“Why are vaginas important to you?” One hundred Connecticut College men were publicly asked this provocative question. In the resulting video, chuckles, averted eyes and mumbled “Uhhhhh…”s convey initial discomfort, yet as they process the query, the students produce comic and wise replies. The popular V-Men video, created by Alia Roth ’14 (producer of “The Vagina Monologues” on campus) has stimulated an unusually candid discussion regarding vaginas, sexuality and gender on campus. Two professors of Gender and Women’s Studies, Ariella Rotramel and Mab Segrest, offer their opinions on the video’s success, and provide steps toward furthering the gender conversation and opening it to a larger audience.
“The V-Men video,” says Rotramel, “in my opinion, is successful in encouraging men to start reflecting on their attitudes towards vaginas. It offers an opportunity to reflect on cultural discomfort and lack of information about basic human anatomy. Addressing gynophobia through these clips is particularly interesting considering the gaps that exist within a sex-saturated culture that does not adequately support sexual rights or people across genders and sexualities.”
The video opens channels toward honest dialogues regarding health and sexuality, and aims to squash a double standard that traditionally renders female sexuality a more open conversation topic than male sexuality. Additionally, the video’s candid question alleviates any pressure that falls on cisgendered men (men whose gender identity is aligns with their biological sex) to conform to a conventionally masculine silence regarding ‘women’s issues’, and unlocks the beginnings of a cross-gendered conversation.
Segrest also found the V-Men video successful. “I thought the Conn guys in “100 Men Rise” were great, one and all! This YouTube video is a moving public answer to anonymous, cowardly and trashy misogyny that periodically surfaces on CC Confessionals,” she said.
When asked what steps might be taken toward furthering the discussion, Segrest elaborated on her opinion, “There were a couple of things I noticed as possible innovations for future such productions. In some answers, the love for vaginas came from a love of and solidarity for the women who had them: mothers, sisters, friends. Other answers, also appropriate, came from a love of heterosexual sex with women: of being in vaginas.
Many students I recognized as queer were in the first category, which was a category of solidarity. The second category tilted towards the heterosexual, and it is very important for men having heterosexual sex to affirm the beauty and power of the vagina in terms of their interactions with women as lovers and mates. I’m not sure how to open up the discussion more fully to queer voices, but it’s worth thinking about. Also, I do think there should be a voice for trans students in this dialogue about vaginas. Having their answers in the mix would have shaken it all up in even more interesting ways because not all ‘female’ humans identify with their vaginas, and not all ‘male’ humans identify with penises. The people who don’t are particular targets of the very gender violence this great YouTube speaks out against.”
Rotramel agrees. “The Vagina Monologues have long been critiqued for the conflation of vaginas with women, and there has been some effort to address this concern. Nonetheless, as the video demonstrates, men slip from talking about vaginas to women, which is understandable within the existing V Day frame. To me, more in depth discussion would help disrupt essentialist understandings of gender. Our community can come together to develop ways to foreground in our discussions and advocacy work how gender and bodily difference (among other social identity markers) structure everyday forms of violence that are experienced by people across genders.”
Both professors asserted that this connotative link of vaginas to ‘female-ness’ is worth further edification. Transgender students and others whose gender identities do not line up with their assigned sex are alienated by the reduction in the video of women to ‘vaginas’.
Opportunities on campus for furthering gender education, however, abound. Segrest says, “1 in 4, the Green Dot Program, and the THINK S.A.F.E Project have transformed the campus climate around issues of sexual assault and empowered students to move from being bystanders to active intervention in cases of gender violence. GWS also has been around for over twenty years raising these issues…. The LGBTQ Center has also done great work familiarizing students with the complexity of gender and sexuality beyond the gender binary.”
A cultural binary is rarely demolished by one activist art piece, but Segrest and Rotramel agree that the open sentiment of the video and the initiative to talk constructively about sexuality is hugely positive. Prompting men to discuss the importance of vaginas is valuable in breeching communication gaps that surround gender-based political issues, and in beginning to eliminate gender-based violence.
“Feminism is not just for women and not just about women: that’s what ‘gender’ means: the way we all understand our embodiment and our relationship to what our culture marks as ‘male’ and ‘female’,” Segrest says. “It’s all a work in progress, and this is a great step forward.”
