The Vagina Monologues (2 page)

It was like

climbing into a spaceship every night. I had to speak into a microphone, even in places where I could easily be heard. The microphone functioned as a kind of steering wheel at times, an accelerator at others.

For the first years, I needed to wear stockings and heavy boy shoes to perform the piece.

Then later,

once my director, Joe Mantello, got me to take off my shoes, I could only do it barefoot. I had to hold 5-by-8 cards in my hands all through the performance every night, even though I had the piece memorized. It was as if the women I had interviewed were made present by those cards, and I needed them there with me. Vagina stories found me, as did the people who wanted to produce the play or bring it to their town. Whenever I have tried to write a monologue to serve a politically correct agenda, for example, it always fails. Note the lack of monologues about menopause or transgendered women. I tried.

The Vagina Monologues is about attraction, not promotion. Many things that have happened in the life of The Vagina Monologues seem completely surreal and at the same time completely logical. Here are

examples: Newspaper Headlines: THAT GIRL GOES DOWN THERE (Marlo Thomas in TVM)

MAYOR’S WIFE TALKS DIRTY (Donna Hanover’s decision to be in TVM) Red boas on the front

page of six London papers the day after V-Day at the Old Vic—newsstands in Britain look like the vagina sea.

TV:

Kathie Lee Gifford chants the word vagina with Calista Flockhart and her studio audience on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee. David Letterman tries to say vagina, but can’t. Barbara Walters confesses on The View that she was embarrassed by TVM and thought it was strident. She later recants.

CNN does a

ten-minute special on TVM and never mentions the word. Dharma’s and Greg’s parents are buying tickets to TVM on an episode. Vagina Occurrences: Glenn Close gets 2,500 people to stand and chant the word cunt. Tovah Feldmanstern was denied the right to direct TVM at her all-girls progressive high school, so she directs it independently. A woman rabbi sends me a hamantasch and describes its vaginal meanings. There is now a Cunt Workshop atWesleyanUniversity. A woman brings her uterus to the theater to have me sign it. A young man makes and serves me a vagina salad for dinner with his parents inAtlanta,Georgia. Bean sprouts are pubic hair. Roseanne performs “What Does Your Vagina Smell Like?” in her underwear for two thousand people. She makes up her own lines, one of them being: “What does your vagina smell like?” ANSWER: “My husband’s face.”

Alanis Morissette and Audra McDonald sing the cunt piece. Women and men faint during the show. It happens a lot. Always at the exact same place in the script. People bring and send objects —vagina

products: vagina glass hand sculptures, clit lollipops, vagina puppets, vulva lamps, cone-shaped art pieces. There is a huge vagina cake inLondonat the V-Day party and no one can cut it.

Hundreds of

sophisticated partygoers eat mauve vagina cake with their hands. The clit is auctioned off and Thandie Newton buys it for two hundred pounds. The Vagina Monologues opens and is published in over twenty countries, includingChinaandTurkey. V-Day has an impossible time raising money from corporations.

Even companies that sell vaginal products refuse to associate with the word. Women call up for tickets to the “Monologues”; men ask for tickets to the “Vagina Chronicles.” The punk ticketseller tells women that if they can’t say it, they can’t come. A young corporate woman bursts into my dressing room to tell me she really isn’t dry. It’s a lie. Two older Israeli women rush my dressing room inJerusalemand hug me while I’m naked. They don’t even notice. A seventy-year-old man in a trance walks into my dressing room unannounced after a show to tell me that he “finally got it.” Two months later he brings his girlfriend back with him and she thanks me. Midwives storm the dressing room to thank me for finally appreciating bodily excretions. A drag queen performs TVM on closing night.

Vagina miracles, sightings, and occurrences. They go on. The greatest miracle, of course, is V-Day: an energy, a movement, a catalyst, a day to end violence toward women—born out of The Vagina Monologues. As I traveled with the piece to city after city, country after country, hundreds of women waited after the show to talk to me about their lives. The play had somehow freed up their memories, pain, and desire. Night after night I heard the same stories—women being raped as teenagers, in college, as little girls, as elderly women; women who had finally escaped being beaten to death by their husbands; women who were terrified to leave; women who were taken sexually, before they were even conscious of sex, by their stepfathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, mothers, and fathers. I began to feel insane, as if a door had opened to some underworld and I was being told things I was not supposed to know; knowing these things was dangerous. Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women—that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. I do not think I am being extreme. When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet. You force what is meant to be open, trusting, nurturing, creative, and alive to be bent, infertile, and broken. In 1997, I met with a group of activist women, many from a group called Feminst.com, and we formed V-Day. As with all the mysterious vagina happenings, we show up,

we do the groundwork, we stay in shape, and the Vagina Queens do the rest. OnFebruary 14, 1998, Valentine’s Day, our first V-Day was born. Twenty-five hundred people lined up outside the Hammerstein Ballroom inNew York Cityfor our first outrageous event. Whoopi Goldberg, Susan

Sarandon, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Marisa Tomei, Shirley Knight, Lois Smith, Kathy Najimy, Calista Flockhart, Lily Tomlin, Hazelle Goodman, Margaret Cho, Hannah Ensler-Rivel, BETTY, Klezmer Women, Ulali, Phoebe Snow, Gloria Steinem, Soraya Mire, and Rosie Perez joined together to perform The Vagina Monologues and created a transforming evening that raised over $100,000 and launched the V-Day movement. Since then there have been stellar events at the Old Vic inLondonin 1999, with performers including Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Melanie Griffith, Meera Syal, Julia Sawalha, Joely Richardson, Ruby Wax, Eddi Reader, Katie Puckrik, Dani Behr, Natasha McElhone, Sophie Dahl, Jane Lapotaire, Thandie Newton, and Gillian Anderson. In 2000, V-Day was celebrated inLos Angeles,Santa Fe,Sarasota,Aspen, andChicago. In three years, V-Day has happened at over three hundred colleges, with performances of The Vagina Monologues directed and performed by students and faculty. All the productions raise money and consciousness for local groups that work to stop violence toward women. The Off-Broadway production of The Vagina Monologues will raise nearly $1

million for V-Day. Subsequent productions around the country and the world will support the movement as well. At this point, the V-Day Fund is supporting grassroots groups around the world, where, in several cases, women are fighting with their lives to protect women and end the violence.

InAfghanistan,

there is RAWA, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a group devoted to liberating

women from the terrible oppression of the Taliban. There, women are not allowed to work, to be educated, to go to the doctor, or to leave their house without a male escort. There, women are being buried under their burqas without any protection from rape or murder. The V-Day Fund is helping RAWA educate women in clandestine schools, documenting illegal executions, and building a women’s

movement. InKenya,Africa, we are supporting Tasaru Ntomonok (Safe Motherhood Initiative), part of

Mandeolo—a project that is stopping the practice of young girls being genitally mutilated by introducing a new coming-of-age ritual without the cut. Recently, we were able to buy them a red jeep so they can travel more easily from village to village as they continue the education and prevention.

InCroatia, we are

working with the Center for Women War Victims, which through our support will open the first rape crisis center in the formerYugoslavia. The center will also be able to train women in Kosova and Chechyna to work with women in those countries who have been raped and traumatized during the war.

V-Day is working in collaboration with Planned Parenthood to implement within their already existing programs a strategy to prevent and end violence toward women. The list goes on and on.

The miracle of

V-Day, like The Vagina Monologues, is that it happened because it had to happen. A call, perhaps; an unconscious mandate, perhaps. I surrender to the Vagina Queens. Something is unfolding.

It is both

mystical and practical. It requires that we show up, do our exercise, and get out of the way. In order for the human race to continue, women must be safe and empowered. It’s an obvious idea, but like a vagina, it needs great attention and love in order to be revealed.

I bet you’re worried. I was worried. That’s why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don’t think about them.

I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas—a community, a culture of vaginas. There’s so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them—like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there.

In the first place, it’s not so easy even to find your vagina. Women go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it. I interviewed a high-powered businesswoman who told me she was too busy; she didn’t have the time. Looking at your vagina, she said, is a full day’s work. You have to get down there on your back in front of a mirror that’s standing on its own, full-length preferred.

You’ve got to get

in the perfect position, with the perfect light, which then is shadowed somehow by the mirror and the angle you’re at. You get all twisted up. You’re arching your head up, killing your back.

You’re exhausted

by then. She said she didn’t have the time for that. She was busy. So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues. I talked with over two hundred women. I talked to older women, young women, married women, single women, lesbians, college

professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African American women, Hispanic women, Asian American women, Native American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. At first women

were reluctant to talk. They were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn’t stop them. Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one’s ever asked them before. Let’s just start with the word “vagina.” It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: “Hurry, Nurse, bring me the vagina.”

“Vagina.”

“Vagina.” Doesn’t matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say. 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. I’m worried about vaginas, what we call them and don’t call them. In Great Neck, they call it a pussycat. A woman there told me that her mother used to tell her, “Don’t wear panties underneath your pajamas, dear; you need to air out your pussycat.” InWestchesterthey called it a pooki, inNew Jerseya twat. There’s “powderbox,”

“derrière,” a “poochi,” a “poopi,” a “peepe,” a “poopelu,” a “poonani,” a “pal” and a “piche,”

“toadie,”

“dee dee,”

“nishi,”

“dignity,”

“monkey box,”

“coochi snorcher,”

“cooter,”

“labbe,”

“Gladys Siegelman,”

“VA,”

“wee wee,”

“horsespot,”

“nappy dugout,”

“mongo,” a “pajama,”

“fannyboo,”

“mushmellow,” a “ghoulie,”

“possible,”

“tamale,”

“tottita,”

“Connie,” a “Mimi” inMiami, “split knish” inPhiladelphia, and “schmende” in theBronx.

I am worried

about vaginas.

Some of the monologues are close to verbatim interviews, some are composite interviews, and with

some I just began with the seed of an interview and had a good time. This monologue is pretty much the way I heard it. Its subject, however, came up in every interview, and often it was fraught.

The subject

being

You cannot love a vagina unless you love hair. Many people do not love hair. My first and only husband hated hair. He said it was cluttered and dirty. He made me shave my vagina. It looked puffy and exposed and like a little girl. This excited him. When he made love to me, my vagina felt the way a beard must feel. It felt good to rub it, and painful. Like scratching a mosquito bite. It felt like it was on fire.

There were screaming red bumps. I refused to shave it again. Then my husband had an affair. When we went to marital therapy, he said he screwed around because I wouldn’t please him sexually. I wouldn’t shave my vagina. The therapist had a thick German accent and gasped between sentences to show her empathy. She asked me why I didn’t want to please my husband. I told her I thought it was weird. I felt little when my hair was gone down there, and I couldn’t help talking in a baby voice, and the skin got irritated and even calamine lotion wouldn’t help it. She told me marriage was a compromise. I asked her if shaving my vagina would stop him from screwing around. I asked her if she’d had many cases like this before. She said that questions diluted the process. I needed to jump in. She was sure it was a good beginning. This time, when we got home, he got to shave my vagina. It was like a therapy bonus prize.

He clipped it a few times, and there was a little blood in the bathtub. He didn’t even notice it, ’cause he was so happy shaving me. Then, later, when my husband was pressing against me, I could feel his spiky sharpness sticking into me, my naked puffy vagina. There was no protection. There was no fluff. I realized then that hair is there for a reason—it’s the leaf around the flower, the lawn around the house.