The Vagina Monologues (3 page)

You have to love hair in order to love the vagina. You can’t pick the parts you want. And besides, my husband never stopped screwing around.

I asked all the women I interviewed the same questions and then I picked my favorite answers.

Although I must tell you, I’ve never heard an answer I didn’t love. I asked women: “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?”

A beret.

A leather jacket.

Silk stockings.

Mink.

A pink boa.

A male tuxedo.

Jeans.

Something formfitting.

Emeralds.

An evening gown.

Sequins.

Armani only.

A tutu.

See-through black underwear.

A taffeta ball gown.

Something machine washable.

Costume eye mask.

Purple velvet pajamas.

Angora. A red bow.

Ermine and pearls.

A large hat full of flowers.

A leopard hat.

A silk kimono.

Glasses.

Sweatpants.

A tattoo.

An electrical shock device to keep unwanted strangers away.

High heels.

Lace and combat boots.

Purple feathers and twigs and shells.

Cotton.

A pinafore.

A bikini.

A slicker.

“If your vagina could talk, what would it say, in two words?”

Slow down.

Is that you?

Feed me.

I want.

Yum, yum.

Oh, yeah.

Start again.

No, over there.

Lick me.

Stay home.

Brave choice.

Think again.

More, please.

Embrace me.

Let’s play.

Don’t stop.

More, more.

Remember me?

Come inside.

Not yet.

Whoah, Mama.

Yes yes.

Rock me.

Enter at your own risk.

Oh, God.

Thank God.

I’m here.

Let’s go.

Let’s go.

Find me.

Thank you.

Bonjour.

Too hard.

Don’t give up.

Where’s Brian?

That’s better.

Yes, there.

There.

I interviewed a group of women between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-five. These interviews were the most poignant of all, possibly because many of the women had never had a vagina interview before. Unfortunately, most of the women in this age group had very little conscious relationship to their vaginas. I felt terribly lucky to have grown up in the feminist era. One woman who was seventy-two had never even seen her vagina. She had only touched herself when she was washing in the shower, but never with conscious intention. She had never had an orgasm. At seventy-two she went into therapy, and with the encouragement of her therapist, she went home one afternoon by herself, lit some candles, took a bath, played some comforting music, and discovered her vagina. She said it took her over an hour, because she was arthritic by then, but when she finally found her clitoris, she said, she cried. This monologue is for her.

[Jewish,Queensaccent]

Down there? I haven’t been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with Eisenhower. No, no, it’s a cellar down there. It’s very damp, clammy. You don’t want to go down there.

Trust me. You’d

get sick. Suffocating. Very nauseating. The smell of the clamminess and the mildew and everything.

Whew! Smells unbearable. Gets in your clothes. No, there was no accident down there. It didn’t blow up or catch on fire or anything. It wasn’t so dramatic. I mean . . . well, never mind. No.

Never mind. I can’t

talk to you about this. What’s a smart girl like you going around talking to old ladies about their down-theres for? We didn’t do this kind of a thing when I was a girl. What? Jesus, okay.

There was this

boy, Andy Leftkov. He was cute—well, I thought so. And tall, like me, and I really liked him. He asked me out for a date in his car. . . . I can’t tell you this. I can’t do this, talk about down there.

You just know

it’s there. Like the cellar. There’s rumbles down there sometimes. You can hear the pipes, and things get caught there, little animals and things, and it gets wet, and sometimes people have to come and plug up the leaks. Otherwise, the door stays closed. You forget about it. I mean, it’s part of the house, but you don’t see it or think about it. It has to be there, though, ’cause every house needs a cellar.

Otherwise the

bedroom would be in the basement. Oh, Andy, Andy Leftkov. Right. Andy was very good-looking. He

was a catch. That’s what we called it in my day. We were in his car, a new white Chevy BelAir. I remember thinking that my legs were too long for the seat. I have long legs. They were bumping up against the dashboard. I was looking at my big kneecaps when he just kissed me in this surprisingly “Take me by control like they do in the movies” kind of way. And I got excited, so excited, and, well, there was a flood down there. I couldn’t control it. It was like this force of passion, this river of life just flooded out of me, right through my panties, right onto the car seat of his new white Chevy BelAir. It wasn’t pee and it was smelly—well, frankly, I didn’t really smell anything at all, but he said, Andy said, that it smelled like sour milk and it was staining his car seat. I was “a stinky weird girl,”

he said. I wanted

to explain that his kiss had caught me off guard, that I wasn’t normally like this. I tried to wipe the flood up with my dress. It was a new yellow primrose dress and it looked so ugly with the flood on it. Andy drove me home and he never, never said another word and when I got out and closed his car door, I closed the whole store. Locked it. Never opened for business again. I dated some after that, but the idea of flooding made me too nervous. I never even got close again. I used to have dreams, crazy dreams.

Oh, they’re dopey. Why? Burt Reynolds. I don’t know why. He never did much for me in life, but in my dreams . . . it was always Burt and I. Burt and I. Burt and I. We’d be out. Burt and I. It was some restaurant like the kind you see inAtlantic City, all big with chandeliers and stuff and thousands of waiters with vests on. Burt would give me this orchid corsage. I’d pin it on my blazer. We’d laugh. We were always laughing, Burt and I. Eat shrimp cocktail. Huge shrimp, fabulous shrimp. We’d laugh more. We were very happy together. Then he’d look into my eyes and pull me to him in the middle of the restaurant —and, just as he was about to kiss me, the room would start to shake, pigeons would fly out from under the table—I don’t know what those pigeons were doing there—and the flood would come straight from down there. It would pour out of me. It would pour and pour. There would be fish inside it, and little boats, and the whole restaurant would fill with water, and Burt would be standing knee-deep in my flood, looking horribly disappointed in me that I’d done it again, horrified as he watched his friends, Dean Martin and the like, swim past us in their tuxedos and evening gowns. I don’t have those dreams anymore. Not since they took away just about everything connected with down there.

Moved out the

uterus, the tubes, the whole works. The doctor thought he was being funny. He told me if you don’t use it, you lose it. But really I found out it was cancer. Everything around it had to go. Who needs it, anyway? Right? Highly overrated. I’ve done other things. I love the dog shows. I sell antiques. What would it wear? What kind of question is that? What would it wear? It would wear a big sign: “Closed Due to Flooding.”

What would it say? I told you. It’s not like that. It’s not like a person who speaks. It stopped being a thing that talked a long time ago. It’s a place. A place you don’t go. It’s closed up, under the house. It’s down there. You happy? You made me talk—you got it out of me. You got an old lady to talk about her down-there. You feel better now? [Turns away; turns back.] You know, actually, you’re the first person I ever talked to about this, and I feel a little better.

At a witch trial in 1593, the investigating lawyer (a married man) apparently discovered a clitoris for the first time; [he] identified it as a devil’s teat, sure proof of the witch’s guilt. It was “a little lump of flesh, in manner sticking out as if it had been a teat, to the length of half an inch,” which the gaoler, “perceiving at the first sight thereof, meant not to disclose, because it was adjoining to so secret a place which was not decent to be seen. Yet in the end, not willing to conceal so strange a matter,” he showed it to various bystanders. The bystanders had never seen anything like it. The witch was convicted.

—The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets I interviewed many women about menstruation. There was a choral thing that began to occur, a kind of wild collective song. Women echoed each other. I let the voices bleed into one another.

I got lost in

the bleeding.

I WAS TWELVE. MY MOTHER SLAPPED ME.

Second grade, seven years old, my brother was talking about periods. I didn’t like the way he was laughing.

I went to my mother. “What’s a period?” I said. “It’s punctuation,” she said. “You put it at the end of a sentence.”

My father brought me a card: “To my little girl who isn’t so little anymore.”

I was terrified. My mother showed me the thick sanitary napkins. I was to bring the used ones to the can under the kitchen sink. I remember being one of the last. I was thirteen. We all wanted it to come. I was so afraid. I started putting the used pads in brown paper bags in the dark storage places under the roof.

Eighth grade. My mother said, “Oh, that’s nice.”

In junior high—brown drips before it came. Coincided with a little hair under my arms, which grew unevenly: one armpit had hair, the other didn’t. I was sixteen, sort of scared. My mother gave me codeine. We had bunk beds. I went down and lay there. My mother was so uncomfortable. One night, I

came home late and snuck into bed without turning on any lights. My mother had found the used pads and put them between the sheets of my bed. I was twelve years old, still in my underpants. Hadn’t gotten

dressed. Looked down on the staircase. There it was. Looked down and I saw blood.

Seventh grade; my mother sort of noticed my underwear. Then she gave me plastic diapers. My mom was very warm—“Let’s get you a pad.”

My friend Marcia, they celebrated when she got hers. They had dinner for her. We all wanted our period. We all wanted it now. Thirteen years old. It was before Kotex. Had to watch your dress. I was black and poor. Blood on the back of my dress in church. Didn’t show, but I was guilty. I was ten and a half. No preparation. Brown gunk on my underpants. She showed me how to put in a tampon. Only got in halfway. I associated my period with inexplicable phenomena. My mother told me I had to use a rag.

My mother said no to tampons. You couldn’t put anything in your sugar dish. Wore wads of cotton. Told my mother. She gave me Elizabeth Taylor paper dolls. Fifteen years old. My mother said, “Mazel tov.”

She slapped me in the face. Didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. My period, like cake mix before it’s baked. Indians sat on moss for five days. Wish I were Native American. I was fifteen and I’d been hoping to get it. I was tall and I kept growing. When I saw white girls in the gym with tampons, I thought they were bad girls. Saw little red drops on the pink tiles. I said, “Yeah.”

My mom was glad for me. UsedOBand liked putting my fingers up there. Eleven years old, wearing white pants. Blood started to come out. Thought it was dreadful. I’m not ready. I got back pains. I got horny. Twelve years old. I was happy. My friend had a Ouija board, asked when we were going to get our periods, looked down, and I saw blood. Looked down and there it was. I’m a woman.

Terrified.

Never thought it would come. Changed my whole feeling about myself. I became very silent and mature.

A good Vietnamese woman—quiet worker, virtuous, never speaks. Nine and a half. I was sure I was bleeding to death, rolled up my underwear and threw them in a corner. Didn’t want to worry my parents.

My mother made me hot water and wine, and I fell asleep. I was in my bedroom in my mother’s apartment. I had a comic book collection. My mother said, “You mustn’t lift your box of comic books.”

My girlfriends told me you hemorrhage every month. My mother was in and out of mental hospitals.

She couldn’t take me coming of age. “Dear Miss Carling, Please excuse my daughter from basketball.

She has just matured.”

At camp they told me not to take a bath with my period. They wiped me down with antiseptic.

Scared people would smell it. Scared they’d say I smelled like fish. Throwing up, couldn’t eat. I got hungry. Sometimes it’s very red. I like the drops that drop into the toilet. Like paint.

Sometimes it’s

brown and it disturbs me. I was twelve. My mother slapped me and brought me a red cotton shirt. My father went out for a bottle of sangria.

Over the course of my interviews I met nine women who had had their first orgasms in the exact same place. They were women in their late thirties and early forties. They had all participated, at different times, in one of the groups run by a brave and extraordinary woman, Betty Dodson. For twenty-five years Betty has been helping women locate, love, and masturbate their vaginas. She has run groups, has worked privately with individual women. She has helped thousands of women reclaim their center. This piece is for her.

[A slight English accent]

My vagina is a shell, a round pink tender shell, opening and closing, closing and opening.

My vagina is

a flower, an eccentric tulip, the center acute and deep, the scent delicate, the petals gentle but sturdy. I did not always know this. I learned this in the vagina workshop. I learned this from a woman who runs the vagina workshop, a woman who believes in vaginas, who really sees vaginas, who helps women see their own vaginas by seeing other women’s vaginas. In the first session the woman who runs the vagina workshop asked us to draw a picture of our own “unique, beautiful, fabulous vagina.”