The Vagina Monologes (Question 3)

3) Ensler seems to have two purposes in this text: to celebrate vaginas and to raise awareness of violence against women. Does she achieve both of these goals equally? Do they contradict each other at all? What is the effect of reading all the monologues as one large piece?

Image: "Pink Sweet Peas" by Georgia O'Keefe

Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues really does achieve both of her purposes for writing it. The book is a celebration of womanhood and embraces female sexuality. Many of the monologues describe how women discover beauty through sexual pleasure. One example of this can be found in "The Vagina Workshop" where a woman takes a class in order to understand her vagina. During the class she is told to lay down and discover her clitoris, she describes the experience as "a quake, an eruption" which opened "an ancient horizon of light and silence, which opened on to a plane of music and colors and innocence and longing." Another example can be in "Because He Liked to Look at It" where a woman has sex with a man who enjoys examining her vagina before they have intercourse. At first she finds it very awkward, because she views her vagina as being "incredibly ugly." but after he had looked at it for over an hour and told her how beautiful he found it, she herself begins to find the beauty in her body and she said that she "began to love my vagina."


The other goal of The Vagina Monologues is to raise awareness of the horrible violence that occurs against women. The most powerful example of this would be "My Vagina Was My Village" which is the tragic story of a woman who was brutally raped by a group of soldiers. She describes herself (and her vagina) before the rape as being innocent as well as sexually curious.  her story then takes a horrible turn as she describes being raped by these men for days, and not only with their bodies but also with physical objects. Finally she says "My vagina a live wet water village. They invaded it. Butchered it and burned it down." This story honestly made me cry, these monsters not only hurt her on a physical level, but the literally destroyed what she found beautiful about herself.  Unfortunately in the world we live in, I do not believe violence like this will ever be able to be fully stopped; however, sharing this story with the world will hopefully impact whoever reads this raise awareness about these horrible crimes so we can prevent tragedies like this from occurring. 


Her goals of celebrating female sexuality and raising awareness against female violence never interfere with each other, however there is one monologue in this book I find highly confusing. "The Little Cooche Snorcher that Could." is one woman's account of her early sexual abuse as a child by her fathers friend, and her sexual awakening from a twenty-four year old woman when she was a only thirteen years old. The rape she experiences as a child deeply affected her, she believed her vagina was "a place of pain, nastiness, punching, invasion, and blood." Her perception only changes when a "gorgeous" young woman kisses her, and then has her spend the night with her. This woman first offers her alcohol, she then undressed and pleasures her. She describes the experience as transforming, and that she had raised her "up to a kind of heaven." Although there is much beauty in this girl finding beauty and pleasure within herself, the underlying fact is that this woman was a pedophile. If this has not been a beautiful woman, but a man, this story would have been appeared much more disturbing. I view this experience as violation, regardless of whether she enjoyed it or not. I don't think this story belongs in this book because it sends a very confusing message. This woman might have viewed this experience as being beautiful, but it is also perverted because a young teenager was sedated and taken advantage of.


The Vagina Monologues is definitely a book that needs to be read from cover to cover as a collection. Like any book, if you just flip through it you will lose many of the crucial meanings behind the stories, but in The Vagina Monologues stories that are taken out of context just appear to be humorous and the message is completely lost. Entertaining questions such as "If your vagina get dressed, what would it wear?" and "If your vagina could talk, what would it say, in two words."taken out of context just appear to be both silly and awkward questions, which answers would just be laughed over. I myself am guilty of reading parts of this book out of context. Before I had actually begin to read the book I had flipped open to the monologue "My Angry Vagina" which starts out with "My vagina's angry. It is. It's pissed. My vagina's furious and it needs to talk. It needs to talk all about this shit." I shut the book and laughed at it, viewing the monologue as just some kind of over dramatic and extreme feminist piece. I did not read far enough to realize that the piece was about loving your vagina and yourself, and not letting others confine your vagina and your sexuality. I now feel that I horribly misjudged this piece on its surface level, and I am very grateful that I was given the opportunity to read this collection of monologues and fully understand all of the deeper meanings that these stories contain.