I went to see a play called “The Vagina Monologues”. Its a very powerful play that brings out the many innovative ideas of women’s sexuality. The play represents strength, vitality, and life of a woman. This play might be humorous and amusing but some monologues are deeply emotional and honest. The play is a collection of over 200 monologues from women of different age groups, lesbian, bisexual, married and single, and many races that represented strength in women.
The play mostly talks about women’s sexuality and their genitalia in a way that reminds all females to share their stories. Many women in society had been raped, battered, gang raped and abused. The monologues are there to start and put across that women do share something in common that they should express themselves. It brings females closer together to stop the violence against women. The energy from the play teaches women not to be fearful of expressing themselves. It gives a female a chance to speak out about herself as a human being and not to be ashamed of who she is.
One monologue expressed the deep concern for a woman’ genitalia saying that it is so rarely talked about that “it needs a community, a culture” so that it won’t be in “secrecy like the Bermuda Triangle”. As much as these quotes can be applied to a woman’s genitalia it can also be applied to violence that women and girls face. If a female will openly talk about her sexuality then it’s also a way for females to get together and express their stories about violence.
A woman talking about her genitalia makes herself more confident and stronger as a person, as well as it reinforces herself as being equal to men. One other monologue talks about how women at first were “very reluctant about their sexuality”, but “once you got them going, you couldn’t stop them”. It takes time to open up, and get comfortable with your own self and the ones around you, but once you get comfortable there are things that you might share in common with others. One might think that talking about a female’s genitalia might sound embarrassing and malevolent, when in the real world it’s just an expression of ideas on a specific topic that relates to a woman. I believe that the whole point of theses monologues was to show a female that there should be a sense of confidence and power in her to speak out about the problems that face her in the world.
One monologue that I found to be very interesting was the “Angry Vagina”. It expresses the feeling of woman genitalia to be “undermined”. The monologue was played in anger and showed a lot of emotion. I found that this monologue can easily be tied to women being “undermined” in this society. It shows that women and are treated differently then the men and are portrayed as being weaker. But the monologue didn’t portray a negative image, instead it was re enforcement for a female to speak out, and express her feelings, to show that she is a powerful being.
Just a word of warning. I do not know what she has been saying this year, but in past editions of the [i]Monologues[/i] Eve Ensler has been shown to fool, twist facts, and outright lie.
For example:
Falsehood #4 "Battering is the leading cause of injury to women aged 15 to 44 in the United States."
According to Emergency Room (ER) data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and the Justice Department, about 1% of women's injuries are inflicted by male intimates. The origin of V-Day's figure is a 1984 article "Domestic Violence Victims in the Emergency Department" published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In the article, 38% of the 492 ER patients who were counted as "female victims" were men! The survey is also flawed because it was a small sample taken at only one, violence-plagued and poverty-stricken inner-city ER. The survey's authors never claimed that it was comprehensive or representative of the population as a whole.
More examples here.
http://www.glennsacks.com/eve_enslers_vDay.htm