I never saw the Vagina Monologues, for all the obvious reasons that a person wouldn’t go and see it: a) any frisson at the title presupposes that you are either shocked by the word vagina, or you are gleeful at the idea of shocking the kind of person who might be, and I wouldn’t put myself in either of those groups; and b) I thought, rightly, that it might be all monologues, and all about vaginas. You need a bit of light and shade with these things. In Puppetry of the Penis, at least they did tricks.
The show’s author, Eve Ensler, and her Vagina Warriors launched their Until the Violence Stops festival recently, with the aim, via a number of events and films and musical happenings, of ”making New York the safest city in the world for women and girls”. It’s a tiny bit annoying — New York might not be the safest place on Earth, but if you were to hike your mind over the most misogynistic places in the world, those skyscrapers wouldn’t get a look in.
Ensler, however, has done much more than that — she’s the will and the cash behind safe houses for women and girls in Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan. And when she discusses her achievements (I mean that in a totally neutral way), she starts here: ”When I started this 10 years ago, no one said the word ‘vagina’. Let’s start there. Something has shifted in people.”
There’s a problem here, isn’t there, a problem which is not covered by the fact that she’s American and we’re not, that American feminism (now on its third wave) has different concerns, and some cool and unusual moves. It is fair to say that, wherever you are in the English-speaking world, the controversial word is not vagina, but cunt.
More to the point, Ensler knows this, which is why the talking point of the Vagina Monologues was never its use of the word ”vagina”, but rather, the bit where it required of its audience that they all stood up and reclaimed the word ”cunt”. The reason nobody said vagina 10 years ago is the same that nobody says it now, apart from doctors and, at a pinch, art critics who have already said ”pudenda” twice in one paragraph.
People who hate women, or find us disgusting or terrifying, do not use ”vagina” casually, as an insult. People who think of themselves as post-feminists, who delight in the shock of an apparently unsisterly sound emitting from them conversationally, do not say ”vagina”. I got chatting to a guy the other day wearing a T-shirt that said ”I heart vagina”, which, I think, says it all.
Not that the T-shirt was funny, particularly, but if ”vagina” were in anything approaching common usage, it would have been actively unfunny. It was weird because it was unusual, and funny because it was weird. And for all her many good works, it’s a disappointment that Ensler has wimped out here. Saying the word once doesn’t have much impact if you thereafter eschew it in favour of something more ”responsible”.
A correlative would be if the gay rights movement had started out reclaiming ”queer”, and only claimed credit for reclaiming ”homosexual”. Because it’s not explosively insulting, because it’s formal and a bit technical, because you can imagine it appearing on a legal document and not bawled across a bar in provocation, ”homosexual” would have been a polite sort of coup.
The mistake feminists make, when they object to the c-word but never approach it, and never use it, is to think that it will slip discreetly out of the language. Of course it won’t! It’s the rudest word we’ve got, in the entire language. It’s like thinking the secret of nuclear fission is just going to disappear. (This was a point not lost on Inga Muscio, who made a splash with her book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence.)
But the Vagina Warriors claim to be up to a certain job, claim to be iconoclasts, then go home at 4.30. They’re the plumbers of the warrior world. Bring on the Cunt Warriors. — Â
