At the suggestion of a friend, I picked up The Post's Thursday, Feb. 16, issue to read Ashley Herzog's Between the Lines, Monologues not true to feminism
about Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues.
I directed and organized this year's V-Day at OU (as well as last year's), and was interested to see what she had to say. To my surprise, Herzog's opinion piece made no mention of the actual performance of The Vagina Monologues which took place on three separate nights this past week. What kind of journalist criticizes a play without even attending a performance? Had she bothered to do so, she may have had some of her questions answered about how exactly V-Day helps to end violence against women and girls around the world.
V-Day was started by Eve Ensler in 1998, and last year alone saw 2,500 productions of The Vagina Monologues in 1,116 colleges and communities around the world, raising over $4 million for organizations dedicated to preventing and ending violence against women (according to vday.org). Although I think those figures speak for themselves, apparently Herzog does not find them significant. In addition, the very subject matter of the show helps to get the word out about women's experiences that may otherwise go unnoted. Education is the first step: until people acknowledge the violence being done to women, they will do nothing to stop it.
V-Day is not, as Herzog claims, short for Vagina Day, nor are activists attempting to replace Valentine's Day. Had she done her research, she would know that the V in V-Day stands for Valentine, Vagina, and Violence. Also, the opinion piece leaves me wondering whether Herzog read the entire script, as there are multiple monologues focusing on violent atrocities such as Bosnian rape camps, domestic violence and the comfort women forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese army in WWII.
Additionally, in her criticism of the monologue The Little Coochi Snorcher that Could Herzog neglects to mention that the speaker was raped as a ten-year-old child, and that the experience in her teen years of being taught by a young woman not to fear her sexuality was considered by her to be a healing one. These are the stories of real women. If their lives have not gone the way Herzog would like, does that mean they should be left out of the spectrum of female experience?
Herzog ends her piece by calling me and all the other thousands of hard-working men and women who organize and perform V-Day preschoolers who have learned the meaning of 'vagina' for the first time. If raising roughly $3,000 for local and worldwide women's groups over the past two years makes me a preschooler, then I do not want to be Herzog's kind of adult.
- Emily Maluski was the organizer/director of V-Day at OU and is a senior creative writing major.
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