Rarely do you hear the word ‘vagina’ spoken multiple times within a two-hour period, unless of course your profession happens to be gynecology. It is also rare for the subject of an entire performance to be about vaginas, unless of course you are talking about “The Vagina Monologues.”
On Friday the lights dimmed and fourteen women took the stage in a semi-circle of girl power. The opening started with the girls talking about how they were worried about their vaginas and what to call them. Many different vagina nicknames were tossed around stage and the conclusion was that because we never really get to, women “secretly love talking about their vaginas.”
“The Vagina Monologues” are not for the faint of heart. For some women there was surely embarrassment and a certain strangeness about this unexamined subject. For other women it was liberating to collectively analyze the vagina, a neglected topic of conversation.
Some of the performance was hilarious, while some was incredibly depressing. What all the words had in common was their poignant power, and their ability to stir the female soul.
The monologues performed at USM this year were about everything ranging from rape, insecurity and anger to orgasms, hair and reclaiming the word “cunt.” One story was about a woman who reached the age of 72 before having her first orgasm, all due to a bad experience she had as a teenager with a guy who insulted her vagina’s wetness. These kinds of stories illustrated a deeper sense of the women-hating that goes on in this world.
Most devastating were the monologues about rape. “My Vagina Was My Village,” “The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could” and “Say It” were heartbreaking stories of women whose vaginas were invaded, torn apart, raped, bruised, damaged and lost in a world of hurt. In between monologues some sobering facts were shared about the rape, violence, genital mutilation and other horrors that occur around the world. In case the devastating foreign country statistics weren’t shocking enough, right here in the U.S. over 200,000 women are raped every year. And those are just the reported cases.
To balance out the pain a little there were monologues intended to make the audience laugh-which they did with great success. Some of the highlights include “My Angry Vagina,” “Reclaiming Cunt” and “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy.”
“My Angry Vagina” was a sort of rant against the constricting forces society puts on vaginas–tampons, douches, and those wonderful metal tools at the dreaded gynecologist. One girl “reclaimed cunt” in a series of pleasurable screams and giggles. One of the funniest was “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy,” where one woman imitated different kinds of orgasmic moans–clit, vaginal, combo, almost, right on it, African American, Jewish, Catholic, uninhibited militant bisexual and many more, all the way to the final moan: the surprise triple orgasm moan, by which point the audience was in absolute hysterics.
The show ended on another sobering note with a very real video of women in the Congo who are being raped as a “war tactic” right now. By the end of it people were wiping their eyes again-it was incredibly moving and very depressing.
This year’s V-day Spotlight Campaign is on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the femicide that is happening there right now. Hundreds of thousands of girls-from ten month old babies to 70 year old women-have been and are still being systematically raped. Our world is an atrocity, where the pain and damage put upon women everywhere is often lost, floating around in a deep, dark hole.
Despite all the intense emotions, and undoubtedly because of them too, the Vagina Monologues were absolutely amazing. All in all it was an incredible, moving and fabulous show, and if you have never seen it, next year is waiting for you!
The Vagina Monologues were written by Eve Ensler in 1996 and have been performed yearly all over the U.S. to raise awareness of violence against women, in a fight to save vaginas everywhere. All proceeds from USM’s performance this year are going to the Sexual Assault Response Services of Southern Maine.