Posted on 01/16/2015 9:43:24 AM PST by Mrs. Don-o
Good riddance! Yet...
Since the 1990s, students from Mount Holyoke College, an all-women's school in Massachusetts, have staged an annual production of The Vagina Monologues. Not this year. The college is retiring the ritual over concerns that the play—penned by Eve Ensler in 1996 as a way to "celebrate the vagina" and women's sexuality—is not inclusive enough.
In a school-wide email from Mount Holyoke's student-theater board, relayed by Campus Reform, student Erin Murphy explained that "at its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman ... Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive."
Good riddance!, I say; though I admire how women's groups have used The Vagina Monologues to raise funding for anti-violence programs, the play itself has always been a little too schmaltzy for my liking, its tone a little too outdated. That it's become (and remained) a millennial student staple has always surprised me. I wouldn't be sad to see more colleges ditching the show.
But I just can't get on board with the logic of Mount Holyoke's dismissal, similar strains of which have been seen elsewhere recently. Last January, for instance, a fundraiser for a Texas abortion-advocacy group came under fire because of its title, "A Night of a Thousand Vaginas," which some argued was hurtful to trans individuals.
In both cases here, the argument is premised on the idea that a) not all women have vaginas, and b) some men do have vaginas, because some trans individuals identify and live as a different gender than they were born without getting genital reconstructive surgery. Ergo, a trans women is a woman, full stop, but she may have a penis. A trans man is a man, full stop, but he may have a vagina. Fine. I get that. I'm cool with that. And, regardless, it doesn't matter if I'm cool with it, because how other people define their genders/bodies/sexualities is none of my concern. If you are a woman without a vagina, neat; there is totally room for all of our experiences in this great big, crazy world.
Yet I am a woman with a vagina, and this becomes an area of my concern when people start saying that I shouldn't reference or acknowlege that—that it's in fact bad and intolerant so 20th century to even speak about it. The fact that some trans women don't have vaginas doesn't negate the fact that the vast majority of women do. And now, in the name of feminism, "female-validating talk about vaginas is now forbidden," as one anonymous writer on a Mount Holyoke messageboard put it. "That's so misogynistic under the guise of ‘progress.'"
But "we can't present a show that is blatantly transphobic," countered another student, displaying the kind of rhetoric that is troubling in all this. There's certainly nothing wrong with wanting to stage a women's show that includes trans perspectives (on genitals or whatever else), but that doesn't make a show without those perspectives transphobic. It just makes it a show without those perspectives, in this case one written almost 20 years ago. And while it might be hard for today's students to imagine, in those days discouraging people from talking openly about female sexuality or suggesting that gender was anything but a social construct is what would earn you the approbation of feminists.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a staff editor at Reason.com.
Elizabeth, rather than talking to it perhaps you should let a man dust it off for you once and a wile.
Hysteria, in its colloquial use, describes unmanageable emotional excesses. The fear can be centered on a body part, or most commonly, on an imagined problem with that body part. Disease is a common complaint; see also body dysmorphic disorder and hypochondriasis.
Interesting choice of words.
There is nothing any sane person can say to refute the above paragraph.
I once met a "woman" that had a penis, I beat the hell out of that woman, but that was back in 1960 and I was young and didn't know any better, and had no respect for gender choices.
Today, being older and more respectful of gender choices, I'd just shoot the thing off of the "woman", being very careful to tell the nice police officer, that I feared for my life and was just trying to shoot "her" gun out of her hand.
What? Wait...uh....
...
My head just exploded.
Yes, apparently so. Glory be, I've lived to see the day when fish DO need bicycles.
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You and me both.
These people really are certifiably nuts.
Full stop.
They can wish otherwise all they want, but the FACT remains that gender is about X and Y chromosomes PERIOD, nothing else matters.
I really have no idea what this means. All I know is millennials sure talk a lot!
There are a small number of women of whom that is true. Not guys that want to be girls, actually XX women. They have a birth defect called Vaginal Aplasia or Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome.
There was a recent break through and they are now able to take these women's cells and grow a vagina in the lab. The implantations have so far been successful although none of the women have yet become pregnant.
It is quite a medical success story.
But I doubt these are the women they are thinking about.
Could there be ANYTHING more annoying than women without vaginas!
I need to go back to bed.
Maybe I’m just in the middle of a very bad nightmare.
American liberalism: What happens when crazy goes crazy.
That made me laugh really hard.
Buwahahahaha. I just about choked stifling my laugh (at work) when I read the title.
unfreaking believeable.
They have this play in the first place stunned me but then to cancel the whack job play over some women don’t have vagina’s is pure stupidity.
I am so happy I convinced my wife to leave that socialist lunatic state to come south with me and raise our children.
I nearly spat my drink out over the keyboard then.
I can only think what this woman looks like too. No doubt she looks like the usual far left lunatic women
There has to be a wall built around New England and stop them moving about the country.
How does one even get that screwed up in the head in the first place?
They are truly insane......
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