Last Saturday night I joined a group of other Rose Scholars to go view the heavily advertised “Vagina Monologues”. From the name of the show, I was already pretty off-put. I didn’t have any interest in watching a trans-exclusionary radical feminist skit show on a weekend, but due to a busy week I wasn’t left with another choice but to crowd into Bailey with all the other patrons. Maybe I would be pleasantly surprised after all.

After about the third sketch about vaginal orgasms and various exclamations about pussy power, I was really glad I hadn’t coughed up 10 dollars for this show. Prior to the viewing, our GRF Sarah informed us that the show was based off the 1990’s original, and it was quite obvious. I can see a time when these sketches might have been groundbreaking or taboo, but in this day and age the message is outdated and a little ignorant. The majority of the sketches reinforced the idea that having a vagina and knowing your way around it is essential to being a woman, which completely excludes the transgendered community and other groups that identify as female without the reproductive genitalia. Other issues I had with the production were the seemly random interjections of woman’s issues in between sketches.  What’s the point of bringing up the struggles of homeless females in the United States if you aren’t going to elaborate or shed more light on the topic? Overall, with the huge platform they are given, the show would do better to update their sketches to better reflect current woman’s issues and not cater specifically to the cis-gendered.

With all that said, the performers themselves were great and committed completely to the roles they played. The show itself, however, was just not my cup of tea.