In a recent commentary for the Maroon News, "Is The Vagina Monologues an Anti-Feminist Play?" Jeremy Garson urges students to not attend the play and to find a more suitable platform through with to support victims of domestic violence because Garson does not agree with the message that The Vagina Monologues presents. That is all that the commentary effectively conveys.
I was honestly excited to read this commentary when I first saw the title, as The Vagina Monologues, like any text, begs to be problematized and discussed by its audience. This piece, however, does none of that and is a severely unfulfilling read.
Garson claims that some readers will disagree with his flagrantly unsupported accusation that The Vagina Monologues present women as nothing but extensions of their genitalia "not on the basis of facts, but by taking the stance of a bully." I feel it is important to identify a couple of key definitions.
fact /fakt/: (noun) A thing that is indisputably the case
opinion /əˈpinyən/: (noun) A view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge
Garson's commentary presents his opinions on The Vagina Monologues, opinions that he has every right to express and would be interesting to read had they been presented alongside any valid supporting evidence from the text. The only facts presented by Garson are that his mother worked as a speech pathologist, and that he is an American. He expresses great pride in both of these facts.
Garson is additionally preemptively dismissive of his audience accusing him of being a sexist. The only context in which Garson appears to potentially exhibit characteristics of a sexist is in his excessive defensiveness. One can freely disagree with the message of a female-centric text without coming across as a sexist. However, accusing one's audience of baseless personal attacks has never helped develop any argument. I think it may be safe to say that Garson doth protest too much and this hypothetical lashing out at his assumed-to-be-ignorant audience weakens his already nearly nonexistent argument.
I don't even necessarily disagree with Garson's argument, in that he effectively develops none of it so there is no basis with which to disagree. Is The Vagina Monologues an anti-feminist play? The point still waits to be made. I do feel strongly, however, that the idea that a text should be boycotted due to its being controversial and provocative is entirely myopic.
David Foster Wallace once said that the purpose of good fictional texts is to "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." The fact that The Vagina Monologues has solicited such a strong response from Garson while historically empowering the women who participate in bringing the text to life suggests that the text is entirely valuable to its audience.
All important texts should lead to discussions of why certain images put into a certain context evoke a certain emotional response. One of the founding principles in studying the humanities, and by extension the liberal arts, is to form a broad understanding of the human condition through textual interpretation. If a text makes an individual uncomfortable, then it did its job. It is then the responsibility of the individual to evaluate why it has elicited such a response and to extend this evaluation into various social and cultural contexts. To boycott a text goes against everything that a liberal arts education stands for.
I also take huge issue with the image Garson opens and closes his piece with. Garson suggests that those who participate in or support The Vagina Monologues "stand on the graves of sexual and domestic abuse victims." Of course, many cases of abuse and assault have ended in tragic deaths, but women who have suffered sexual and domestic abuse are survivors. To suggest that these strong women have died in even a metaphorical sense flies directly in the face of Garson's seemingly passionate view that women are more than just their vaginas.
As a whole, Garson's argument is paper-thin and weakly supported. He devotes an absurd amount of time to defending himself and essentially no time to establishing why he sees The Vagina Monologues as anti-feminist and politically problematic. Regardless of the argument, or lack thereof, of the piece, it is wholly ludicrous to boycott a text because it has been known to provoke its audience in a myriad of ways.
The Vagina Monologues is a socially and culturally important text. To suggest that the play not only does not deserve attendance, but also that it should not be used as a vehicle to financially support the Victims of Violence charity is to suggest that uplifting the voices of sexually, socially, and emotionally empowered women is a truly dangerous act. I believe here we have found the point that Garson seems to have missed.
“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.” -Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues
