Vagina Monologues Will Be On Campus

[Updated with new information and moved to the top]

We blogged, a few weeks ago, about plans by the feminist campus student group Empowerment to perform “The Vagina Monologues” on campus.

The play, quite simply, flatly contradicts Catholic teaching on sexuality, and Student Affairs’ longstanding policy holds that no events by a student group contrary to Church teaching will be approved.

However, Student Affairs has no control over academic departments in the University, and Chris Miller, Vice President for Student Affairs, informed the representatives of Empowerment that sponsorship from an academic unit would be possible. When the play was performed on campus in 2007, the Honors Program sponsored it.

This time, it will be Social and Cultural Sciences. Roberta Coles, Chair of that department confirms that the play will be performed in the Weasler Auditorium on April 30, at 8:00 p.m.

According to Coles, there will be a talkback session with the cast and faculty after the performance. Apparently, no tickets will be required. According to Coles “it’s free and it’s a good-sized venue.”

Empowerment, by the way, was one of the selected organizations that met with lesbian academic/activist Ronnie Sanlo, when she was invited to Marquette to hold secret meetings with groups on campus considered sympathetic to the gay/lesbian agenda.

The play is morally questionable in an easy half-dozen ways, anti-male sexism being only one.

The play is ultimately insulting to women. The best analysis comes not from any conservative source, but from the liberal Slate website.

The first thing that will strike nonideologues is Ensler’s clumsy prose, which ranges between bad Rod McKuen (“It was a mouth. It was the morning.”) and the very worst of Henry Miller (“Then the quivering became a quake, an eruption, the layers dividing and subdividing”). While Ensler would call this a work of desacralizing, it’s ultimately a work of desexualizing. I take a backseat to no one in my enthusiasm for the vagina itself, but the Vagina According to Ensler is a combination between a bath toy and a household appliance. Its vision of female sexuality is at least as narrow and insulting as Henry Miller: A woman is a machine you work like a crank until you produce the desired quantity of fluid — from you and from her.

Does that mean it should not be performed on the campus of an ostensibly Catholic university?

Not necessarily. Performing the play and having a critical discussion of it would be dandy. Unfortunately, the last time it was performed, only left-leaning feminists were on the panel that discussed it. It only got criticized by English professor Heather Hathaway for not being sufficiently politically correct in several ways. (In fairness, she did criticize it for being badly written and incoherent.)

So, in the “talkback,” will any genuinely critical comments, from a Catholic or other Christian perspective, be offered?

Or is it going to be another attempt to indoctrinate students into a warped feminist view of sexual liberation?

We will continue to report on this.

Vagina Monologues Comes to Marquette Again

According to the website vday.org, The Vagina Monologues will be performed at Marquette again this year, with performances on April 14, 15 and 16.

Vice President for Student Affairs Chris Miller has confirmed that no student organization has approval to perform the play. Rather some academic unit (last time it was the Honors Program) will be sponsoring it.

[Update]:

Anthony Peressini, Director of the Honors Program, has heard nothing about this.

The person listed as the contact on the Vday website, Anahi Sanchez, has not yet responded to our e-mail.

Could it be that somebody has merely thought about presenting the play, without any firm plans?

Campus Discussion of Vagina Monologues: Conservatives Fail to Step Up

This past Saturday saw the campus performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” presented under the aegis of the Honors Program. There is plenty wrong with the play, as we have explained right here.

But one of the most comprehensive and eloquent explanations of the moral defects of the play was written by five undergraduates in a Tribune op-ed.

It said, in part:

“The Vagina Monologues” contains many problematic elements. It glorifies practices which are regarded as immoral by many Christians and non-Christians alike.

It provides no positive male characterizations and lacks any examples of healthy intimacy.

It lacks any representation of a Christian view of sexuality, though the author claims to have interviewed hundreds of women. Rather than viewing the body and sexual organs with respect, it draws on every possible vulgar reference.

From a standpoint of sexual violence awareness, the play has little to offer victims of violence or those who care for them.

True, it describes accounts of exploitation and rape in graphic terms, but the author freely admits that many of these accounts are purely imaginary and improvised.

By reducing them to a single body part - the vagina - the play objectifies and dehumanizes women while ignoring the qualities of intellect, morality, creativity and leadership which women have worked so long to have recognized by society.

With a wealth of other materials at its fingertips which would promote an educated discourse, why did the university choose this particular work?

That’s a good question, and the answer is doubtless that lefty feminists (and their liberal allies) want to perform it precisely because Christian conservatives don’t like it.

There is really little other justification.

But what is wrong with performing it on campus as a point of discussion? In principle, nothing.

But if the purpose is to promote discussion, it’s fair to evaluate the quality of that discussion. Going in, there were plenty of reasons to suspect that it would be stacked with one-note feminists who would care little for Christian views of sexuality.

The Tribune, back in early April, noted the one-sidedness of the panel slated to discuss the play, observed:

. . . with just more than two weeks left until the April 14 performance, there is no Catholic representative yet. Alongside three faculty members from political science, philosophy and English, the panel includes Rosalind Hinton, an assistant professor of religious studies at DePaul University, according to a flier for the event.

Hinton’s specialties, according to the DePaul Web site, include African American religions and gender in American religious contexts. A survey of her writings reveals little, if any, handling of Catholic issues. While it sounds like she would add perspective to this panel, there remains no faculty member, such as a priest or Catholic theologian, to represent Catholic teaching.

As we wrote in January, “if the reading is in opposition to a healthy view of female sexuality, why is this? If it is empowering, how do we understand this vision in terms of our Catholic faith?” We need to adequately represent all perspectives to answer these questions properly.

We asked Anthony Peressini, Co-Director of the Honors Program and organizer of the event, to respond to the Tribune’s criticism. He replied as follows:

The panel includes well-qualified individuals who will lead a dialogue that addresses multiple perspectives, both faith-based and academic, of the issues presented in the reading. I am not comfortable assigning “left leaning” or other labels to these individuals in this setting.

Until we hear their presentations tomorrow, I could not pre-judge or classify their opinions of the play. As I said, our goal is to present a variety of perspectives that enable a multi-faceted analysis of the issues presented in the reading. I expect our panel will do just that.

Did it happen that way?

Mostly not.

The bright spot of the evening was feminist English professor Heather Hathaway, who introduced the work. Far from providing a sycophantic view of the piece, she criticized it for (among other things) not being well written, for not being contextualized or self reflective, for being incoherent (such that sometimes we don’t actually know what it is saying), for reducing women to their genitalia and for being western and bourgeois (obsessed with the concerns of affluent feminists in rich countries as opposed to poor women in the third world).

In spite of several positive comments that she made, some of the leftists in attendance were unhappy with this.

And some conservative students were unhappy because she failed to discuss the moral stance of the play concerning human sexuality.

So who was supposed to discuss that latter issue? Who was supposed to analyze the play from a Catholic perspective? A certain Rosalind Hinton, who is an Assistant Professor of Religious studies at DePaul University. Well before the performance, blogger Daniel Suhr had no trouble establishing that Hinton is a leftist of the same stripe as Daniel Maguire.

So her performance was not surprising. She began as follows:

I’m supposed to give a Catholic viewpoint… (Short pause marked by sarcastic grin.) the Catholic Viewpoint. (Visibly rolls eyes.)

The substance of her talk wasn’t any better. According to blogger Katie Wycklendt:

She went to discuss her conviction that the acceptability of masturbation shouldn’t even be disputed [as well as asserting] her theory on the legitimacy of dispute over the Church’s stance on homosexuality, contraception, and consensual, responsible premarital sex. She asserted that Church authorities are merely trying to control people’s lives and that there is a context for every truth (a good way of getting around [explicitly] endorsing relative truth).

In other words, the speaker who was supposed to represent the Catholic perspective actually attacked the Catholic perspective!

And the issue here wasn’t whether the Catholic perspective should be the only view presented, or even whether it should be one among alternative views presented, but whether it should be represented at all.

So is this just another example of standard political correctness? Did the Honors Program (basically an adjunct of the very politically correct English and Philosophy departments) let all its biases hang out here?

In fact, the story is more complicated.

Peressini in fact expended a lot of effort trying to get a conservative speaker who would uphold the Church’s teaching. He contacted at least eight (and perhaps ten to twelve) people, all of whom turned him down. And he called the Chair of the Theology Department (which is not nearly so leftist and politically correct as English and Philosophy) to get leads on possible speakers.

Peressini appears to have shot himself in the foot by limiting his search to people with academic credentials. A well-informed and eloquent student like Suhr would have done very well.

But the most disturbing thing about this is that several fairly orthodox and conservative Catholic scholars failed to step up and defend the Church’s position. Somebody who doesn’t know better might assume that the Church’s position can’t be defended. That’s not true, but neither is it going to prevail if people won’t defend it.

The Most Revealing Segment of “The Vagina Monologues”

Performing “The Vagina Monologues” on campus has been a sort of cause célèbre among campus leftists, and sure enough they are getting to perform it this coming Saturday.

There is a lot wrong with the play, but one very revealing piece of dialogue (along with the attached directions) is as follows:

Intro — Because He Liked To Look At It

This monologue was based on an interview with a woman who had a good experience with a man.*

(*This statement is not meant to be sarcastic as much as it is matter-of fact. The laugh will actually be stronger the more straight forward the delivery.)

That’s right. The feminist audience is expected to laugh at the notion that a woman might have a good experience with a man.

Vagina Monologues: Lesbian Pedophile Seduction

It was just announced Monday. The controversial play “The Vagina Monologues” is going to be performed on the Marquette campus.

To get some idea of the controversy surrounding the play, check out an editorial in the Marquette Tribune endorsing the idea, and a column by GOP3 blogger Daniel Suhr opposing it.

We’ve just watched the HBO version of “The Vagina Monologues” (which we got from the Raynor Library), and read the 2006 version of the script at the same time.

Our first reaction is that this whole controversy is silly. Much of TVM is shtick humor, no more raunchy than what one might see on Comedy Central, in which audiences titter -- with a teenage level of maturity -- at hearing naughty words.

As a columnist in Slate put it:

Considering all the brouhaha surrounding The Vagina Monologues--Eve Ensler’s one-woman show, which has become a cult artwork and a rallying point for feminist activists and fund-raisers--the volume that reproduces them is bewilderingly slim. “You mean this,” the incredulous noninitiate will ask, “is it?”

This is an insultingly slim book. It consists of a handful of monologues by women who once felt uncomfortable with, but now rejoice in, their vaginas. There’s an inhibited old woman, an abused Southern black woman who becomes a lesbian, a lesbian dominatrix, a masturbation enthusiast, and a woman who wants to “reclaim” -- from whom is left unclear -- the word “cunt.” The book is padded with a few tiresome questionnaires devoted to what your vagina would wear if you dressed it up, what it would say if it could talk, and (this of a 6-year-old girl) what your vagina smells like, as well as a half-dozen “Vagina Facts” (like that the clitoris has twice as many nerve endings as the penis).

The first thing that will strike nonideologues is Ensler’s clumsy prose, which ranges between bad Rod McKuen (“It was a mouth. It was the morning.”) and the very worst of Henry Miller (“Then the quivering became a quake, an eruption, the layers dividing and subdividing”). While Ensler would call this a work of desacralizing, it’s ultimately a work of desexualizing. I take a backseat to no one in my enthusiasm for the vagina itself, but the Vagina According to Ensler is a combination between a bath toy and a household appliance. Its vision of female sexuality is at least as narrow and insulting as Henry Miller: A woman is a machine you work like a crank until you produce the desired quantity of fluid--from you and from her.

The show most certainly does talk about “violence against women” (the supposed socially redeeming aspect of the play) but that is only a small part. If somebody really wants to educate people about that issue, there are better ways than having a female actress read what is really little more than a stand-up comedy routine.

Conservatives have made much of some morally questionable monologues, and such monologues are certainly there.

The most notorious is the one in which a lesbian seduces a teenage girl.

If one reads the 2006 version of the script, one will find that the girl is 16 years old, and the lesbian who seduces her is 24.

But the script has been sanitized. In the original off-Broadway version, the girl was 13 years old. (The HBO version uses the sanitized script too.)

This is a bit like a politician who uses the “n-word” to refer to black people, and then manages to edit the word out of the only recording of him doing that. One can’t forget the way he really spoke. And one can’t forget that Ensler had the adult lesbian seducing a 13-year-old.

The seduction is portrayed as a sort of liberation. The character says:

Afterwards the gorgeous lady teaches me everything about my Coochi Snorcher [vagina]. She makes me play with myself in front of her and she teaches me all the different ways to give myself pleasure. She’s very thorough. She tells me to always know how to give myself pleasure so I’ll never need to rely on a man. In the morning I am worried that I’ve become a butch because I’m so in love with her. She laughs, but I never see her again. I realize later she was my surprising, unexpected and politically incorrect salvation. She transformed my sorry-ass Coochi Snorcher and raised it into a kind of heaven.

Child molestation, in other words, becomes a liberating experience for the child.

At one point, the script read:

Now people say it was a kind of rape . . . Well, I say if it was rape, it was a good rape then, a rape that turned my sorry-ass coochi snorcher into a kind of heaven.

Our guess is that the feminists who tout this play would go ballistic at a favorable portrayal of a man raping a 13 year old girl. But we suppose different standards apply to lesbians.

Also suspect, from a Catholic moral perspective, is a monologue where the narrator is a lesbian dominatrix prostitute. At least she doesn’t engage in sex acts with children.

While we respect the position of the University that academic units can make their own decisions as to what sort of presentations are appropriate for the curriculum, we frankly can’t see why anybody would want to present this silly mélange. Anybody who thinks it’s somehow liberating for women has some very odd notions about “liberation.”

Some pundits have suggested a counter-production called the “Penis Parables” in which men recite the ways in which they obsess about their penises. But the irony here is that men traditionally have obsessed about their penises, while women have not obsessed about their vaginas.

Which is one of the ways in which women are generally more sensible than men.

But for feminists, this sort of gender difference is unacceptable.