There’s Valentine’s Day… and then there’s V-Day.
Valentine’s Day is filled with chocolate, kisses, (chocolate kisses, anyone?), flowers, and whatever your plans are for the night, whether it’s hanging out with someone special or watching horror movies with your girls while consuming mass amounts of Ben and Jerry’s.
V-Day is a completely different beast.
V-Day is a growing movement that works towards stopping violence towards women and girls around the world. It began in 1994 after the first performance of The Vagina Monologues, which is a play written by Eve Ensler based on her interviews with women from around the world about not only the cultural stigmas of rape and abuse, but also about, well, their vaginas. The play ran on Broadway for five years before it began to tour the U.S., and on Valentine’s Day in 1998 Ensler and a group of women from New York City founded V-Day.
Now, V-Day and The Vagina Monologues have hit UM.
When I told people that I was going to see The Vagina Monologues instead of going to the Griz game, I got some weird looks, but as a woman, a feminist, and an English major, I figured I should at least see it once.
The monologues vary; some are serious, such as the monologue My Vagina Was A Village with the woman from Bosnia talking about her experiences in a rape camp. Others are hilarious, like The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy in which a sex worker and, in the case of the performance at UM, her client discuss and display exactly how one should go about making a vagina happy.
The audience’s enthusiasm, both the women and the men (some of whom went independently and not of their wife/sister/girlfriend’s demand), only made the already excellent performance even better.
What it comes down to is that you don’t have to be an activist or a feminist to enjoy The Vagina Monologues. Whether you think along the same lines as Ensler and the characters in the monologues or not, this is a performance that shouldn’t be missed.