As an activist, it is my deepest responsibility to accept constructive criticism and to be open to the idea that my work can be problematic – especially when coming from a place of racial, economic and cisgender privilege. I want to thank my peers, mentors, staff and faculty who have been open and honest with me throughout this process. I want to thank my co-producer, Ari Holden and everyone who expressed concern with this movement on our campus in a productive and thoughtful way. I want to thank everyone who has supported this movement in our community and will continue to support it as it reaches this pivotal point of transformation.
When I first saw The Vagina Monologues my freshman year at Connecticut College, the show changed my life. I felt empowered, liberated, and more motivated than ever to get involved in issues regarding gender-based violence. I had never experienced being a part of such an outrageously supportive, loving, powerful community of women. When the co-producers, who were also incredible mentors and friends, asked me to take over my senior year, I immediately accepted, hoping to transform the show, just a little bit.
The experience of The Vagina Monologues had never, for me at least, been solely about the content of the monologues. It was about the community that we built, the conversations that we had, the time we would take before the show to dedicate our performances to ourselves, our loved ones, our oppressors, or anyone or anything we saw fit. I met some of my best friends throughout the experience; but never through the monologues themselves. It was not really until this fall that I became frustrated with the show itself, and even more so with the monologues. I quickly became discouraged with the lack of gender-inclusivity. This prompted me to create the 100 Men Rise Campaign (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPJ2gTUDTqU) which, regardless of its own problems, sparked incredible dialogues and productive critiques in our community about The Vagina Monologues and how we can move forward with the fight for gender equity on our campus.
After this video went viral, I spent weeks meeting with faculty, staff, students and members of The Vagina Monologues discussing what the show adds to our community and how it harms our community. Even so, Ari and I carried on, as the show had already established a strong group of women who were working tirelessly on producing this show. It was not until the spring, when as a producer, director and organizer, I began to feel suffocated and frustrated with the lack of autonomy I had in production. I could not alter the script and I could not add or take away monologues even the monologues which were considered offensive; Coochie Snorcher, which is essentially the glorification of rape between two women, one being a fourteen-year-old girl; The Woman Who Loved To Make Vaginas Happy, which, was my favorite monologue as a first year student and always seemed to forget that the lines “The black woman moan”, “the Jewish moan”, and “the uninhibited bisexual moan”, are written in this monologue. These lines are then followed by “stereotypically sounding moans” which changes the tone of the monologue to a racist, anti-Semitic, sexist and queer-phobic one; My Vagina Is A Village which graphically describes sexual assault as a war crime during the Bosnia-Kosovo war, yet the only other monologue about gender-based violence that happens in our own country was a spotlight monologue and Eve’s personal story. Thus, both portrayals of gender based violence in TVM are either “othered” through war crime or so personal that is becomes uncomfortable; Bob which tells the story of a man begging a woman to look deep into her vagina, despite her being uncomfortable with that; And They Beat The Girl which shares the story of a transgendered woman being beaten and her boyfriend being murdered for her gender—this is the only representation of a trans woman in the entire show and it is also the only monologue that is optional to perform. Finally, there is not one monologue in the show that shares the voice of any experience of any college-aged woman. For a show that is so widely performed on college campuses, I could not fathom why there was not a single monologue that stems from the story of a college-aged woman. There were many other moments in the monologues that made me cringe with concern and others made me feel downright torn about the whole undertaking. But I carried on hoping to make the experience for the cast as positive as possible.
For the most part, these insulting undertones did not take away from the show being constructive for the cast. We became close, and it was generally an extremely positive experience. But I also could not shake my doubts, especially when a few cast members approached me specifically to express their pain and hurt that was caused by some of these monologues. With all of the criticism surrounding the show, and personal doubt I experienced organizing the production, I wanted to gauge if the performance still impacted the cast the way it was intended to. Therefore, I surveyed the cast of 102 women to better understand what they want from this kind of movement within the context of our community; because in any feminist movement, the voices and wants of the people in the movement should always be at the forefront.
Not surprisingly, the cast expressed very similar concerns to mine. The most common criticism from the cast was that there was not a single monologue that came directly from us.
Of the 80 women who responded to the question “what would you change about the show?”, 62 of the women commented that they would like the freedom to change parts of the original monologues or add monologues that we had written. When they were asked, “do you feel your personal experiences were represented in the monologues?”, only 48% of the cast said “yes”. And when asked the open-ended question, “What was your favorite part about being in the show?”, not one person responded with “performing the monologues” or anything along those lines. Instead, the responses varied mostly between; “meeting new women”, “building a strong community of women”, “sisterhood”, “the connections and friendships I found” and by far the most popular answer was, “the dedications” which I explained earlier.
All of this forced me to ask myself: When the actual performance is neither fully representative nor empowering for the women themselves, what is the purpose of performing it? If even some of us are uncomfortable with the words we are speaking, why continue speaking them?
At the end of the production a number of young men came up to me and said, “Wow, I can’t believe I never knew all of these things that women think and feel. I learned so much…” While I was thrilled that they left the production feeling moved, I could not shake the guilt that we had just done this community a massive disservice. These are not our voices, and these are certainly not our opinions. In fact, almost none of the monologues represent our experiences, our lives, our sexualities or our realities. I felt as though I had been complicit in harming and lying to our community.
There was absolutely a time and place for The Vagina Monologues. They created an undeniable platform that has changed hundreds of thousands of women’s lives. But when a production that has been performed year after year in our community, has resulted in the boredom of the audience, the falsification of our generation’s voices, the silencing of some students and triggering of emotions, it is time for the re-production of this show on our campus to end; the Connecticut College community has moved on. We are ready to speak our own voices and share our own stories. We will create an inclusive platform for women to be creative, to have autonomy over our voices, to enable the intersectionalities of identities to be heard, to acknowledge that our bodies and our statements are political. We will keep the community of women activists alive while challenging each other to write, learn, perform and think more critically about what we are presenting to our community and to ourselves.
Every movement transforms, and with the evolution of this movement on our campus, we will allow this production to grow, and break free from the constraints that V-Day demands for their productions. We have an obligation to the generations of women to come to let them share their stories, and have full autonomy over their voices. We will now be telling our stories and while we are moving away from the V-Day movement, we will continue to stand in solidarity with it and appreciate the space it has created for progress.
It is my hope that this movement will leave behind a stronger, even more supportive group of women who will continue to build on this production, act as mentors for each other, and maintain a space of creativity, passion, advocacy, and critical engagement.
Interesting. Good read
I will never forget all the amazing women I met through VagMons at Conn, or the lessons they taught me about myself, my community, my feminism, and about themselves. There is no denying that I would be a different person if not for VagMons, and I will always value that, but Alia brings up many good points in this article, ones that have needed addressing for some time now.
The VagMons experience for me was never about the monologues, it was about the people involved, and I think that the equality movement at Conn is ready for *their* voices and *their* stories to be fully heard in *their* words.
#alwaysrising
Ellery W ’12, Vagina Monologues Director 2012
Thank you, Alia for writing this article.
I have never met a “vagina sister” who felt more connected to the material than to the women involved. And the show is not really about embodying the stories themselves. It’s why we have the lines in front of us – because they’re not supposed to be our stories, but these real women who Eve interviewed almost 2 decades ago now. I have known that since freshman year, when I participated. And yet, it was never a bad thing for me.
I performed Coochie-Snorcher and it was never about the rape between two women, especially since the age had been changed in the last (at least) 5 years to be 16, and not the original 13 years old, as 16 is the age of consent in a number of states, including CT. The women in the monologue were empowered by being together and learning from one another. The young woman is raped by her father’s friend when she’s a preteen, which allows her to see this independent and kind woman as not a power over her but instead a “salvation,” as she says in the monologue. Perhaps it’s because, while Jewish, I come from white middle-class suburbia and therefore don’t know the struggles of a lot of women (though I have had struggles of my own that brought me to the Vagina Monologues). But I don’t see why it shouldn’t be performed. Sure, it can be changed. It’s a different show every year, in fact. I’m unsure of the copyright laws Eve and lawyers have placed on the show’s script, since I know she requires certain monologues to always be performed, but I’m sure in the future, the women of the Monologues could write in their own parts that apply more to the Conn community. I’ve spoken with many friends and my sisters who were always supportive of my involvement and yet Conn was the only school I knew of that included literally everyone who wanted to be involved, that auditions were merely for placement and not for exclusion. That’s incredible and should not be ignored or forgotten. We need to continue the Vagina Monologues tradition, even if we change what it means for us by including more of an accurate portrayal of our women. The “orgasm monologue” that all audiences and most cast members tended to love was, for me, about taking back the power of pleasure. We were in control of our pleasure, even if there were some stereotypes perpetuated. There was a Japanese moan my freshman year either written in or added by the two women who were performing it (and their director), but there was no Japanese woman in the cast and we decided it was inappropriate. I’m never offended as a Jewish woman by the oy veys in the Jewish moan, or that it exists. Because the monologue is about pleasure, not pain. There are people who could be offended by yelling “cunt!” because we don’t hear the word often enough, let alone in a message of empowerment for women. But that’s what the show has always been about for me. If we need to change some things around in the content, I understand and agree. But I don’t think we should forget the original or not perform the original. Because while it doesn’t always represent our stories, in some ways it shouldn’t. It represents the hundreds of women before us who never even mentioned the topic of “down there” until Eve brought it up. The issues in a lot of the monologues are ones we don’t discuss in our lives to begin with and they’re important to know and for the Conn community to hear. The show isn’t perfect, but it is important.
That being said, I love the idea of having both the Vagina Monologues in its official form, done more as a normal performance in which everything is kept, and then having something separate about OUR vagina stories. The women who share their dedications always make me cry because their stories are so beautiful and it’s pervasive when I am close to the person, as well. This is great when we are in the safe space of the cast. I worry about the perception and criticism since it may bring up difficult situations in a public form and may create unneeded backlash against the brave survivors, and cast members in general. Then again, when there is no risk there is no reward, and the reward for this would be that more of OUR women’s stories are heard.
My comments on the article are rambling and probably as I try to reconcile my feelings about it. Because I agree that there are tough issues that it both brings up and glosses over and that it should reflect our community, as well. And I agree that our stories should be heard. But at the same time, I want to be sure we don’t lose sight of why the original stories are so important, and how it isn’t just about us. That these stories are not glorifying horrible situations but instead shedding light on them as well as trying to empower the women who try to survive them every day. That is why Eve wrote the Monologues and shared these women with us.
Kimmie ’12/’13, Vagina Monologues Head of Day-Of Committee 2012
Alia,
This was a great article. I performed in TVM three times during my time at Conn, and I have to admit that I accepted rather uncritically both their content and Ms. Ensler’s particular form of activism. I focused on the empowerment of hearing women’s voices, and didn’t think too much about whose voices were silenced.
You present a very insightful and respectful argument, and I hope that it inspires more careful consideration not only within the Conn community, but within wider feminist circles.
I completely agree with your concerns. The problematic portrayal of the “other”, which also ties into compassion fatigue (in addition to the other issues you mention) is a big hindrance to the impact that these stories have on the audience. So thank you; I think it is high time that Conn students make their own monologues discussing their experiences and issues pertinent to them / us. Only that way can we hope to truly move people and affect change in our community.
This is spot on. As a Conn student and raging feminist I always felt super uncomfortable with the Vagina Monologues for all the reasons articulated above. I was also sad to see so many powerful smart students bonding over something so problematic when they could be coming together for a better cause. I’m so happy to see this change finally occurring. Power to you.
Thanks for writing this Alia. I appreciate the points you make and you articulated a lot of what felt “off” to me about the Vagina Monologues as a both a women’s studies major at Conn and now as a community sexual assault advocate and preventionist.
Good luck with your own production. I encourage you to check out Speak About It at speakaboutitonline.com I find this performance to be more authentic to college experience and it offers a great message for prevention that aligns well with The Green Dot program you all do. Maybe it can be a tool for inspiration.
I have mixed feelings about this issue since performing in CCs Vag Mons as a freshman (and subsequently) changed my life radically and for the better. That being said, I do definitely see the concerns being raised as valid. I wanted to comment as say that for me, joining the Vagina Monologues as a freshman as intimidating, and I was comforted that there were lines and that I wasn’t telling my own story. While I eventually I would have loved to do that- I hope the new way of speaking out does as much to include so many women at Conn. I also think that telling only Conn women’s stories is limited- while Conn women are diverse in many ways, there is a certain privilege/way of life associated with being a Conn student at all. I thought one of the benefits of the VMs was the exploration of what women experience all over the world. Of course the way that was done was imperfect at best- but I would hate to narrow the scope of the discussion. I truly believe that uniting ourselves as women is a good cause- even if it’s messy and even if no narrative can speak for us all. Perhaps there is a way that both college/Conn voices and experiences can be told without losing our compassion and exploration of the global state of women (and do so in a non-othering, inclusive way!)