"Does the world really need another older White woman (and I say this as an older White woman) speaking on behalf of communities we are not a part of?"

"What more than two decades ago would have been considered the well-intentioned act of sharing a substantial platform now feels a bit like inserting an unnecessary middleman (or woman) into the mix."

Writes Kimberly Harrington in "Decades after ‘The Vagina Monologues,’ its creator seeks a reckoning In her new book, ‘Reckoning,’ Eve Ensler, now known as V, delves into the personal and the political and again asks us to speak out" (Washington Post).

Let's look at the front end of "feckless c*nt."

I'm only using the asterisk because I know it will literally cost me money (in Google ads) to put the written out "c" word in the post title. My preference would be to write it out, and the whole fuss over it...



... strikes me as stupidly retro, phony feminism. I don't even like "The Vagina Monologues," but, good lord, the "Reclaiming Cunt" scene is hellishly relevant today:

I call it cunt. I’ve reclaimed it, “cunt.” I really like it. “Cunt.” Listen to it. “Cunt.” C C. Ca Ca. Cavern, cackle, clit, cute, come-closed c-closed inside, inside ca-then u-then cu-then curvy, inviting sharkskin u- uniform, under, up, urge, ugh, ugh, u — then n then cun — snug letters fitting perfectly together — n — nest, now, nexus, nice, nice, always depth, always round in upper case, cun, cun-n a jagged wicked electrical pulse-n (high pitched noise) then soft n-warm n — cun, cun, then t — then sharp certain tangy t — texture, take, tent, tight, tantalizing, tensing, taste, tendrils, time, tactile, tell me, tell me “Cunt cunt,” say it, tell me “Cunt.” “Cunt.”

I thought that was a bit coyly old-fashioned when the play first came out in 1996, but apparently Americans still haven't gotten comfortable with "cunt." I've had it with the bullshit puritanism of present-day American politics. If you can call someone an "asshole," you should be able call them a "cunt," but it's just too easy in social media to latch onto a word, to snatch the "cunt," grab that pussy, and see if you can destroy somebody today.

Well, I wasn't going to say all that, but I did and I mean it. I just wanted to give some attention to the "feckless" part. Why "feckless"? It's not a common word. To ask the question is to have the answer pop immediately into your head. Perhaps Samantha Bee already revealed the reason for "feckless." I don't know. I didn't listen to her routine. I don't even like her. She annoys me. Too much loud sassy politics that assumes you're on a particular side. I'm so bored with that. But I did a google search to see if my understanding of the reason for "feckless" was right, and I can see that many others have arrived in the same place:



"Feckless" stands in for "fuckless." And that does deserve a feminist swat. To use "fuckless cunt" as an insult means that you think that a vagina that does not receive the male organ is a pathetic, lesser place that the one that gets the male organ inserted even in the least loving satisfying way. The cunt should get fucked or it's totally worthless. That's just horrible feminism, Samantha Bee. Just apologize for "feckless."

In case you're wondering what the fuck "feck" even is that we should feel bad about the lack of it, it's just another way to say "effect." So to be "feckless" is to be lame, without effect. Obviously, there's no reason to say that about Ivanka.

The Menopause of the "Monologues."

"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).

"Perhaps Regina Marcia Benjamin should suggest teaching pro-abortion-rights bloggers that masturbation is part of human sexuality."

Says Meade, here, in the discussion of the ugliness of the mockery of the "masturbating fetus," and alluding to Benjamin's predecessor in the role of Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, who was fired by Bill Clinton in 1994 for saying that children should be taught that masturbation "is a part of human sexuality, and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught."

(She meant taught about, but there was much mockery, as people assumed or pretended they believed that she thought that school teachers should be showing children how to do it, as opposed to simply teaching that it's something that many people do, that isn't physically harmful, and that avoids pregnancy and disease.)

This mockery of masturbation is quite fascinating. I'm drawn to Scalia's notorious dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, in which he defended the state's power to criminalize sodomy:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices.

Imagine a state today attempting to prosecute the crime of masturbation. Of course, the defense would be the right of privacy, and the courts would hear masturbation described in the loftiest terms. It would parallel what we heard — over the past few decades — about homosexuality, which was initially viewed as a lowly or ridiculous matter that didn't belong in the treasured realm of constitutional rights.

Given the importance of privacy rights to the pro-abortion-rights bloggers, I think their laughing at the masturbating fetus shows the poverty of their understanding of the very rights they'd like to pressure others to believe in.

By the way, that much-produced theater piece "The Vagina Monologues" gets reverent about masturbation:

I lay back and closed my eyes. I put the mirror down. I watched myself floating above myself. I watched as I slowly began to approach myself and re-enter. I felt like an astronaut re-entering the surface of the earth. It was very quiet this re-entry, quiet and gentle. I bounced and landed, landed and bounced. I came into my own muscles and blood and cells and then I slid into my vagina. It was suddenly easy and I fit. I was all warm and pulsing and ready and young and alive. And then, without looking, with my eyes still closed, I put my finger on what had suddenly become me. 

As the Supreme Court said: "one's own concept of existence." Or as the commenter at the fetus-mocking pro-abortion-rights blog said: "'I fap, therefore I am'? Sounds like a plausible slogan for today’s GOP wankers. Jesus God." Exactly. Jesus. God. Cosmic.

At the UW-Madison: Who pounded on the window and made a lewd gesture during a performance of "The Vagina Monologues"?

"Actors in the play asked for a public apology from a sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, whose members were filing out of a bus and in the area near the Brink Lounge, 701 E. Washington Ave., when the disturbance occurred."

“It came at the absolute worst moment, when women were putting themselves out there and telling stories of real pain and violence,” said Aliza Feder, a UW-Madison senior theater major who was part of the cast.

It’s not clear that the people who disturbed the play are part of the sorority, said Kevin Helmkamp, associate dean of students.

Sorority! Is there a rift in the enormous sisterhood of women?

It’s also unclear whether they knew it was a performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” the popular play by Eve Ensler about women’s empowerment.

Well, then I guess it was also unclear — if they did know it was a performance of "The Vagina Monologues" — whether their pounding and gesturing expressed their objection to the message of empowering women, their wild enthusiasm about vaginas, a thoroughly justified aesthetic opinion that the play is bad, an alert to the audience members that it's not the 90s anymore and it's time to come out and have some fun, or maybe it was a protest against the monologue "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could, in which a woman recalls memories of traumatic sexual experiences in her childhood and a self-described 'positive healing' sexual experience in her adolescent years with an older woman," in which case it was unclear whether they knew if the line "If it was rape, it was a good rape" was censored from the play in this particular performance.

The show was held in the basement of Brink Lounge. Near the end, a bus parked on East Washington Avenue let out members of the sorority for their spring formal to be held in a basement lounge adjacent to the theater space. A large window forms part of the back wall of the theater fronting East Washington Avenue. 

The majority of sorority members walked by without incident, Feder said. One woman allegedly starting pounding on the window as the scripted portion of the play was concluding, she said. After a brief lull, other young men and women joined, with most pounding on the window and one woman briefly lifting up her skirt, she said.

I'm guessing wild enthusiasm about vaginas.

"Forty-one years after Germaine Greer issued her infamous directive, the ladies seem to have complied."

What Greer said, leading off this NYRB review of Naomi Wolf's presumably idiotic book "Vagina: A New Biography" was: "Lady, love your cunt."

To be sure, not every iteration of vagina pride represents an unambiguous advancement for the feminist cause. It is a matter of dispute whether Eve Ensler’s twee flights of fancy about vaginas that smell like “snowflakes” are really good for the sisterhood. And whatever Greer was hoping for when she enjoined women to “boast of…their venery,” it is safe to say that it was not “vajazzling,” the modern trend of affixing crystals to the shaven pudendum.

One might reasonably argue that the occasional outburst of snowflakery is a tolerable price to pay for liberation. But Naomi Wolf would counsel against such complacency. In her new “biography” of the vagina, she warns that her subject is in danger of being trivialized by its cultural ubiquity. The vagina, properly understood, is, “part of the female soul” and the medium for the “meaning of life itself.” In order to free female sexuality from patriarchal calumny, pornographic distortion, and some of the damaging myths of second-wave feminism, it is essential, she argues, that women reclaim the “magic” of the vagina and restore it to its rightful place at “the center of the universe.”

"I don't think I've ever called anybody a genius, except sarcastically."

I just said, to Meade, after he misread the title of the last post as something I'd written, when it was a quote from a Wall Street Journal editorial. (Not that the Wall Street Journal was calling anybody a genius. It was characterizing what other people were saying about John Roberts, and, in my view overstating it.)

I decided to check my impulsive assertion. Have I ever called anybody a "genius" (without sarcasm)?

On February 15, 2008, I called Jane Fonda "some kind of media genius... a media genius — a media whore." And I called Eve Ensler "genius" for thinking up a play — "The Vagina Monogues" — that's so completely easy to produce and perform — "3 women sit on stools and get to read their lines off index cards."

On June 28, 2001, Howard Kurtz had called Mitt Romney a "boring genius," and I restated that as "a genius at being boring."

On March 14, 2012, I called Rush Limbaugh a "media genius," but not "enough of a genius" to have deliberately set off the Sandra Fluke flap for publicity purposes.

On December 30, 2011, I said "The guy's a genius!" about James Franco, but that was complete sarcasm.

October 14, 2011, I say this about Steve Jobs: "Here we are, mourning our loss of a genius, and the genius (apparently) fell for the monumental stupidity of 'alternative' medicine." I'm only referring to his reputation as a genius, and I'm calling him stupid.

June 14, 2011: I say "The idiot is a genius!" about Sarah Palin.

January 24, 2008: I refer to Dolly Parton as a "pop culture genius."

I see I need to amend my original quote: I don't think I've ever called anybody a genius, except sarcastically or in the specific category of genius: media genius.

ADDED: Contemplate the possibility that John Roberts is a genius — a media genius.

Freudian slip of the day.

In the previous post, I was writing about women who need to be "continually push[ed] to value their insights," and it came out as one of those near-homophone typos: "continually push[ed] to value their insides."

Didn't mean to wander over into "Vagina Monologues" territory.

You guys fell into the "vagina" trap!

Gotcha! Once again. Right between the legs! Eve Ensler flies in for the occasion.

"I just think the idea that she doesn't believe in global warming is bizarre..."

"... we just kind of have to walk around the world at this point and look at what is happening to nature and earthquakes and tsunamis."

Here's a tip: When you want to call somebody dumb, try not to say anything dumb.

Now, Eve Ensler, to make up for your embarrassing derision, you can "walk around the world." Make sure to take a running leap when you get to the oceans.

She "worships the female sexual organ, seeing it as her god."

Uganda denounces Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues."

The Ugandan government has condemned "The Vagina Monologues," which is to be staged in the country later this month, saying it is part of an international effort to corrupt the moral fabric of Ugandans. The state minister of information, James Nsaba Buturo, said the government had no plans to ban the play, but said the title "is undoubtedly indecent and tasteless" and the content "promotes values that are a threat to our country."

Well, good for them for not banning it! Myself, I think the play is awfully bad, though I couldn't care less if Ensler "worships the female sexual organ."

(Political theology might be this blog's theme of the day. See previous post.)

UPDATE: In the end, Uganda did ban the play.