For campus feminists, Valentine's Day is now "V-Day," and "V" stands for "valentine," "violence," and "vagina." The brainchild of Eve Ensler, feminist activist and author of the award-winning "The Vagina Monologues," V-Day was celebrated nationwide last Friday as 1053 cities and 660 campuses put on performances of Ensler's play. Ensler herself appeared at the University of Michigan. Her visit coincided with the Midwest premiere of her latest play, "Necessary Targets," at Ann Arbor's Performance Network--but that isn't why Ensler was there. "I can't think of a place I would rather be on V-Day than here," Ensler told her audience Friday afternoon. "I'm in total awe of the women and vagina-loving men on this campus." Whether Ensler is also in total awe of the ticket-buying power of the women and vagina-loving men at UM must remain a matter of speculation.

The Michigan Daily has published excerpts from Ensler's V-Day talk, which centered on raising awareness about violence against women. Telling her audience that "You're part of a world-wide movement," Ensler elaborated on her theory of how becoming a "vagina-loving" individual can make the world a kinder, gentler place:

"My entire life was shaped by violence," Ensler said. "I had never become anything other than a reaction to what had happened to me. My own relationship with my vagina was very dissociated."

Ensler began the V-Day movement and wrote "The Vagina Monologues" to make women aware their vaginas belong to themselves. She also criticized current practices females use to enhance their looks, including liposuction and leg waxing.

"If every woman in this room were living in their full power, we'd be living in another world," Ensler said. "Practices (of beauty) are so time-consuming, it's clear why we're not running the world.

Ensler calls her world of women and "vagina-loving men" V-World, a world that is "creative, sexy, delicious and fabulous."

[...]

In addition to speaking about her own projects, Ensler spoke in opposition of President Bush's campaign against Iraq.

"We're on the verge of doing the most suicidal thing we can do, which is bomb Iraq," Ensler said. "The most radical thing you can do is not be afraid of these testosterone-driven warriors."

Ensler wants to stop violence against women, and I'm all for that. But the way to do that is not to engage in adolescent word play ("ooooh, I said 'vagina': that makes me shocking and transgressive!") that then becomes the basis for a pathetically simplistic politics ("if we all hold hands and say 'vagina' over and over, we will grow to love vaginas, and in loving vaginas, we will love one another, and then there will not only be no more violence against women, but there will be no war, only peace, and women will run the world and the world will be creative, sexy, delicious and fabulous!"). Ensler's gratuitous male-bashing only enhances the hysterical quality of her rhetoric. In emphasizing feeling ("vagina-loving") over thought, that rhetoric not only directs at men the kinds of conceptual slurs that Ensler finds so damaging when they are aimed at women, but imagines either that no one will notice the double standard or that despising men is a necessary component of empowering women.

The "V" in V-Day apparently also stands for vacuous.

Is it possible for modern academics to do anything that isn't X-rated?

Someone should tell Ensler that if she can't make it through more than three or four sentences without mentioning a vagina, then she is probably either (1) delivering a lecture to a group of gynecologists, or (2) full of it. Just a rule of thumb.

And here's to the vagina loving women of Iraq,and to their husbands,sons,and daughters who have been butchered,tortured,gassed,and starved by the testosterone driven Saddam Hussein.Tell it to them, Ms. Ensler.

Multiple choice question: A Michigan fraternity (eschewing the idiotic black face masks so increasingly frequent on compus) decides to attend a performance of the Vagina Monologues en masse. In order to show solidarity for the performance, for the performers, and women in general they appear in identical costumes. They all arrive as erect penises bearing the slogan "I love vaginas." [Except for the one gay fellow who comes dressed as a limp penis bearing the slogan "I don't.].] The University would respond by:
a) praising the fraternity for being sensitive empowering 'vagina-lovers;
b) suspend the fraternity for divisive speech; and/or
c) mandate sensitivity training on the grounds that the act consituted violence against women and created a hostile school environment?
I vote for c.

Let me be the first to note that there is no crisis of violence against women, no rape crisis, no date rape crisis, no domestic violence crisis, etc.

These crises are entirely fabricated.

I make it a habit to check the crime statistics at my alma mater, the University of Illinois. Those statistics make it clear that the Women's Program at the university is simply lying about violence against women.

I talked with the chief of the university police a year ago. I asked him if a crime wave against women was really sweeping the campus. His response was that Champaign/Urbana was so sleepy that his officers had to fight off boredom.

Ensler: "My own relationship with my vagina was very dissociated."

Is it just me, or does it seem strange to speak of a "relationship" with a part of one's own body? Is there maybe actually a medical syndrome for this kind of thing? Any shrinks out there?

[possible duplicate]
David, you make an interesting point. Ironically, I had always thought it was pubescent males who had 'personal relationships' with their sex organs. I always found it a bit odd when I would run into someone who, for example, had a name for his penis. Now it turns out I was the victim of my own self-perpetuating steretype and learn that women have or can have 'personal relationships' with their vaginas. I do feel a bit of sympathy for Ms. Ensler as I do not feel disociated is the way to go here. If one must have a perosnal relationship with their own vagina or penis - I think a hands-on approach is to be preferred. Although I suppose if one refers to ones own body parts in the third person . . . [best leave that thought alone for a while - but I was having an incredible Woody Allen flash back just now] Just a humble suggestion. Ivan

It's all very well for this thread's male respondants to snicker. Women (although not Professor O'Connor, evidently) have more appreciation for Ensler's project, which draws its justification from important feminist efforts to theorize the female body as a discursive formation. Such work understands how cultural, historical, and ritual conditioning has led women to associate their vaginas with pain (first intercourse; childbirth), with vulnerability to male domination (rape), with "uncleanliness" (menstruation), and with women's essential inferiority to the phallus-bearing male (Freudian psychology). This is clearly what Ensler means when she refers to the "dissociated" vagina. Surrounding the vagina with much needed discourses of pleasure, enjoyment, power, and even humor, Ensler is reclaiming the vagina for women, which naturally is a frightening or offputting prospect for men. However, labelling that rhetoric "hysterical" risks legitimizing the patriarchal tool that associates any rhetorical deviation from "proper" female conduct with an essentialist notion of diseased sex organs. In other words, calling Ensler "hysterical" reinscribes her within the very negative-vaginal logic she helps women escape.

Carolyn...could you please explain what you mean by:

"important feminist efforts to theorize the female body as a discursive formation"

When I read things like this, my eyes tend to glaze over. Could you explain in simple language exactly what this means? I'm not trying to be sarcastic; I'm trying to determine if there is any content here or merely words gone wild.

Thanks.

David -- I mean that poststructuralist feminist theory understands the body as a cultural and linguistic construction, a rich "discursive site" that encodes many different understandings, representations, and histories. By unpacking cultural meanings inscribed on the body, theorists have articulated sophisticated understandings of what it means to inhabit our raced, gendered, and classed identities. For example, feminist critics have explored the cultural construction of embodied phenomena such as pornography, eroticism, anorexia, disease, monstrosity, menstruation, and motherhood. For more, I recommend Katie Conboy's edited collection _Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory_ (Columbia University Press, 1997).

Interesting that my complaint that Ensler is simply lying about violence against women goes unnoticed.

She is lying.

The kind of lying she is engaging in is the most despicable, irresponsible and damaging kind of lying that a woman can engage in. And she is lying.

Loved the "Ensler is reclaiming the vagina for women, which naturally is a frightening or offputting prospect for men" rhetoric. Does the writer have a functioning brain? Seems unlikely.

Feminism, when it isn't engaged in the most disgusting demagoguery, seems almost comic in its love of Stalinist double talk.

And, men, don't buy into this nonsense. I'll decode it for you. Frigidity is widespread among women, and they love to blame it on men. The reality is that they are enforcing it on one another. The pack mentality of feminism, with its emphasis on enforcing prescribed sexual behaviors and attitudes, is emblematic of the way in which women enforce frigidity upon one another. Most women "construct" their sexuality first in order to win the approval of other women, and only secondly for their own and men's sexual pleasure. And of course, women cannot be blamed, so it must be men's fault.

Ensler's dialectic won't cure the bane of frigidity. It reinforces it and guarantees its passage to another generation of women. There is a comic nature to all this. It seems that every way in which women attempt to overcome their frigidity only serves to reinforce it.

Thank God my wife hates this crap and curses any woman who tried to enforce it on her.

Dear Ms. Troyer:
You have posted thought-provoking comments and I trust you do not mind a lengthy response. I would also like to learn more about post-structuralist feminist theory and will take you up on the reading suggestion you set out in your last comment.
“It's all very well for this thread's male respondents to snicker.”
This immediately sets out debate over the Vagina Monologues as one demarcated along gender lines. I query whether this limits ones ability to respond on anything other than a gender-driven level. This implies that men snicker and women appreciate. I acknowledge the snickering tone but question whether it must be purely gender-driven. (I am open to that possibility but I would need to hear more on that point.) This seems to be something of a “men just don’t get it approach”. That may be true but that argument seems a bit shop-worn by now and creates the logical fallacy that implies “we do not agree - therefore you do not get it”. If one spots some self-absorbed over indulgence in Ms. Ensler’s approach that need not be written off, without more, as the ramblings of a threatened male. That over-indulged self-importance is a trait that crosses gender lines and is one that can be found in many of those who, like me, perform in public fora. I have a certain arrogance about me. As such, I sometimes see like traits in others male and female. The immediate positioning of your response along a gender fault line prevents the discussion from moving beyond gender. On the other hand, the very nature of the subject matter might compel these parameters. To the extent it matters, I have seen the Vagina Monologues twice (in NY) and enjoyed it immensely. The fact that I find some of Ms. Ensler’s remarks a bit off-putting does not mean that I did not nor cannot appreciate the art she creates or the message she intends to convey. I simply resent people who come across as a bit too full of themselves even though I can admire the work they produce. In retrospect, I resent people that act too much like me.
“Women (although not Professor O'Connor, evidently) have more appreciation for Ensler's project,”

This sentence belies the gender-fault line you set up in the opening sentence. Is Ms O’Connor (who was the only person to use the term hysterical by the way) in some way aberrant amongst women for not agreeing that it is important “to theorize the female body as a discursive formation.” I have no particular problems with post-structuralist paradigms but theorizing ones body as a discursive formation strikes me as construct in the nature of Foucault - by way of Nietzsche in its focus on points of diffraction and incompatibility rather than on thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This post-structuralist construct negates any possibility of synthesis and seems to compel conflict rather than resolution (hence, the Nietzsche comments).
Such work understands how cultural, historical, and ritual conditioning has led women to associate their vaginas with pain (first intercourse; childbirth),
I am not sure I understand the connection between cultural conditioning etc., which is an anthro-sociological concept, with vaginal pain arising out of ‘first intercourse’ or childbirth, which is a physiological concept. Even absent such conditioning the pain would remain. Does the conditioning exacerbate the pain or cause women to focus said pain on their vagina? I am also uncertain that this pain, such as it is, is associated with or limited to the vagina. Can one suppose then that the physical pleasures of intercourse (1st,2nd or beyond) or childbirth are similarly associated with the vagina, or is pleasure a more general association. If the latter, why is it simply the pain which brings on the anatomically specific association? You do make this point later and I do appreciate Ensler’s intent in creating a more positive aura for the vagina. I do wonder if we limit our pleasures when we create physical parameters for pleasures that affect far more than the actual place from whence that enjoyment springs.
with "uncleanliness" (menstruation),
Do people still think this? Perhaps I am naÔve or associating with the wrong crowd but I just do not see this in my daily life. Menstruation is talked about openly and in a matter of fact manner in our house and “Dad, when you are at the store can you pick up some sanitary napkins for me” is not considered unusual or out of place. Do women still feel this way and if so - who is conditioning them to believe it? Further, in terms of empowerment, I see nothing but empowerment among my daughter and her friends. They scoff when I mention that in my day - women were relegated to roles as cheerleaders rather than athletes. My daughter and her athletically inclined girl friends imposed themselves into the boys’ baseball team because they did not want to be limited to (all-girls) softball. No one stood in the way and if anyone did - there would be hell to pay - as they would just not put up with it. That is the conditioning I now see and I am damn happy about it.
and with women's essential inferiority to the phallus-bearing male (Freudian psychology).
Do you believe that the academic and sociological underpinnings that formed the basis of Freud’s theories still have merit? Have not Freud’s theories taken pride of place on the dustbin of history? Is not a cigar sometimes only a cigar? If not, why rely on Freud’s posturing with regard to the phallus-bearing male.
. . . Ensler is reclaiming the vagina for women, which naturally is a frightening or off-putting prospect for men. . . .
I see this remark as a rhetorical flourish that serves as a bookend to the opening sentence. The equivalent of “Men just don’t get it” is now joined by the equivalent of “men are fraidy-cats”. They are cute put-downs and nice slogans but ultimately meaningless in terms of advancing ones argument. If I posed this question to my daughter (and I might in fact do that) I suspect that her answer would be “How can I reclaim something that I have never lost?” As a rallying point - the idea of reclamation has a strong emotional appeal and is one that has been used throughout history. However, I wonder whether convincing one that one has lost something simply in order to galvanize a movement is worth the cost of the self-imposed sense of loss.
Rgds, Ivan

Ivan-- I have a few remarks in response to your posting. You quote my remark that "It's all very well for this thread's male respondents to snicker" and comment: "This immediately sets out debate over the Vagina Monologues as one demarcated along gender lines." I believe you are misunderstanding my meaning here. Everyone who posted before me was male, and they were snickering at the idea of a woman having a relationship with her vagina -- "dissociated" or otherwise. I also believe that the point of the original posting was to mock Ensler and The Vagina Monologues and to encourage ridicule in the comments.

Then you write: "Is Ms OíConnor ... in some way aberrant amongst women for not agreeing that it is important 'to theorize the female body as a discursive formation?'" Professor O'Connor obviously does believe this is an important project; if you look at her CV you'll see that she has devoted her academic career to precisely this kind of work. A book, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture, deals with the discursive formations surrounding amputation, cholera, breast cancer, and monstrosity. In O'Connor's own words, the book "centers on the epistemological continuity between the disorderly materiality of unhealthy bodies and the radically altered social order of an increasingly materialist culture, examining how the forms and figures of urban industrial disorder filtered through the language surrounding actual disease." O'Connor's classes at the University of Pennsylvania have also pervasively focused on the body as a discursive formation -- see, for example, Deviance in Victorian Literature ("Throughout the century, whole scientific disciplines grew up around the threatening figures of criminals, homosexuals, paupers and hysterical women; while even such seemingly innocuous topics as masturbation, nervousness and dirt were pervaded by a sense of danger and disgust...."), Invalid Women ("Women's symptoms were--and sometimes still are--routinely read by medicine as aberrant body language, the spontaneous fictions of unsettled and undisciplined; while women's fictions often treat themes of illness, using them to articulate pressing questions about women's capacities for artistic expression and self-determination under patriarchy...."), and Fictions of Deformity ("Taking as our starting point Shelley's story about a scientist who assembles and animates a monster from pieces of human and animal corpses, we will track the deformed body across a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and medical texts. Examining the multiple and shifting ways deformity has been narrated over time, we will pay particular attention to moments when the misshapen body becomes the means of articulating transgressive fantasies of culture...."). Other publications, lectures, etc., reinforce this theme.

You write: "I am not sure I understand the connection between cultural conditioning etc., which is an anthro-sociological concept, with vaginal pain arising out of 'first intercourse' or childbirth, which is a physiological concept." I wonder whether one can so cleanly separate the cultural from the physiological? Even young girls know that having a baby hurts (look at media representations of childbirth--the woman is depicted gasping and crying out, her body drenched in sweat, her face wrenched with pain); later, they discover that losing their virginities will hurt and that they will bleed when their hymens tear. This makes them identify their vaginas culturally as the site of pain, even when they have not yet experienced that pain physiologically.

You write: "Menstruation is talked about openly and in a matter of fact manner in our house and 'Dad, when you are at the store can you pick up some sanitary napkins for me' is not considered unusual or out of place." I think you err here in generalizing outwards from your own experience with your daughter. I know of few girls who would feel comfortable asking their fathers to purchase sanitary napkins for them, even fewer who would happily discuss menstruation "openly and in a matter of fact manner" with a man (even a father). Your daughter may play baseball and benefit from the generations of women who struggled to give her that choice; yet female psyches and bodies are still the focus of much negative cultural stereotyping, and women still have many taboos to overcome.

You write: "Do you believe that the academic and sociological underpinnings that formed the basis of Freudís theories still have merit?" I believe Freud's theories never had academic merit. Rightfully debunked they might be by now, yet Freudian psychology is still widely read and debated, and his views on penis-envy have been enormously influential in a wider cultural context. (The very fact that everyone knows the term "penis-envy" supplies proof of that influence.)

You write: "As a rallying point - the idea of reclamation has a strong emotional appeal and is one that has been used throughout history. However, I wonder whether convincing one that one has lost something simply in order to galvanize a movement is worth the cost of the self-imposed sense of loss." Your dismissal fails to account for the remarkable success of The Vagina Monologues. It fails to account for the thousands of women who have experienced The Vagina Monologues it as a transformative experience, one that helps them re-articulate their relationships to their bodies, and especially their vaginas. Evidently these women have lost something; evidently they welcome a chance to reclaim it.

Once again the respondents to this thread have failed to confront the demagoguery of Eve Ensler.

Ensler, once again, is lying about violence against women. She is a liar.

Respondents continue to pass over this as if it did not matter.

What would you think of a white man who systematically and deliberately lied to create the impression that white men lived under a siege of violence by black men?

This woman is a vicious demagogue. If you cannot condemn her, them you should share in the condemnation.

Ensler is a Nazi. Her tactics are those of the Nazi. Sometimes people say these things for dramatic effect. This time I mean it literally.

That academics will tolerate a Nazi liar if her lies are aimed at men says volumes about the total lack of moral compass in our universities.

Damn you.

Brian -- You post here to deride the "particular accents" and "mannerisms" of materialist feminism's "exclusionary language," but in practically the same breath, you identify yourself as Erin O'Connor's proud father. I'm curious about something: how do you reconcile your paternal pride in your daughter with your desire to "condemn" the materialist feminist discourses upon which she has built her academic career? I bring to your attention this passage from a review of Erin O'Connor's Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Literature:

"[Raw Material] is not a book ... for the fainthearted, not bedtime reading for the innocent brood. Nor is it a popular history for the lay reader, for Raw Material is the culmination of OíConnor's dissertation work and is as much about its overt subject matter--somatics and signifiers--as it is about the academic sub-specialty known as cultural studies. Slow going is required as one makes oneís way through sentences such as the following: 'The material patterns of industrial pathology found a metaphorical counterpart in medical models of disease, which mapped productive language onto pathological process as a means of investigating the meaning of corporeality in machine culture.'"

You have leveled certain charges against my rhetoric in this forum. But here we see the very same charges leveled against your daughter's book: Raw Material is an exclusionary volume (it is "not for the fainthearted"; it is not "popular history for the lay reader"); it participates in the "academic sub-specialty known as cultural studies"; its difficult, complex sentences necessitate "slow going" on the reader's behalf. Surely if you attack me for the nature of my rhetoric, your criticism must also include your daughter's professional discourse?

The fact is that all academic disciplines employ specialized language. Papers in mathematics, biology, and economics are not written with a populist readership in mind; why should works of materialist feminism be labeled "discrimminatory" [sic] because they employ similarly specialized discourses? In other words, why should feminists be held to different standards of "accessibility" than scholars working in other fields?

The best description of Eve Ensler that I've come across is from an NYTimes Magazine article by Susan Dominus (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/10/magazine/10ENSLER.html)

"In some ways, Ensler is a familiar type, the girl from drama club who was electric but also exhausting. She seduced you with the intensity of her feelings but unnerved you with the instant intimacy she offered, the righteous outrage you couldn't possibly match."

Carolyn, I hear you on the sneering tone. But just because some men object to Ensler for reasons that I find objectionable doesn't mean that I (a woman and a feminist) can therefore support her project. If some women want to hold hands and chant about their vaginas, I won't try to stop them. But I won't join in the celebration either.

I think it _is_ vacuous, an example of "the personal is political" carried to an absurd extreme. I am particularly irked by one her latest slogans: "Afghanistan is Everywhere"
(http://www.awakenedwoman.com/ensler.htm). This strikes me as a possibly naive or possibly cynical but certainly opportunistic use of Afghan women as symbols of victimhood: the very real suffering they endured under a brutal regime of violence and terror is supposed to prove the existence of our suffering. I'm not buying it.

I don't believe that feminist scholarship should be held to a higher standard of accessibility. But I do believe that all work in the humanities should be more accessible than is presently the case: ie, accessible to an educated layperson from outside the specialization (which is not the same as writing for a popular audience, though if more scholars wrote for a popular audience that might be a good thing).

I don't know which I find more ridiculous, Brian's absurd Clintonian denials in the face of Carolyn's challenge ("I am a victim of a false accusation!") or Stephen's insistence that Eve Ensler is a Nazi. Grow up, people, and take some responsibility for your words. Brian, your post clearly referred to Carolyn's feminist jargon, so why play deconstructionist language games denying it? Stephen, the Nazis were evil bastards who gassed millions of Jews, but Eve Ensler is a crank feminist who just wants to chant "vagina" all day long. There's a difference.

Chris

Carolyn...thanks for your response:

"I mean that poststructuralist feminist theory understands the body as a cultural and linguistic construction, a rich "discursive site" that encodes many different understandings, representations, and histories. By unpacking cultural meanings inscribed on the body, theorists have articulated sophisticated understandings of what it means to inhabit our raced, gendered, and classed identities."

Why do you use a phrase such as "the body as a cultural and linguistic construction?" One's *image* of the body may be affected by cultural factors (although we can argue about how much)--but surely you don't mean to claim that the body has no reality independent of our image of it? Poststructuralist/postmodernist phrases like this often seem to me either trivial or false, depending on how you interpret them.
Also, you refer to our "raced, gendered, and classed identities." Why do you focus specifically on the triumverate of race, gender, and class? Aren't there other factors that affect an individual's personhood equally or more? For example, some people think mainly in terms of images, while others think mainly in terms of words. Isn't this a factor of one's being that is at least equal in importance to, say, one's skin color?