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for anti-violence programs, the play itself has always been a little too schmaltzy for my liking, its tone a little too outdated.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.
Actually, the best thing to say would be.....
OK, Jesus. It’s time. Come back NOW!!!!!
Does this mean John Boehner could or could not attend....
Good Christian women like you need not say anything, Mrs. Don-o
Let me say it.
Women without vaginas must be women with penises. If anyone does not know what that is...we’ve had one as president for the last 6 years.
:sigh:
No.
A understandable mistake in today's world but still, no.
See post 31.
The liberal lovers of political correctness being skewered on their own petard. You can only laugh.
If you could get the jerks to go ahead and host the silly play (which I think is dumb, but that’s beside the point), you might achieve a small breakthrough with them in their understanding the stupidity and harm in all the political correctness they created.
Are you looking up?
Because I strongly believe we’re “seeing these things come to pass”.
I could not agree more.
LOLOL
I agree with you and note that the number of such cases are a tiny fraction 'way below one percent. Which only goes to highlight the incredible stupidity of this student's statement, quoted above, concerning the overwhelming percentage of normally vagina'ed women:
"student Erin Murphy explained that "at its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman ... "
Note the characteristic of propaganda-writing as opposed to objective reportage: the above quoted student Erin Murphy "explained that..." —rather than "stated her opinion that", or "claimed that", or even just "said that"...
Utter, incomprehensible, stark raving madness.
These people have taken leave of their senses, abandoned the use and authority of reason, defenestrated logic from their ivory towers, rejected the very concept of objective truth.
They are, perhaps willingly and wittingly, servants of The Enemy.
Liberalism?
This risible stupidity is on REASON dot COM!
That's a LIBERTARIAN outfit ...
I guess liberalism and libertarianism meet at libertinism ... or just at madness.
Percentage wise a very small number but they are still out there.
I just don't want these women to be confused with the guys who have mental problems. Which happens a lot.
One group needs medical help for a physical problem. The other needs mental help because they are kooks. :)
In this administration, they never shut up.
Oh my...I even understand what PIV stands for.
Unfortunately, that’s not too far off for some of the modern crap on the market.
Hey! That’s no way to talk about the President!
;^)
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