that I got out ahead of you. I knew what you would say before you said it, and you never got the chance to see that's what you would have said.
My work here is done."
Thanks for reminding the plebs of your superiority.
Subtly mocking your own predictability to mock the predictability of others: few bloggers would be able to pull that off.
Lonetown said...
After reading the comments I'm beginning th think the only reason most people go to see the Vagina Monologues is for the chance of seeing a talking vagina.
I remember seeing a feature length porn movie back in the 80s where this a talking vagina was the main plot point.
I just tried a search and came up with hundreds of hits, though I don't think the one I was looking for. Apparently talking vaginas are a big porn genre on PornHub, RedTube and these other YouTube like amateur porn sites.
Perhaps someone could do a movie of a bunch of vaginas sitting around reading the Vagina Monologs.
Here's another idea: Remember those 6' tall vaginas they had walking around the Republican convention? Maybe they could do the monologs.
John Henry
Sounds like an opportunity for me to market my new play, the Mangina Dialogues.
Althouse at her most insufferable. She writes something foolish and obnoxious (I have to blog about this because others will blog about it the wrong way), someone calls her on it and asks her to clarify, and she replies with bluster, bullshit and taunts, then runs away. "I'm done! " Yeah, you are.
After reading the comments I'm beginning th think the only reason most people go to see the Vagina Monologues is for the chance of seeing a talking vagina.
That is some enviable confidence with which you defend that piece of dreck.
Most of us were dragged by our wives who were embarrassed afterwards that they did it.
The only line I remember is when she felt bad that it was a man who made her realize that her vagina was not ugly, and not a woman.
WTF? I am still thinking WTF after all of these years.
rhardin: I use a colostomy bag, you insensitive clod!
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