On the Vagina Monologues

2.20.2007

It’s still not a word I’m comfortable with. Cunt. Awkward. The cuss word so bad that you heard whispers of it before you actually knew what it was. A secret, seedy word for smoky locker rooms. The woman behind me shouts it loudest, “Cunt!” From all around the room people join into the chorus, “Cunt!” I can’t shout it very loudly; I’ll start laughing too hard. Ooooh, they said a bad word. Not to mention coochie snorcher, pussy cat, mushmellow, and down there. Welcome to the Vagina Monologues. An emancipation of the least talked about female body part.

I was surprised that I could laugh so much about something I had previous only spoken of while drunk. I knew it was there, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to sit in a room full of people chanting about it. They were selling chocolate vaginas at the door. I noticed them, smiled so I would look progressive, and then walked away a little too quickly. I mean, I’m not that progressive.

They start with the word. “It’s a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. If you use it during sex—trying to be politically correct, ‘Darling, could you stroke my vagina?’—you kill the act right there.” It only gets better from here. A monologue about hair “down there.” You know what I’m talking about. A woman describes how her husband blames his extramarital affairs on the fact that she won’t shave her vagina. Their therapist thinks this shows that she is unwilling to compromise in the relationship. The woman experiments with it but decides she feels to puffy, to prepubescent. She needs the hair as “fluff” or padding. “Besides,” she says, “my husband never stopped screwing around.”

At times, I laughed so hard that I shook. I wanted to get on top of my seat and cheer. Take the cold “duck lips” they use to do women’s yearlies. Who does think these things up? The scratchy hospital gown. The whole sterile, somewhat bizarre examination—sliding your bum into an extremely vulnerable position. Ahem. There were monologues that showed the range of views women have about their body. Questions of: “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?” Or: “If your vagina could talk, what would it say?’ Then there is the woman who is afraid she has lost her clitoris. And the story about the older woman who had closed up “down there” because of an embarrassing incident with a lot of vaginal wetness. “The flood,” she calls it. After she closed up down there, she started having dreams about Burt Reynolds. “He never did much for me in life, but in my dreams…” In her dreams, Burt pulls her close, and just as he is about to kiss her a flood comes from her vagina. She says, “There would be fish inside it, and little boats.” So she has put up an imaginary sign: “Closed due to flooding.” It’s funny and sad. It points to how fragile we are about our vaginas—how small, embarrassing things can have a major impact. This fragility, the pain and tenderness, is what make the Vagina Monologues truly poignant.

Her face is round and cherub like, blond hair, big cheeks. “My vagina was green, water soft pink fields, cow mooing sun resting sweet boyfriend touching lightly with soft piece of blond straw,” she says. She has an air of innocence about her, it is amplified by the innocence of the text, a monologue about beauty and hope. Beside her is a girl in black, long black braids that reach down her back. She is somewhat hunched at points, angry, volatile. “I do not touch. Not now. Not anymore. Not since…Not since a piece of my vagina came off in my hand.” They go back and forth. The cherub faced girl speaks of hope and desire. The other, “Not since they took turns for seven days smelling like feces and smoked meat, they left their dirty sperm inside me. I became a river of poison and pus, and all the crops died and the fish.” It is the most chilling scene of the entire show—hope and potential smashed by reality. The vagina as an entrance for joy and destruction. A tearing of the soul as the flesh splits open.

A similar account is told of the Korean comfort women who were forcibly recruited by the Japanese government to serve the sexual needs of their soldiers during WWII. The women were made to wear a simple dress, with a button opening for easy access. It was planned rape on a massive scale—someone had to design and manufacture these dresses. The Korean women were raped until they could no longer walk. Raped until they could no longer have children. Raped as they bled. Raped for hours. Some of them tried to kill themselves, some were brutally beaten to death, others gunned down as they fled. These women were viewed as holes—an easy tool for Japanese masturbation. The Japanese government has removed records of these events; they have taken the information out of textbooks. Now these women are rising, are at the Japanese embassy saying, Put us back in your history books. See us. Do not hide what has happened to us. Japanese government, say you are sorry. We are seventy and eighty years old. Do not let the truth die with us. Japanese government, say you are sorry.

I was embarrassed to be crying in so public a place, until I heard the girl next to me gasp and start weeping softly. All around the audience, people held one another—acknowledging the pain of these women and their own pain. A collective consciousness, a collective grief. It was cathartic; it was devastating; it was jubilant. So that when the piece on women and sexual pleasure came up—the actors moaning on stage—we all laughed at the hilarity of it and cheered at the triumph. Watching and performing the Vagina Monologues is essentially a form of bearing witness to the horror and transcendence housed in that little member. It is celebration and grief rolled into a rollicking, profane show. It crosses all boundaries, is bigger and larger than anything I’ve seen and still, at the end, I was wondering, is that all? Won’t they keep going? There is still so much to say. So here, I’ll say my small part of it.

My vagina tastes like lemons, a little bit tart and sweet. If it were given the chance to get dressed up, it wouldn’t; it would walk in the nude, feet dipping into the soft, wet earth, swimming in a cold creek. If my vagina could talk it would say, “See me. Let me be both grief and joy. Ecstasy and sadness.” My vagina is a mouth, opening and closing. It pulsates, moves; it is dry and wet. My vagina houses so much pain. The pain of being a rape survivor. My vagina is life to me. Hope and new beginnings. My vagina is eagerness, unspoilt and indestructible. My vagina is wild charlock. Simple. Beautiful. It has been tampered with, attempted to be killed off and still it lives, As Maya Angelou would say, “Now she is rising.” Rising. My vagina is a rising waterfall, cresting and moving towards the sun. My vagina is silly thoughts and whimsy. Prayer and hope, touch and softness. Sweet lips upon lips upon lips. Moistness. My vagina is the key that connects me to other women. The secret passcode I know. My vagina connects me to lives of the future and lives of the past. My vagina is a place of life and death. My vagina. My vagina wants to be heard. Wants to shout, “How dare you!” My vagina does not want to be condescended to, to be prayed for, or acted like it doesn’t know what it is doing. My vagina wants to lead a parade in its own honor. Saying, Look what we have come through now, see how we are rising. Awkwardly, bumps and bruising, falling and rising, rising. Rising higher than we have ever risen before. My vagina is a sunrise. A hot air balloon, throwing off weights to go higher and higher into the sky. My vagina is earth and groundedness. True beauty. Trees grow there, shrubs, and rabbits play in the shade. My vagina is a wolf—a brilliant untamed thing, a misunderstood animal, wild, its own. My vagina is not always so serious. My vagina is a pretty pink princess who wears tiaras and dances in the snow.

Sometimes, I feel a terrifying nothingness down there. A numbness that won’t leave, like part of me has fallen asleep, and refuses in some somnambulant fashion to not wake again. To stay dead. I would call you Lazarus. Raise you from the dead. I would call you my darling, stretch my body across yours and pray, beg for your life back to me. Awake, sweet one. I will massage the muscles of your heart until they beat again. I will put my lips to yours and blow until your chest rises and falls. Awake from your druggedness. Awake from your numbness, your brokenness.

My vagina is a trumpet, a declaration, you can hear the sound ringing, barreling, if only you will listen, if only you want to hear. My vagina is my light and my beauty. My vagina is moss. Soft to touch, to lay your face against. Not melodramatic, just me. Not too much. Me. My vagina is not “too” anything. She is. She is.

Ultimately, the show was amateurish, a group of college girls, sometimes stumbling over their lines, sometimes performing brilliantly. You could tell there were a few that felt awkward to be on stage. For me, this heightened the poignancy, brought the production closer, an intimacy, a realness. When girls my own age spoke, not 20 feet from me, about violence, about transcendence, I wanted to jump up on stage and say, “Me, too! I am a Vagina Warrior!”

We are just opening to hope. Opening slowly. Learning to love our vaginas. Learning to hope. To laugh with ourselves about the dreaded v-word. Or c-word. Or even, our coochie snorchers.