MaxedOutMama
Saturday, April 23, 2005
The Monologues Hit High School
Anyone who remembers their high school years can understand Number 2 Pencil's reasoning on this one.
Here's the background story:
The only solution I can see to the above is for the school administrators to impose a school uniform, which quite a few public schools have done.
Now a middle-aged woman like me is made more than a bit uncomfortable about women strongly identifying with body parts, because back when I was young, the focus of feminism was to get men to concede that there was a lot more to women than our body parts and that women's biological equipment didn't trump our minds or control our thinking. I'm just not sure that I can describe this as "You've come a long way, baby," and I would like to state my extreme personal objection to being characterized as a talking walking vagina.
But this is quite the fad, and can lead to some interesting exchanges. See Mike Adam's column about receiving an email with the title "My Vagina Is Very Mad At You." I would have been startled too. My reaction was that the college student who fired off the missive demonstrates the need for better teaching of grammer, because parts of her email are somewhat linguistically vague:
This is granting an exceptional amount of power to a woman's genitals. I would describe this as an errant, nonsensical, extremely sexist idea. Not that I don't defend Eve Ensler's or the emailer's right to express this. I believe in free speech - theirs, mine and Mike Adams'. So let me make myself clear. I regard this as mortally offensive, inane, dangerous blather that degrades individual women and women as a gender. I also find it offensive on humanistic grounds, so I would say that Mike Adams has every right to protest this formulation as being offensive and irrational.
There is a long cultural history involving the description of women as being dominated by their dangerously irresponsible body parts. This goes way back and is also associated with some of Freud's theories (some of which I always found hysterically funny). See the etymology of "hysteria":
There is another aspect to this concept as it was absorbed into western medical thought, and here is an excellent description of how the psychiatric diagnosis of hysteria (now separated from its origin) came to be misapplied to the great detriment of male and female patients (here Eliot Slater is quoted):
So to conclude, I fail to see why brandishing the concept that a woman should regard her vagina as the essence of her being and an entity unto itself (or her primary identity) should receive any respect from anyone. Instead, this should be actively rebutted. Certainly I am not doing justice to the entire import of Eve Ensler's thought. But logically speaking, I don't have to. The concept itself is demeaing to human beings, and as it becomes enshrined into popular culture by poorly educated pundits, it is destined to have a malign effect. We've been here, we've done this, and it did not work out. Men are not their testicles and penises, and women are not their vaginas or uteruses.
Mike Adams has the perfect right to be concerned about the habits of thought that have resulted in his receipt of an email containing the following passage:
Here's the background story:
...after Carrie Rethlefsen attended a performance of the play "The Vagina Monologues" last month, she and Emily Nixon wore buttons to school that read: "I [heart] My Vagina."and:
School leaders said that the pin is inappropriate and that the discomfort it causes trumps the girls' right to free speech. The girls disagree. And despite repeated threats of suspension and expulsion, Rethlefsen has continued to wear her button.
More than 100 students have ordered T-shirts bearing "I [heart] My Vagina" for girls and "I Support Your Vagina" for boys.As Number 2 Pencil comments:
The girls claim the buttons provoke discussion about women's rights, and are perfectly happy that some boys plan to wear "I Support Your Vagina" buttons, but let's be honest. There are going to be much more racy buttons appearing out there, and it'll be interesting to see how the school deals with this - obviously, not all speech is protected under the First Amendment, and schools can certainly ban pins/t-shirts that discuss body parts.One commenter to the post suggests "My penis (heart) your vagina" is inevitable. I would say yes. In fact, a whole cottage industry could develop around this. What teenager wouldn't enjoy the controversy? I'm sure I would have been bumper-stickering and t-shirting with the rest of them. For the last two years in my high school, the rebellions took the form of streaking and pipe-bomb building along with phoned-in bomb threats. (I did not participate in either, due to the iron oppression imposed by my particular patriarchy and matriarchy.) A kid in one of my classes blew off part of his hand building a pipe bomb. Things get out of control in high schools very quickly.
It'll also be interesting to see whether another situation like this will develop when buttons like, "My Penis is Better Than Your Vagina" and "Shut Up About Your Vagina," inevitably emerge.
The only solution I can see to the above is for the school administrators to impose a school uniform, which quite a few public schools have done.
Now a middle-aged woman like me is made more than a bit uncomfortable about women strongly identifying with body parts, because back when I was young, the focus of feminism was to get men to concede that there was a lot more to women than our body parts and that women's biological equipment didn't trump our minds or control our thinking. I'm just not sure that I can describe this as "You've come a long way, baby," and I would like to state my extreme personal objection to being characterized as a talking walking vagina.
But this is quite the fad, and can lead to some interesting exchanges. See Mike Adam's column about receiving an email with the title "My Vagina Is Very Mad At You." I would have been startled too. My reaction was that the college student who fired off the missive demonstrates the need for better teaching of grammer, because parts of her email are somewhat linguistically vague:
What I don't support is people who don't support women. My vagina could care less about politics; all it wants is to not be raped and be treated kindly.If I understand her, she meant to write "all it wants is not to be raped and to be treated kindly." On the other hand, perhaps her vagina is into S&M and wants not to be treated kindly. I should not presume. Who can know these days? Earlier in the email the person standing up for her vagina's civil rights wrote:
The point of Eve Ensler's book is to expose a subject that women have always had to cover up, our vaginas, our logos. Vaginas are a place of pleasure and pain.Now "logos" in the Christian tradition has a particular meaning, and it is a very powerful one, and it also has a philosophical meaning important in the history of western humanist thought. See here for some definitions of logos (literally, from the Greek, the word):
Aristotle:Basically the invoking of "logos" in the odd communication that Mike Adams received implies that a woman's vagina is the organizing principle of her knowledge of her existence, which governs not only the individual elaboration of her being in the world but all possible paths of existence for her.
The name used by Aristotle for the logical appeal of a speaker. The two major elements of logos are evidence and reasoning.
Here's a pretty generic one:
Often translated as "word", its true meaning is much more multifunctional (a better translation would be "reason"). The Logos is the light that gives Gnosis via communication. It is the Christ (not to be confused with Jesus). First there was a thought, then the word. We pass on knowledge in this world through words. It is something that gives us guidance by "seeing" or a certain amount of comprehension.
This is granting an exceptional amount of power to a woman's genitals. I would describe this as an errant, nonsensical, extremely sexist idea. Not that I don't defend Eve Ensler's or the emailer's right to express this. I believe in free speech - theirs, mine and Mike Adams'. So let me make myself clear. I regard this as mortally offensive, inane, dangerous blather that degrades individual women and women as a gender. I also find it offensive on humanistic grounds, so I would say that Mike Adams has every right to protest this formulation as being offensive and irrational.
There is a long cultural history involving the description of women as being dominated by their dangerously irresponsible body parts. This goes way back and is also associated with some of Freud's theories (some of which I always found hysterically funny). See the etymology of "hysteria":
1615, from L. hystericus "of the womb," from Gk. hysterikos "of the womb, suffering in the womb," from hystera "womb" (see uterus). Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Hysterics is 1727; hysteria, abstract noun, formed 1801.This might be more amusing if it was not a relatively common belief even in the 1950's and 1960's that women became too emotional and irrational at certain times of the month to be entrusted with serious duties such as being an elected representative or piloting a plane. This was part of our culture, and it was a part that feminism had to debunk. People really were convinced that you never knew when a woman would just whack out into hysteria, controlled by her body parts. These current fake-feministic twits seem to be trying to reestablish the same idea.
There is another aspect to this concept as it was absorbed into western medical thought, and here is an excellent description of how the psychiatric diagnosis of hysteria (now separated from its origin) came to be misapplied to the great detriment of male and female patients (here Eliot Slater is quoted):
Looking back over the long history of ‘hysteria’ we see that the null hypothesis has never been disproved. No evidence has yet been offered that the patients suffering from ‘hysteria’ are in medically significant terms anything more than a random selection. Attempts at rehabilitation of the syndrome, such as those by Carter and by Guze, lead to mutually irreconcilable formulations, each of them determined by their terms of reference. The only thing that hysterical patients can be shown to have in common is that they are all patients. The malady of the wandering womb began as a myth, and as a myth it yet survives. But, like all unwarranted beliefs which still attract credence, it is dangerous. The diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ is a disguise for ignorance and a fertile source of clinical error. It is, in fact, not only a delusion but also a snare.In other words, as the concept of hysteria came to be understood in modern western medicine, it turned into the exact opposite of a concept developed on reason and evidence. This concept has been instrumental in the mistreatment of both male and female patients. Read the whole of the above article to get an idea of just how dangerous such a diagnosis can be in practice. Irrational concepts naturally produce irrational actions.
So to conclude, I fail to see why brandishing the concept that a woman should regard her vagina as the essence of her being and an entity unto itself (or her primary identity) should receive any respect from anyone. Instead, this should be actively rebutted. Certainly I am not doing justice to the entire import of Eve Ensler's thought. But logically speaking, I don't have to. The concept itself is demeaing to human beings, and as it becomes enshrined into popular culture by poorly educated pundits, it is destined to have a malign effect. We've been here, we've done this, and it did not work out. Men are not their testicles and penises, and women are not their vaginas or uteruses.
Mike Adams has the perfect right to be concerned about the habits of thought that have resulted in his receipt of an email containing the following passage:
I can't believe that you are a professor of criminal justice and you yourself can't understand what the Vagina Monologues does for women, specifically women who have been victims of rape and other sexual violence. It's people like you who make it so hard for women to except (sic) their bodies.Why are women themselves are not objecting to this sort of thing? There are elements in the woman's movement today that are extremely irrational yet correspondingly extremely aggressive. Shouldn't women themselves be taking up this battle? Are we going to let badly educated and self-righteous fools dominate the dialogue?
