Sex Education in Amherst - High school takes on controversial play [VAGINA MONOLOGUES]

TIME ^ | 1/26/04 | NATHAN THORNBURGH

[ppaul]

Monday, Jan. 26, 2004
Sex Education in Amherst

A high school takes on a controversial play

By

NATHAN THORNBURGH

This Feb. 14, V won't stand for just valentine at Amherst Regional High School in Amherst, Massachusets. The local school board and superintendent last month approved a student request to stage The Vagina Monologues the night before Valentine's Day as part of a national campaign to call attention to violence against women. The theater piece, written by Eve Ensler, has played off-Broadway and in all-star benefits around the country and the world on Valentine's Day for the past six years. But this is believed to be the first sanctioned high school performance of the play, a collection of readings on such topics as homosexuality, rape and various parts of the female anatomy. Conservative critics like Fox News's Bill O'Reilly have joined local residents in assailing the school board's decision. "The girls who will be up there faking orgasms onstage wouldn't even be old enough to see When Harry Met Sally in the movie theater," fumes Amherst resident Larry Kelley, who read the play after he heard of the high school's plans. "But it isn't the orgasms or even the use of the C word that gets me. Rather, it's the favorable description of sex between a 24-year-old woman and a 16-year-old woman. This is inappropriateness squared for high school students." So far, however, this liberal college town; which once scuttled a performance of West Side Story at the same high school after some residents complained that its portrayal of Hispanics was insensitive; appears to be standing firm. At a town-hall meeting last week on the controversy, opponents of The Vagina Monologues were outnumbered by supporters.

Link to article: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1101040126-578986%2C00.html

[ppaul]

The teacher's unions are whining that they're not getting enough tax dollars?
They'll get even less.
This kind of perversion will ensure that even more parents start home-schooling.

[weegee]

Some high schools have also tried doing "Hair" with the nudity (this in the 1990s).

[goldstategop]

Its a liberal town... very liberal. Its the PC thing to do in Amherst - support feminazi aspirations on all four cylinders.

[lentulusgracchus]

This kind of perversion will ensure that even more parents start home-schooling.

It's time to blow the NEA out of the schools....time for a searching, pitiless political purge, to get rid of these people who've decided that education is the soft underbelly of the People, and who have mounted a major, 40-years-long assault on what the People think is right, in order to substitute Marxist vanguardism and cultural anti-Americanism for the culture we inherited from our fathers.

The NEA and the homosexual campaign are responsible for travesties like this. This is a Leftist agitprop assault on the middle class through their children.

[jla]

Liberal women, & their effete men, crow about this play like it was the greatest story ever written.
Appears to be nothing but homo propaganda and, as could be expected from liberals, lewdness & depravity.

[ppaul]

http://mensnewsdaily.com/archive/l/l-misc/lyman122803.htm

"V-Day" in Amherst

Sexualizing minors, in the name of art, has found a niche in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Last week the college town was abuzz after learning that The Vagina Monologues will be performed at the Amherst Regional High School in February with the approval of the school committee and the superintendent, Jere Hochman. According to the Amherst Bulletin, Hochman chirped, "We hope that there are ways for our students to find their voice in their years with us."

As part of a global campaign, students and staff at the school will stage the work of contentious playwright Eve Ensler on V-Day (Valentine's Day) at the close of 'violence against women' week. Proceeds from the presentation, reported the Bulletin, will be doled out to a local women's shelter. Extracting from interviews she conducted with over 200 femmes, Ensler created a series of edgy soliloquies and dialogues that are "a celebration of female sexuality."

But "celebration" is merely a misleading way to say "overkill." Promotional material for the book edition notes that the word "vagina" is used over a hundred times. Ensler's play has been featured -- sometimes with famous actresses -- all over the United States and at hundreds of college campuses. Last year an audience at Amherst College was treated to this feminist bacchanal, and one brave soul publicly complained. Writing in the student newspaper, Andrew Moin was stunned by a scene which "consisted of descriptions" of a teen-aged girl having sex with an older woman. He wasn't too impressed, either, with the scene that was titled "If Men Could Menstruate."

Poor guy. He, at least, attended to gain a better understanding of "gender relations." But who could be inspired by explicit speeches that sound more appropriate for a gynecologist's office? Consider this portion of the 'monologues':

"I come from the 'down there' generation. That is, those were the words-spoken rarely and in a hushed voice that the women in my family used to refer to all female genitalia, internal or external. It wasn't that they were ignorant of terms like vagina, labia, vulva, or clitoris. On the contrary, they were trained to be teachers and probably had more access to information than most."

Real educators, those with half a brain and a measure of discernment, would not want their adolescent students mouthing that embarrassing drivel or listening to it. But the airheads who run this school system are not unlike Michael Jackson. They have distinguished themselves by consistently showing bad judgment while in the company of children.

This is not the first time, either, that a school play has been controversial in Amherst. In 1999 a never-ending debate occurred over West Side Story because the musical, according to critics, unfavorably stereotyped Latinos. Larry Kelley, who organized a rally on the Amherst Town Common in support of the Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim classic, is perplexed with the current theatrical choice.

"Amherst Regional High School Committee became the only ruling authority in history to cancel a production of West Side Story because a distinct minority in town thought it was racist. Yet they embrace allowing young teenagers -- who could not get into an R-rated movie without a parent or guardian -- to revel in sexually-explicit material," stated Kelley.

Get the Orwellian logic, Larry? It's cutting-edge to offend the sensibilities of traditional Americans, but it's declasse to offend La Raza-indoctrinated Hispanics. It's also not the first time that sex-n-art have caused an academic rumpus.

In 1996, Amherst school officials decided to display a photo-text exhibit in the elementary schools titled "Love Makes A Family: Living in Lesbian and Gay Families." David Keenan, a father of five, joined several families in a legal action to bar the exhibit from being shown.

The legal challenge was unsuccessful, but Keenan remains glad he took a stand. "I opposed the exhibit, because it was not appropriate for the age group or the mission of public education."

Long time observers of one of the country's wackiest liberal communities wonder if the mission of public education in the People's Republic of Amherst isn't to sexualize vulnerable youngsters. If so, the shameless adults running the schools are a threat to national security and qualify as enemy combatants. Ship 'em to Guantanamo? Not a bad idea.

Izzy Lyman

Izzy Lyman is the author of The Homeschooling Revolution and operator of Icky's Blog .
She can be reached at ilyman7449@aol.com .

[csvset]

The link & url in your posts are for a school located in Nova Scotia Canada.

You may want to consider striking the url & link.

[Jim Noble]

The NEA and the homosexual campaign are responsible for travesties like this

Well, the NEA part is right.

But I think the gays are just catching a ride on the straight sexual freedom express.

Once the straight majority adopted sexual liberation as its most important value (unilateral divorce, no effective sanction for adultery, criminalization of provoked violence, abortion, nonenforcement of statutory rape law, no limits on pornography or commercial sex display), the repression of sexual minorities became impractical.

The guilty white liberals of Amherst, who no longer have much sexual liberation of their own to enjoy, get an erotic thrill out of Eve Ensler's minions corrupting their children-sort of like the same political thrill they get out of being Deaniacs.

They want to party like it's 1969. The gays are just along for the ride.

[pabianice]

But will they give equal time to "The Penis Proposal"?

[jla]

anyways there's my two cents from someone whose actually scene the play

OK, thanks.

[NCPAC]

I saw "VM" two years ago at the Mechanic Theater (Baltimore, MD). It is a good, thought provoking, and engrossing play; well written and the performance I saw was well acted. You're right, as well, regarding the Bosnia rape camps scene. In fact, I found the overall theme of the play to be far more "sobering" than "liberating."

With that being said, however, "VM" should not be performed/shown as part of any high school's cirriculum. This play is (or should be) intended for discerning adults.

[little jeremiah]

Ok, but what did you think of the scene about the homosexual seduction - older woman and young girl? Was that eye opening and riveting? And do you think that sort of thing is good for high school girls to be indoctrinated by?

[ppaul]

The link & url in your posts are for a school located in Nova Scotia Canada. You may want to consider striking the url & link.

Oops!

Admin Mod.: Please strike posts #7 & #8.
Thanks.

[ppaul]

But will they give equal time to "The Penis Proposal"?

Probably not.
"Puppetry of the Penis", http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_610064.html?menu=, seems to be more in vogue these days.

[lentulusgracchus]

Real educators, those with half a brain and a measure of discernment, would not want their adolescent students mouthing that embarrassing drivel or listening to it. But the airheads who run this school system ...have distinguished themselves by consistently showing bad judgment while in the company of children.

If they were just airheads, they would only be guilty of bad manners and bad judgment.

But they aren't airheads. They're very smart, ruthless people who are sexualizing the kids and doing lifestyle recruitment right under the People's nose. They deserve to be tried for their lives, for having engaged in the deliberate mass corruption of minors.

This, in a democracy, is the equivalent of lese majeste': they are laying hands on the posterity of the country, to alienate it from the virtues and beliefs of the young people's ancestors and convert them into conscienceless libertines and degenerates.

A distinction here: a person born homosexual and hard-wired for it by prepartum biochemistry, is homosexual. A heterosexual person who is acclimated or inducted into homosexuality is degenerate. Anyone who makes this change in a minor by seduction, coercion, or miseducation deserves a death sentence, in my book -- and is a sexual offender no matter the outcome of her or his trial.

[lentulusgracchus]

Well, the NEA part is right. But I think the gays are just catching a ride on the straight sexual freedom express.

I understand your point, but I think you're in error. What I've seen is that the gays are the drivers in this process, using GLSEN and PFLAG to network into NEA and CDC enabling contacts.

CDC did a sexual-education curriculum for Ohio about five years ago that featured the same sort of PC indoctrination, complete with secret teacher training in Delphi techniques developed by RAND, which CDC proposed that teachers use to turn aside parental objections to course content. These techniques were highly manipulative and intellectually and morally dishonest. The course content was sexualizing and radicalizing, as is the program content described here.

[MHGinTN]

The concept of 'shame' has been all but evaporated by the democrat socialist left-leaning party. Mass-a-two-sh!ts is a cesspool and this only adds to the fecal sludge floating up there. It's not surprising that such a state has sent Fat Teddy, 'the swimmer' Kennedy and Barney 'I'm butt oriented' Fwanks to our central government!