I don’t love The Vagina Monologues. It’s a loaded statement that invites the multitudes of vagina warriors on our campus to fight and convince me otherwise.
When Eve Ensler first published The Vagina Monologues, in 1996, the collection of monologues was scandalous and revolutionary. The monologues sparked a dialogue about the cultural taboo of speaking out about vaginas. Since its inception, VagMons has become a preeminent platform for women to examine sexism and sexuality.
The VagMons movement has changed hundreds of thousands of women’s lives and raised millions of dollars to stop violence against women. It would be unspeakable to undermine these incredible accomplishments and contributions.
My qualm is that the monologues themselves are now outdated.
Most of the monologues are written from a middle–class, straight, white woman’s perspective. As a result, the play fails to show the wide range of experiences of womanhood.
Ensler conducted 200 interviews and tried to capture the perspectives of many women, but these interviews are filtered through Ensler’s voice. In VagMons, women of color and non–Western women play only a small part in a supposedly universal, but particularly white and Western, representation of female sexuality.
In countries like Korea and the Netherlands, culturally appropriate adaptations of the play have been written to combat the inherently Western (specifically, American) material that they find culturally irrelevant and degrading.
At Penn, our extremely diverse cast and crew may seem to offset these concerns, but the original script still creates problems. For example, “My Vagina Was My Village” graphically describes the rape and torture of a Bosnian woman. Rather than destabilizing stereotypes about the female experience in the “Third World”, the monologue strengthens the narrative of poor, ethnic victims.
In addition, the monologues also fail to include the trans community. Despite its one (optional) monologue about a transgendered woman, the play perpetuates the idea that the vagina is what makes a woman. What about the women who do not have vaginas? Or men who do have vaginas? Or people who identify differently altogether?
The play suggests that those without vaginas cannot identify as women and that those with vaginas have no choice but to do so. As a result, VagMons fails to encompass not only transgender and genderqueer identities but celibate, abstinent, bisexual and disabled individuals.
Every year, V–Day has a “spotlight campaign” which highlights a particular group of women who are experiencing violence, with the intent of raising awareness and funds around and toward their specific issue. Over the past decade, attention has been called to the women of Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Iraq. I fear that those who hear these stories without ever being introduced to that region’s broader cultural fabric won't hear the perspectives of the women who actually live there.
On one point, Ensler and I agree: the world has changed dramatically in the twenty years since The Vagina Monologues debuted. In fact, Ensler believes that new voices should be writing new plays if they wish to have a Vagina Monologues–esque work to reflect these growing concerns over her original script.
In support of the general cause, you’ll find me in the audience at Penn’s annual production of The Vagina Monologues. But maybe in time, we can move away from this specific play and perform a new work that will give voice to the strains found in Ensler’s aging play.
I believe Ensler would celebrate the feminist movement—and her legacy—continuing with a new generation of women filled with diverse hardships, pleasures and perspectives.
Correction: An earlier version of this article falsely stated that Eve Ensler conducted over 300 interviews to create The Vagina Monologues. As the article now says, Ensler conducted 200 interviews.
