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The lights went out. The audience grew silent. The theater was cold and three women, in black and barefooted, came onstage, sat on three stools and started talking about one thing many of us cannot afford to say loudly without shame: VAGINAS.
Each of the three talked shamelessly about vaginas--how vaginas looked like, how vaginas smelled, what vaginas would say if able to talk, orgasms, sexual abuse, sexual fantasies, pelvic exams, moans, first lesbian experience--everything about vaginas. They engaged in THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES.
Eve Ensler, the award-winning playwright of The Vagina Monologues, vaguely recalls how it all started. Ensler remembers having had a conversation with an older woman who talked about her vagina and about how contemptuous her vagina was to her--this shocked Ensler and made her think about what other women thought and felt about their own vaginas. So she began asking friends. She began interviewing more than 200 women of different ages, races, religions, and professions.
Ensler writes, "I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried about what we don't think about them. So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas; to do vagina interviews, which became The Vagina Monologues. I talked with hundreds of women. I talked to old women, young women, married women, single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African-American women, Hispanic women, Asian women, Native American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. At first, women were reluctant to talk. But once they got going, you couldn't stop them."
And that's precisely what happened onstage in the second run of The Vagina Monologues here in Cebu last September 21 and 22, 2001--there was no stopping the three women onstage from talking about vaginas.
Lara Fabregas, Tami Monsod, and Lyn Sherman--seasoned stage performers--brought the vagina to life onstage in an intercourse of humor and drama. What every woman recognizes as her own personal experience of her vagina was suddenly put under the spotlight in a coitus of hilarity and seriousness.
Many of the things we talk of in hushed voices and only in private, adult conversations were revealed frankly, openly, vividly, and directly onstage. In The Vagina Monologues, one would hear of an angry vagina. In The Vagina Monologues, one would learn that one cannot love a vagina at all if one cannot love hair. In The Vagina Monologues, women learn that other women's pussies also drip when they are sexually aroused and that it is normal. In The Vagina Monologues, women rule over men in the arena of pleasure, mainly because the female clitoris has around eight thousand pleasure nerve endings--much much more than the number found in men's dicks. In The Vagina Monologues, everyone learns that getting a woman laid is not the only way to make her happy.
Not everything in The Vagina Monologues was physiological and funny though. You would also hear about an old woman revealing that her "down there" is like an old, damp cellar--dirty and despicable. And about the gruesome details of lying on the examining table, with legs spread like eagle's wings, and the silvery medical instrument the doctor pokes around pussy folds during vaginal and pelvic exams. And about the cold barrel of an armalite being thrust into a young girl's vagina. And about the painful yet fulfilling experience of giving birth.
But one might be tempted to conclude that The Vagina Monologues is JUST a hilarious play about women's sexuality. Or, for the simple-minded religious moralist, that it is just exaggerated vagina comedy, that it should be categorized as immoral and anti-family, and that it ought to receive an X-rating. It is not JUST cunt talk. There's more to the show than what the title suggests. For The Vagina Monologues contains deeply moving realizations that any person living in a highly patriarchal and male-dominated society would fail to recognize. There may be some exaggerations in the show, and therein lies its power.
For instance, one recurring theme in The Vagina Monologues was that the vagina is very much a part of every woman as much as the penis is very much a part of every man. Throughout history, women have been treated or treat themselves as if their vaginas were dissociated from their very being. It is small wonder, therefore, to read of rape, sexual abuse, sex trafficking, marital infidelity... But now, women are speaking up: the vagina is part of us; it's what makes us women.
Another recurring and interlocking theme in the show was that empowered women realize that they actually can live a happy life without men. For the macho among us, this should be stunning. What with all the religious hype about sexuality and women's roles, about our bodies being impure and undesirable. The Vagina Monologues debunks all that. It even went on to declare that Christian women have no vaginas. Christianity's deplorable lack of appreciation, or to put it more fairly, restrained appreciation, of the vagina leaves Christian women morally and God-ordainedly lesser creatures subordinated to men. A handful of nuns and priests came to watch the show that night, and I'm sure it taught them a valuable lesson. There were men, too, and their eyes glistened with tears of laughter and newly acquired wisdom.
Ultimately, The Vagina Monologues is not just about vaginas. It is about women and their bodies, feelings, and experiences. It is about men and how men treat women. It is about being a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife, an aunt, a niece, or a grandmother, as much as it is about being a son, a brother, a father, a husband, an uncle, a nephew, or a grandfather. It is about being. It is about you. It is about me.
Sarah Mae Enclona, director of S. Imprints Creative Mix and producer of The Vagina Monologues show in Cebu, said that the proceeds of The Vagina Monologues benefit the Purple Rose Campaign--a global campaign to fight sex trafficking of women and children. So there. It isn't JUST a show.
Yet, many people have found the title offensive enough not to merit an hour and a half of their precious time. Companies sought for financial support declined for multicolored reasons, the heaviest of which was the vulgar, offensive and fearsome title that would supposedly taint the companies' image. Everywhere The Vagina Monologues is shown, this seems to be the common drawback. Only a few companies showed interest in supporting a play for women's causes. Even here in the Philippines, no matter how convincingly detailed the producers' invitation is, companies would still cower at the title. Never mind the women's cause. But ask these companies to sponsor an orgiastic activity featuring close-to-naked men and women gyrating lustfully, inebriated, and virtually humping one another with clothes on at the beach, and they just might give you the cash you need. Or just look at print and television advertisements of horseback-riding, bikini-clad women selling rum--you would indeed wonder what image of women they are trying to create. You get the idea. Who earns at promoting women's causes? Who cares about vaginas?
Who cares that there are at least 75,000 Filipino women dancing, performing, or engaging in sex for a living in Japan? Who cares that Filipino women are sold for sex in Nigeria (150 were reported in 1995)? Who cares that our women have subscribed, either by will or by force, as mail-order-brides for foreign men? Who cares that since 1989, more than 150,00 Filipino women left the country either as fiancées or wives of foreigners?
You ask who cares about vaginas and you might as well answer the question "Who cares about women?"
The Vagina Monologues does, having premiered in more than 15 countries and having been translated into more than 10 languages--its concern for vaginas and women alike have reached a global scale. But the greatest achievement The Vagina Monologues can boast of is not that it has become popular, but that it has tasked the human mouth to speak for the female vagina. That it has enabled Woman to tell Man and fellow Woman who she is, what she wants, and what makes her humanly happy.
