My first year at Bowdoin, I resisted attending ‘The Vagina Monologues.’ As a freshman girl, sex had taken on some decidedly negative connotations–saying ‘no’ was a sure way to disappoint that cute upperclassman you’d just met; however, if you said ‘yes’ too many times, everyone would know.
I could tell that this paradox had a relationship to feminism, but reclaiming power through my vagina was the last thing I wanted to do. I wasn’t my vagina… I was a personality and a set of unique interests, and I wanted some recognition for this from the opposite sex damn it.
Sophomore year, I can’t tell you what happened. Likely, some of my initial resistance toward the show had worn off, but not enough to drag me away from the obligatory post-dinner stupor or another campus event. I was present when my friends talked about “the flood” (the saddest monologue, they said) and related other anecdotes–but I had no point of reference.
Junior year I was abroad, though open to the idea of ‘The Vagina Monologues’. Somewhere along the way I had watched YouTube clips of the production, maybe even read selections from the show in the feminist blogosphere. I thought about what it would be like to pretend to have an orgasm in front of my professors and peers. I walked the streets of Rabat, Morocco: my gaze averted–the male gaze constant. I wished my vagina came with an invisibility cloak.
I think you can see where this is going.
Senior year was a sprint with no warm-up for this blogger. I threw myself into reporting on sexual assault issues—and I quietly withdrew from relationships with people that didn’t value my vagina, or any part of me, quite the way I needed them to.
I was still a personality and a set of unique interests—but so was everybody on earth. And the thing that differentiated me from 50% of the population wasn’t my brain (they had those), my breasts (they kind of had those), or my butt (yeah, everyone has one). It was my vagina–a logical symbol for the female experience.
When I finally took myself to see ‘The Vagina Monologues’ in Kresge auditorium I was alone. You see, all of my friends had seen the show for the past three years—it was their turn to indulge that post-dinner stupor. As the show began, the strangest thing happened: I realized that I had already seen ‘The Vagina Monologues’.
I knew the Bowdoin stories shared in the prelude from old issues of ‘Speak’— narratives that stayed with me as I moved through the same campus geography where each of these defining sexual experiences had occurred in their time. As for ‘Vagina Happy Facts’—weren’t they common knowledge? Somehow, I knew them all. And the monologues…I’d seen them on YouTube, heard them quoted by friends, read them somewhere I couldn’t quite recall.
Or maybe, just maybe, I’d lived them in some limited way: through my kinship with a world of women sitting half-naked in bathhouses, staring stoic on the Metro-North commuter rail, or grabbing my hand and dragging me out on the floor– twirling to Carly Rae Jepsen with simple, stupid, exultation.
It was a small way, and a very safe way, to experience someone else’s darkness and trauma–if my vagina had a collective memory, it certainly balked at claiming someone else’s experience. Listening to those strangely familiar monologues I waited for something that I could understand, that I could share. And then it came—one billion rising. The joy that we could all share, the dance we could dance—with our whole selves, and not just our vaginas.