Last month was a good one in the annals of human sexuality. Early in May, a Winona, Minnesota, student got kicked out of high school for wearing a button that said “I Heart My Vagina.” Carrie Rethlefsen, an eighteen-year-old senior, had seen a recent college production of The Vagina Monologues, and decided to take up a cause that adults at her school felt would be disruptive. A week later, a small town in Brazil celebrated “Orgasm Day”–and a part of the day’s serious programming included a production and discussion of The Vagina Monologues.
Lots has been written about that vagina play, but I guess it won’t keep me from weighing in as a benighted married man. It seems that if people don’t unapologetically love it (it’s about female empowerment!), then they are dead-set against it (God hates obscenity. And sex. And women).
I think Winona school officials have carved out an interesting middle ground. They have certainly bent over backward to show their sensitive sides–yes, yes, we know all about the oppression and the repression of women, and we’ll schedule seminars and discussions and panels and lectures and all that–but we have to be realistic here. We know this slogan will make kids giggle, and point, and joke, and skip classes, and blow up condoms like balloons, and sniff glue, and write graffiti on the bathroom walls, and steal the banisters out of stairwells, and smoke cigarettes, and disrespect the custodial staff, and so on … My paraphrasing is an exaggeration, of course. But honestly. We’re not talking about preventing school shootings here. Why don’t school officials worry about the disruption if it happens, rather than speculate about the potential disruptee? Why expel the messenger before even seeing what the reaction to the message might be?
The v-word itself has become a point of agreement in the culture wars–not so much for the troglodytes of the religious right, who hate sex and women, or in our high schools, but in various sects within feminism. This vagina activism works in two different ways, as I understand it. The post-feminists (or, as some like to say, lipstick feminists) promote a pro-sex, positive body image. Among the second-wavers, it is about exposing the history of female victimization (from both men and women). The nice thing is that feminists of any age can agree on loving their vaginas. So what’s the problem?
I think it’s just fun for women to say it out loud, and it’s fun for them to talk about it. It’s liberating to turn the word into a slogan on a button, a bumper sticker, or a T-shirt. Maybe they enjoy indulging in what has long been a male practice–speaking frankly and maybe a little proudly about their genitals. When I heard that one of Carrie’s male friends made his own T-shirt that said “I Support Your Vagina,” I thought, now that was a fine way to get behind the cause. Then I thought, Sheesh, what a dork. I’d make one that said, “I Heart Your Vagina, Too!” or “Let’s See It!” (Kidding… I’m kidding!)
Just by way of contrast, I like to imagine The Penis Monologues. (I don’t doubt there are dozens of parodies and maybe even a few serious, men’s-movement oriented treatments along these lines. Besides, you might say, most of modern life is already a perpetual penis monologue.) The subjugation and victimization of men is a hard sell. You have to believe in the hippy-dippy sophistry that to be a victimizer is also to be tragically unfulfilled. A Penis Monologues would invariably seem silly or self-indulgent, and it would certainly run the risk of trivializing The Vagina Monologues. But on a personal level (and there, by the way, is where The Vagina Monologues really triumph, I think), men have a lot to gain by thinking and speaking more openly about our own tragicomic equipment, and some of the indignities we suffer from in the daily, below-the-belt struggle for self-respect and fulfillment.
A reader recently commented that the Viagra paradox (mentioned in last month’s column–how many men and women seriously want to deal with a six-hour boner?) may be a result of widespread circumcision. There is surely a growing awareness that there are lots of reasons why we should call this what it is: a form of ritual genital mutilation. On the other hand, I’m not sure I agree with the theory that this has somehow made American men less capable of having sex or obsessing about sex. We may be twenty to fifty percent less sensitive than if we still had our foreskins, but I don’t see that stopping my circumcised friends from having sex at every opportunity they get, and then some.
Maybe that would be a good place to start with our proposed penis monologues. Maybe we should all talk about our genitals a lot more, until it is no longer disruptive or even very interesting, like talking about our elbows.
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