Watching the Vagina Monologues was overall an experience that I’m glad I’ve had.  Many of the stories were extremely valuable stories to hear.  The two that I found the most powerful were the story of a Bosnian woman  who was raped over and over to the point of physical mutilation during the war in Yugoslavia, and the story of an old woman who was mocked by her first date for getting aroused at a kiss and then lived the rest of her life as a virgin out of shame.  There were funny moments, touching moments, and plenty of the “scandalous” discussion of sexuality that the title promises.

The first time I watched a girl have a fake screaming orgasm on stage, I was taken-aback and impressed at the audacity in exactly the same way that the very title “Vagina Monologues” is intended to take-aback and impress.  However, the eighth time I watched a girl have a fake screaming orgasm on stage, I was beginning to be less impressed.

I was disappointed with the lack of variety in the messages of the stories that were told.  I was also disappointed in the failure of the show to address some very important modern issues related to sexuality and sexual health.  Not including the intro and conclusion, on the program I count 4 acts that covered: genital mutilation, rape in war-torn areas, childbirth, and violence against transgender women (I suppose was a nice gesture, but it came across as a sorry attempt to gloss over the fact that the very premise of the rest of the show seems to define womanhood as having a vagina, which is inherently exclusionary to transgender women).  These acts were rather smothered among the remaining 13 acts that ALL conveyed the general message that “Your vagina is yours, unique, and natural. You should not be ashamed of it or of sex.”  Which is not to say that that’s a bad message.  It’s true, and it’s something that should be known.

However, as Sara pointed out beforehand, the Vagina Monologues was written out of a 90’s movement — and that was very evident.  I can only assume that dispelling the shame and mystery about sex for women was a huge, huge deal at the time.  This is 2017 though.  I was born just after the Vagina Monologues premiered, and I’ve been hearing things like this my entire life, I suspect due to a mass movement to normalize comfort with your body and your relationship with sex.  Your body is yours, sex should be fun, etc.  Maybe there are other countries, or other places in this country, where this message is still new and risqué.  Maybe I speak from a limited perspective as someone who grew up in a non-religious household in a liberal city.  Ultimately though, I don’t think that sex and orgasms are the mystery that they might have been to women who grew up 40 years ago.  A 3 second google search returns 27.5 million results about “how to have an orgasm”.  Everything from Cosmo articles to Web.md to a Columbia University advice column.  Any porn site (or for that matter any general media site like tumblr or reddit) can instantly show you people having sex any way you could possibly want to see it.  BDSM, gay/lesbian, group sex.  Advice and communities and information and straight up porn about anything you could possibly be into.  I assure you, to those of us living in the modern world, sex and sexual organs are not a mystery.

For instance, one section of the show was introduced as the story of a homeless woman who was interviewed in a shelter.  The section then went on to mention absolutely nothing about homelessness.  Or homelessness and sexual assault, dealing with periods as a homeless woman, or homelessness and its prevalence among the LGBT community.  Now, the story that was told instead was in itself a powerful one to tell: a young girl is taught that her vagina is something to be hidden and ashamed of and then raped at the age of 10.  However, save for the sentence or two about the rape itself, the vast majority of this story continued into a long, detailed account of the woman’s one-night stand with a female neighbor, through which she learned to love sex.  Then, this story was sandwiched in among a dozen other stories of very similar focus.  A woman goes to a workshop and finally finds her clitoris.  A woman has sex with a partner who thinks her vagina is beautiful.  A woman finds that she likes being a professional dominatrix more than being a lawyer.  Etc.  Etc.

And yet, for a play that is so heavily and even exclusionarily centered on the literal, physical vagina, it included absolutely nothing about abortion rights.  Nothing about birth control.  I suppose many of the stories could be interpreted as sort of oblique references to the importance of sexual knowledge, but there was absolutely no advocacy for effective sex education.  Planned Parenthood was not mentioned once.  There was a brief section on how short skirts aren’t invitations, but the discussion of campus rape that followed took the general attitude that, “You can get raped even if you do everything right.”  Which is true.  It is not, however, the strong stance on combating rape and sexual harassment that I wanted to hear.  There was no discussion about protecting your friends and helping strangers out of bad situations, no mention of the decision to press charges or not, no hotlines or ways to get support mentioned, and not even any general discussion about the meaning and importance of consent. Despite the pages in the program about the “V-day” movement, as far as I remember domestic violence was mentioned only in a 10 second remark expressing pity towards a girl who didn’t think her abusive relationship was a problem.

With the massive recent changes to our idea of what gender is, being a woman isn’t about having a vagina anymore.  This production, in the modern times, could have been a great platform to talk about what exactly femininity is and the roles that it plays in our lives.  Even aside from more discussion of sexual harassment, consent, and domestic violence, there are so many topics that could have been interesting, inclusive, and relevant.  Why are things like sports and computers considered inherently unfeminine?  Why are so many things largely enjoyed by women considered infantile and stupid?  What about the pressure to have children and “settle down”?  What about rights for parental leave?  Women in STEM?  What about body image?  Makeup and clothing?  What about the idea that both being “too feminine” and being “not feminine enough” seem to attract scorn?  What about media and self esteem?  I understand that no singular show could address all of these issues to any reasonable depth, but to address none of them?  This production was not about femininity, about being a woman, or about women’s issues.  Instead this was, as I suppose the title promised, a play that was very literally about vaginas, complete with vagina pictures, vagina stories, vagina descriptions, and vagina metaphors.

I suppose this was simply not intended to be the show that I wanted it to be.  Maybe it was just a bit outdated and really didn’t aspire to do anything but raise awareness for female genitals.  Maybe it was intended to be very sensitive to the opinions of anti-abortion/anti-birth control portions of the population, and therefore not bring up those issues.  However.  HOWEVER.  The ending was particularly baffling.  To conclude this show in which just about no controversial issues were addressed, the performers all gathered on stage and shouted, “This is what democracy looks like!”, as though they’d just rallied us all with a defiant and poignant political statement.  I did not feel particularly rallied.  Or perhaps I did, but more by what the production failed to say rather than by what it said.  The Vagina Monologues is a show that leaves all the worms safe and cozy in their cans.