The Vagina Monologues

One Eve banished us from Heaven. Another is helping us discover the heaven within ourselves. One Eve is blamed in Western theology for initiating sin and instilling self-loathing in her daughters. Another is shaking us, awakening realizations of how misplaced this self-loathing is. One Eve banished us from Heaven. Another is helping us reclaim our lost Eden.

One week ago, I was seriously questioning whether we, in this part of the world, had come to that point in our female emancipation movement (if we can call it that), which drives us to confront a performance like the Vagina Monologues. Ten minutes into the actual performance and I found myself validating my initial musings on the subject and judged the effort as pretentious. I sat there, smugly, laughing at the humorous bits but still reluctant to acknowledge such a show to be an acceptable outgrowth of our natural trajectory of female liberation. I completely objected! We had not yet reached this stage! We were not ready to talk about vaginas in this fashion! Before long, however, my indignation gave way and I found myself changing my mind. I don’t know what this show awoke in me, but I remembered thoughts and feelings that I had packed away. I remembered why the issue of women was not something I should take cynically. Why it was something that still needed to be addressed. Why my indifference was careless, even though it may not have been callous. And why “the issue” of women was not an issue but a problem.

Moved almost to tears, I realized that putting something like this “out there” was not something that was too advanced for our still young, though just a little jaded, women’s movement. In fact it was not advanced for any women’s movement anywhere in the world. It was, on the contrary, very essential to any conversation about women’s rights because in the final analysis women’s rights are not about political equality. They are not about the rights of the workplace; the rights to a career; to equal employment; to equal compensation. They may demand all of these things but they are not about them. Women’s rights are, in their most fundamental aspect, about sexual equality. To achieve that sexual equality one must embrace that sexuality’s most basic element. And that element is the female body. What makes these monologues so powerful is that they remind us that if we are to get anywhere on the subject of freedom and equality, expecting to free ourselves from patriarchal chains, then first we must free ourselves from our own chains. Our own, and those shackled on us by other women. And we must free ourselves from the chains of those women who help propagate our self-hatred.

The Vagina Monologues may have sprung from great advances in the feminist movement (and indeed from the marriage between women’s rights and human rights, which, sadly, are not the same) in a first world America but they belong at the very core of any feminist movement – and especially a movement gestating in a third world environment. We need something like this to shock our precarious movement back into the ring. To claim space at ballot boxes and parliaments and offices, we must first reclaim the female form. We must reclaim our bodies and end our self-loathing. Unless we do this we cannot find out true emancipation. “My short skirt is not about you…it is about me”. Unless we understand what drives this small but vital fact, we cannot move ahead.

At the end of the show, public opinion was unanimous: “What a bold show!”, “What bold women”, “How bold!”, “O but this was almost too bold”. The degree of boldness does not matter. What matters is that the only way anyone could express their opinions on the subject was by the use of the adjective “bold”. And yes, it was bold. For a sleepy, indifferent, apathetic nation it was certainly bold. But for anyone for whom women mean anything, the show was just a first step in a much-needed direction.
It is about time that someone took this very essential first step. And it is a first step. That’s what makes it so important. I am terrified that this first step will be pulled over. That it will halt. That many will resist the second step. That it will be consumed by a great silence. A silence of embarrassment. A silence of shame. I am afraid that its’ footprint will also fade away. That it will become a distant memory of “that scandalous show that senselessly spoke of vaginas and periods”. A scandalous show with no truth! Just another scandal in the scandalous life of this city of voyeurs. It saddens me.

There are structures in this city that celebrate the male form; structures that declare male power. Military structures that shout out their masculinity - that celebrate the phallus. National symbols that kiss the sky in their entire erect splendor. There is no structure for its’ female counterpart. There is no structure that celebrates the vagina or that celebrates women and womanhood. And it saddens me that while these will stay, this one effort at salvaging female space will fade away.

There were many people who sat in the audience that night. Who sat and laughed at all the right jokes. But there were also those who laughed at all the wrong ones. And these laughs appalled me. They worried me. They made me wonder how many of the people who were there that night understood the message that these powerful monologues were trying to put across. And of those who understood it, how many took it seriously? How many people were laughing for the right reasons and how many were laughing because they heard a woman say “vagina” and “cunt” and “clitoris” right there on the stage? And how many were laughing because they thought the whole event ridiculous?

I doubt the sincerity of those laughs. I doubt it, because when you think about it, the Vagina Monologues are not funny. They are real and they talk about real pain. It is okay to laugh for relief and to laugh to let go. It is okay to laugh with the women who share their pain in such an honest way. But it is not okay to laugh at them, or at this kind of pain. I was moved almost to tears when one woman recited the story of another woman’s rape. When she went deep down inside herself to try and understand and portray the trauma that another experienced upon such a brutal violation of her body and of her self. And still amazed that the story of such violence could find such beautiful words to tell itself. I would have been moved to tears. But a sharp laugh from someone right behind me shocked my tears away. Shocked them, because that laugh had come from a woman.

We have come very far in the women’s movement. We have placed women on billboards, in offices, in the Parliament. We have placed women as Justices of our courts and keepers of our jails. We have placed women as international ambassadors. We have placed women as heads of our legislature. We were the first third world, Muslim nation to be ruled by a female Prime Minister. Our movement may not have spread wide across our nation but where it has broken patriarchal boundaries it has penetrated deeply and our ideas are here to stay. But we still get giggles at “inappropriate” words and enlightened as we are, we still can’t raise our voices in unison and say “cunt”. And that is why we really haven’t come very far.

I think the four women who got up on that stage and said what they had to are incredible ladies. But how long will it be before our true narrow-mindedness gets the better of us and we push them towards the margins like we do anyone who threatens to disturb our order? If this were Salem, these women would have been proclaimed witches and been burned at the stake. And I would probably have been burned with them. This is not Salem, however. And it is the 21st century. But I wonder. There may be no more ritual burnings because of our urban umbrella of human rights (although I can’t say the same for my rural sisters), but there are still labels. And they are cruel ones. And we have to take the crucial second step to obliterate them. We have to be continue to be brave. And to do that we have to understand how valuable this finally broken silence is. We have to understand that all our progress, all our developments are worthless if we cannot learn to be comfortable with our bodies. We have to embrace ourselves to keep from being silenced all over again.