Vaginas Speak: The Vagina Monologues at Texas A&M

It was at times heartbreaking and at other times hilarious. There were times when the auditorium was filled with laughter, and there were times when it was so quiet that you could the faint sounds of weeping. There were times when you would sit forward in your seat smiling, and times when you would sit back in your seat with your hand over your mouth. There were not easy transitions from one topic to the next, but sharp contrast in tone and subject. During a performance of the Vagina Monologues at Texas A&M University I felt confronted with the stories of women. At times it made me feel so uncomfortable that it was difficult to keep watching, to keep listening, to keep hearing the stories. But that’s the point. Each performance left you feeling something, but before you could digest and become comfortable with what you had witnessed the next performance pushed you further.

The first monologue, “Hair” was comical and witty and it left me thinking about my own preconceived notions of what is sexy and what is not. The woman talked about her husband wanting her to shave her vagina, and how she did not feel comfortable when she did. But more than that she talked about how he, and the therapist, blamed her for his infidelity. It is interesting how often when someone cheats on their husband, lover, or partner so often we wonder why and often ponder whether or not it was the person who is being cheated on fault. The “Wear and Say” list was simple a list of answers to those questions; women’s answers for what their vagina would wear and what it would say. What would it wear? It would wear everything from Armani to sweatpants. What would it say? Slow down. Think again. Remember me. Then there was the workshop for vaginas. What does your vagina look like? Well, to the woman that the monologue was based on it looked like a big black dot that acted as a vacuum. Let’s just say by the end of the workshop she had a whole different view of her vagina.

Bob liked to look at it. There is a monologue about a woman who met a man who was completely ordinary in every way, except for the fact that he was obsessed with looking at vaginas. This was how this particular woman was able to fully appreciate her vagina. It was not necessarily that it was a man, but that it was someone else. Bob could have been named Brandi and it would have been the same type of experience. Sometimes we need to see ourselves through someone else. Sometimes we need to see the beauty that we fail to recognize.

Probably the most powerful performance was a monologue entitled “The Memory of Her Face.” From an Iraqi girl being disfigured from a bomb dropped by an American war plane, to a woman kidnapped and beaten in Mexico, to a woman in Pakistan that is burned by acid, you will wanted to look away even though in front of you there is only a stage. This performance was so raw and delivered with such emotional impact that it is difficult to encapsulate what I witnessed on stage. There was anger that you felt toward the man that beat his wife and disfigured her with acid, so much anger that you do not care about justice but only vengeance. There was deep sorry for the woman who was kidnapped and a lack of understand how so many women could simply be made to disappear. There was guilt felt for the woman disfigured in the war zone because of our foreign policy of “spreading democracy,” and the resulting disruption of so many lives.

There was so much more. There was the angry vagina, which was justifiable angry at all the ways in which vaginas are mistreated. Then there was the little coochie snorcher that could. Of course there was the woman that was reclaiming cunt, taking back the word so often used in such disparaging ways. Then there was the woman who liked to make vaginas happy, and she could moan in so many ways. One of my personal favorites was about being in the room when a woman gave birth, and how a vagina can sacrifice so much. The last monologue was a teenage girl’s guide to surviving sex slavery, and how one girls spent two years of her life struggling to survive and how she made it through.

The performances where like nothing that I could have imagined. There where at times so moving that it pained your very soul to listen to the sadness emanating from the voices of the women on stage. And then one of the performers would say things that would make you chuckle followed by an uncontrolled laughter. This would only last until the next performer pushed your emotions to the very edge was again. This was not something that you should watch as a casual observer, something that you can simply watch on a Saturday night before having drinks. The words and the voices stay with you for much longer. The vagina speaks, and it is powerful.