The Vagina Monologues (7 page)

It was a kind of surgery, a kind of delicate science, finding the tempo, the exact location or home of the moan. That’s what I called it. Sometimes I found it over a woman’s jeans. Sometimes I sneaked up on it, off the record, quietly disarming the surrounding alarms and moving in. Sometimes I used force, but not violent, oppressing force, more like dominating, “I’m going to take you someplace; don’t worry, lie back, enjoy the ride” kind of force. Sometimes it was simply mundane. I found the moan before things even started, while we were eating salad or chicken just casually right there, with my fingers, “Here it is like that,” real simple, in the kitchen, all mixed in with the balsamic vinegar. Sometimes I used props—I loved props—sometimes I made the woman find her own moan in front of me. I waited, stuck it out until she opened herself. I wasn’t fooled by the minor, more obvious moans. No, I pushed her further, all the way into her power moan.

There’s the clit moan (a soft, in-the-mouth sound), the vaginal moan (a deep, in-the-throat sound), the combo clit-vaginal moan. There’s the pre-moan (a hint of sound), the almost moan (a circling sound), the right-on-it moan (a deeper, definite sound), the elegant moan (a sophisticated laughing sound), the Grace Slick moan (a rock-singing sound), the WASP moan (no sound), the semireligious moan (a Muslim chanting sound), the mountaintop moan (a yodeling sound), the baby moan (a googie-googie-googie-goo sound), the doggy moan (a panting sound), the southern moan (southern accent—“yeah!

yeah”), the

uninhibited militant bisexual moan (a deep, aggressive, pounding sound), the machine-gun moan, the tortured Zen moan (a twisted, hungry sound), the diva moan (a high, operatic note), the twisted-toe-orgasm moan, and, finally, the surprise triple orgasm moan.

After I finished this piece I read it to the woman on whose interview I’d based it. She didn’t feel it really had anything to do with her. She loved the piece, mind you, but she didn’t see herself in it. She felt that I had somehow avoided talking about vaginas, that I was still somehow objectifying them. Even the moans were a way of objectifying the vagina, cutting it off from the rest of the vagina, the rest of the woman. There was a real difference in the way lesbians saw vaginas. I hadn’t yet captured it. So I interviewed her again.

“As a lesbian,” she said, “I need you to start from a lesbian-centered place, not framed within a heterosexual context. I did not desire women, for example, because I disliked men. Men weren’t even part of the equation.” She said, “You need to talk about entering into vaginas. You can’t talk about lesbian sex without doing this. ”For example,“ she said. ”I’m having sex with a woman.

She’s inside me.

I’m inside me. Fucking myself together with her. There are four fingers inside me; two are hers, two are mine.“

I don’t know that I wanted to talk about sex. But then again, how can I talk about vaginas without talking about them in action? I am worried about the titillation factor, worried about the piece becoming exploitative. Am I talking about vaginas to arouse people? Is that a bad thing? ”As lesbians,“ she said, ”we know about vaginas. We touch them. We lick them. We play with them. We tease them. We notice when the clitoris swells. We notice our own.“

I realize I am embarrassed, listening to her. There is a combination of reasons: excitement, fear, her love of vaginas and comfort with them and my distancing, terror of saying all this in front of you, the audience. ”I like to play with the rim of the vagina,“ she said, ”with fingers, knuckles, toes, tongue. I like to enter it slowly, slowly entering, then thrusting three fingers inside. “There’s other cavities, other openings; there’s the mouth. While I have a free hand, there’s fingers in her mouth, fingers in her vagina, both going, all going all at once, her mouth sucking my fingers, her vagina sucking my fingers. Both sucking, both wet.”

I realize I don’t know what is appropriate. I don’t even know what that word means. Who decides. I learn so much from what she’s telling me. About her, about me. “Then I come to my own wetness,” she says. “She can enter me. I can experience my own wetness, let her slide her fingers into me, her fingers into my mouth, my vagina, the same. I pull her hand out of my cunt. I rub my wetness against her knee so she knows. I slide my wetness down her leg until my face is between her thighs.”

Does talking about vaginas ruin the mystery, or is that just another myth that keeps vaginas in the dark, keeps them unknowing and unsatisfied? “My tongue is on her clitoris. My tongue replaces my fingers. My mouth enters her vagina.”

Saying these words feels naughty, dangerous, too direct, too specific, wrong, intense, in charge, alive.

“My tongue is on her clitoris. My tongue replaces my fingers. My mouth enters her vagina.”

To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed.

“You have to

talk about entering vaginas,” she said. “Come on,” I say, “come in.”

I had been performing this piece for over two years when it suddenly occurred to me that there were no pieces about birth. It was a bizarre omission. Although when I told a journalist this recently, he asked me, “What’s the connection?”

Almost twenty-one years ago I adopted a son, Dylan, who was very close in age to me.

Last year he

and his wife, Shiva, had a baby. They asked me to be present for the birth. I don’t think, in all my investigation, that I really understood vaginas until this moment. If I was in awe of them before the birth of my granddaughter, Colette, I am certainly in deep worship now.

I WAS THERE IN THE ROOM

For Shiva

I was there when her vagina opened.

We were all there: her mother, her husband, and I, and the nurse from theUkrainewith her whole hand up there in her vagina feeling and turning with her rubber glove as she talked casually to us—like she was turning on a loaded faucet.

I was there in the room when the contractions made her crawl on all fours, made unfamiliar moans leak out of her pores

and still there after hours when she just screamed suddenly wild, her arms striking at the electric air.

I was there when her vagina changed

from a shy sexual hole

to an archaeological tunnel, a sacred vessel, a Venetian canal, a deep well with a tiny stuck child inside, waiting to be rescued.

I saw the colors of her vagina. They changed.

Saw the bruised broken blue

the blistering tomato red

the gray pink, the dark;

saw the blood like perspiration along the edges saw the yellow, white liquid, the shit, the clots pushing out all the holes, pushing harder and harder, saw through the hole, the baby’s head

scratches of black hair, saw it just there behind the bone—a hard round memory,

as the nurse from theUkrainekept turning and turning her slippery hand.

I was there when each of us, her mother and I, held a leg and spread her wide pushing

with all our strength against her pushing

and her husband sternly counting, “One, two, three,”

telling her to focus, harder.

We looked into her then.

We couldn’t get our eyes out of that place.

We forget the vagina, all of us

what else would explain

our lack of awe, our lack of wonder.

I was there when the doctor

reached in withAlicein Wonderland spoons

and there as her vagina became a wide operatic mouth singing with all its strength;

first the little head, then the gray flopping arm, then the fast swimming body, swimming quickly into our weeping arms.

I was there later when I just turned and faced her vagina.

I stood and let myself see

her all spread, completely exposed

mutilated, swollen, and torn,

bleeding all over the doctor’s hands

who was calmly sewing her there.

I stood, and as I stared, her vagina suddenly became a wide red pulsing heart.

The heart is capable of sacrifice.

So is the vagina.

The heart is able to forgive and repair.

It can change its shape to let us in.

It can expand to let us out.

So can the vagina.

It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world.

So can the vagina.

I was there in the room.

I remember.

THE STORY OF V-DAY AND THE COLLEGE INITIATIVE

by Karen Obel, Director,V-DayCollegeInitiative I didn’t find V-Day. It found me.

I had been on the board of directors of the Feminist.com website for just over a year when I went to a board meeting to which Eve Ensler had been invited at the suggestion of Kathy Najimy.

Kathy thought

some of our goals at Feminist.com overlapped with Eve’s goal to stop violence against women. Kathy was right: By the end of the meeting, V-Day was conceived.

The V-Day Benefit Committee was made up of women whom each of us invited to join and still others whom they invited and so on. Our first project was V-Day 1998, the event that was to launch the V-Day movement and the first of many events to raise money and awareness to stop violence against women.

V-Day 1998 was a celebrity benefit performance of Eve’s play The Vagina Monologues atNew York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom Theatre. The performance had sold out, but outside on the street, hundreds of people still clamored to get in. Everyone wanted to be a part of V-Day, the groundbreaking event that

forever changed the meaning of Valentine’s Day. For me, the tone was set by Glenn Close during rehearsals the day before the performance. I was in the box office when I heard her ask Eve for direction on the subtleties of pronunciation in her particular monologue. “Is it ehr, ehr, ehr or ahr, ahr, ahr?” she asked. Out of context, the question might seem pedestrian, even silly. But hearing Glenn and watching her prepare, I became acutely aware of how profoundly committed the V-Day 1998

participants were to the

event and how clearly they understood the importance of the messages of The Vagina Monologues and the V-Day movement. And the audience got it too. The men and women, students and businesspeople, mothers and activists in the theater—alternately laughing, gasping, silent, crying, and cheering—received the performances with open arms, hearts, and minds. By the time Glenn Close reached the climax of “Reclaiming Cunt,” she had worked the audience into such a frenzy that when she demanded their response, they could not keep themselves from answering. Despite the resistance of potential sponsors and advertisers to V-Day 1998—for some reason, a lot of people have trouble with the word vagina— the event was a huge critical and financial success. The New York Times, which initially would not run a paid-for ad for the event because it considered the logo too suggestive, eventually accepted an altered version, and ended up reviewing the event as “the hottest ticket in town.”

Much hard work and dedication were required of the Benefit Committee to make that first V-Day the success that it was. Our responsibilities grew dramatically as the demands on us increased. I started as a “regular” volunteer, was made the committee’s secretary, and became coordinating producer by curtain time. During the year in which we worked to make it happen, I would often ask myself why I was giving so much to V-Day, an organization working to stop violence against women, worthy though the cause was. After all, I am fortunate never to have been a victim of violence. Yet in the months leading up to the event, I would come home every day from my more-than-full-time job and spend three to ten hours answering e-mail, drafting and sending letters and other documents, creating seating plans and invitations, and so much more. I was tired all the time, but I couldn’t have been happier or more inspired. I floated through my days joyfully and with a strong sense of purpose. On the night of the show, I sat in the audience among friends and family, my mother next to me. At the end of the performance, Eve came out

on the stage and asked those of us who were or knew victims of violence to stand. I stood. My mother stood. Almost everyone in the audience stood. I began to understand “Why V-Day?”

A few weeks later, the V-Day Benefit Committee met to revel in the success of the evening and to discuss what we could do better next time. For the first time in a year, we didn’t have an imminent event to focus on. For the first time in a year, I heard the women I had come to know as strong, brilliant, creative, and self-sufficient, and whom I thought I knew so well, tell stories about violence in their own lives that stunned me. These women had been so selflessly dedicated to mounting the production that, during a year of endless meetings, not once did they allow us to stray from our purpose by calling attention to themselves. When they finally spoke, they shared experiences of abuse so horrific that I wouldn’t have believed them if I hadn’t heard them with my own ears. When I left that meeting I was numb, but again I knew “Why V-Day?” I realized that many people I knew and would come to know have had similar experiences of abuse, similar stories to those I had heard that night. I decided I would do whatever I could to change the world so as to eliminate the causes and sources of violence against women, to prevent their devastating effects. Since the first step to eradicating a societal problem is making people aware that it exists, the V-Day Benefit Committee decided that the goal for 1999 would be to get our message out at the local level. We came up with the idea for the V-Day College Initiative.

We would invite colleges and universities to mount productions of The Vagina Monologues on

Valentine’s Day, the proceeds from which would go back into their communities through organizations working to stop violence against women. I volunteered to direct the project. I had high hopes for the College Initiative, although I had no idea what to expect, how it would be received, or what it could realistically achieve. I began by going on-line to research colleges and universities in the United States. I spent countless hours each day for weeks sending letters to women’s studies and theater departments, professors, student activities organizations, health educators, campus theater groups—to any person I thought would be likely to read my letters and respond—at every school on my various lists until the pictures and words on my computer screen started to blur. If people did respond, they were sometimes curious, sometimes suspicious, sometimes hostile, and sometimes enthusiastic. Some had heard of The Vagina Monologues, although it wasn’t as well known then as it is now. Many were interested in the idea of the College Initiative but couldn’t believe that it could be so accessible and straightforward, that there was no cost to participate and no hidden agenda. As things started taking shape, my contacts kept me posted on their progress. Sometimes they expressed concern about the small number of people showing up for auditions, the difficulty in getting people to attend their productions, and the criticism and backlash from those who didn’t see the merit in what they were doing or were outright opposed to it. Occasionally, they would ask to withdraw from the Initiative—because resistance at their schools became too strong, because they didn’t believe they had the support or resources to mount the kind of event they envisioned, or because they found they were neglecting their personal responsibilities. In these instances I was back to square one, but with much less time to find replacements. Sometimes I was able to convince people to persevere. This was the case with the folks at my own alma mater, Cornell University: They stuck it out, ended up participating for two years in a row, and have had successful events and tremendously rewarding experiences. Like the Cornell team, those who made it all the way through wrote excitedly of sponsors coming out of the woodwork, favorable local press, the sheer joy and power they felt from being part of the V-Day community, and their astonishment at their own ability to pull off their events. In the end, my targeted letters, the V-Day website, www.vday.org, and word-of-mouth worked to bring more than sixty-five schools in the United States and Canada to the V-Day 1999 College Initiative. I was initially disappointed in the final total, but then I realized how significant it was to have gotten any schools at all to participate. More important, I thought of the devotion of those who took part, and came to consider the College Initiative no less than a monumental achievement for V-Day. Our activities were covered extensively in the media, and they introduced more than 20,000 people in North America to V-Day and The Vagina Monologues. During the week following Valentine’s Day, I received an