Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women—that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. I do not think I am being extreme. When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet. You force what is meant to be open, trusting, nurturing, creative, and alive to be bent, infertile, and broken.
In 1997, I met with a group of activist women, many from a group called Feminst.com, and we formed V-Day. As with all the mysterious vagina happenings, we show up, we do the groundwork, we stay in shape, and the Vagina Queens do the rest. On February 14, 1998, Valentine’s Day, our first V-Day was born. Twenty-five hundred people lined up outside the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City for our first outrageous event. Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Marisa Tomei, Shirley Knight, Lois Smith, Kathy Najimy, Calista Flockhart, Lily Tomlin, Hazelle Goodman, Margaret Cho, Hannah Ensler-Rivel, BETTY, Klezmer Women, Ulali, Phoebe Snow, Gloria Steinem, Soraya Mire, and Rosie Perez joined together to perform The Vagina Monologues and created a transforming evening that raised over $100,000 and launched the V-Day movement. Since then there have been stellar events at the Old Vic in London in 1999, with performers including Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Melanie Griffith, Meera Syal, Julia Sawalha, Joely Richardson, Ruby Wax, Eddi Reader, Katie Puckrik, Dani Behr, Natasha McElhone, Sophie Dahl, Jane Lapotaire, Thandie Newton, and Gillian Anderson. In 2000, V-Day was celebrated in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Sarasota, Aspen, and Chicago.
In three years, V-Day has happened at over three hundred colleges, with performances of The Vagina Monologues directed and performed by students and faculty. All the productions raise money and consciousness for local groups that work to stop violence toward women.
The Off-Broadway production of The Vagina Monologues will raise nearly $1 million for V-Day. Subsequent productions around the country and the world will support the movement as well.
At this point, the V-Day Fund is supporting grassroots groups around the world, where, in several cases, women are fighting with their lives to protect women and end the violence. In Afghanistan, there is RAWA, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a group devoted to liberating women from the terrible oppression of the Taliban. There, women are not allowed to work, to be educated, to go to the doctor, or to leave their house without a male escort. There, women are being buried under their burqas without any protection from rape or murder. The V-Day Fund is helping RAWA educate women in clandestine schools, documenting illegal executions, and building a women’s movement. In Kenya, Africa, we are supporting Tasaru Ntomonok (Safe Motherhood Initiative), part of Mandeolo—a project that is stopping the practice of young girls being genitally mutilated by introducing a new coming-of-age ritual without the cut. Recently, we were able to buy them a red jeep so they can travel more easily from village to village as they continue the education and prevention. In Croatia, we are working with the Center for Women War Victims, which through our support will open the first rape crisis center in the former Yugoslavia. The center will also be able to train women in Kosova and Chechyna to work with women in those countries who have been raped and traumatized during the war. V-Day is working in collaboration with Planned Parenthood to implement within their already existing programs a strategy to prevent and end violence toward women. The list goes on and on.
The miracle of V-Day, like The Vagina Monologues, is that it happened because it had to happen. A call, perhaps; an unconscious mandate, perhaps. I surrender to the Vagina Queens.
Something is unfolding. It is both mystical and practical. It requires that we show up, do our exercise, and get out of the way.
In order for the human race to continue, women must be safe and empowered. It’s an obvious idea, but like a vagina, it needs great attention and love in order to be revealed.
THE
VAGINA
MONOLOGUES
I bet you’re worried. I was worried. That’s why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don’t think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas—a community, a culture of vaginas. There’s so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them—like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there.
In the first place, it’s not so easy even to find your vagina. Women go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it. I interviewed a high-powered businesswoman who told me she was too busy; she didn’t have the time. Looking at your vagina, she said, is a full day’s work. You have to get down there on your back in front of a mirror that’s standing on its own, full-length preferred. You’ve got to get in the perfect position, with the perfect light, which then is shadowed somehow by the mirror and the angle you’re at. You get all twisted up. You’re arching your head up, killing your back. You’re exhausted by then. She said she didn’t have the time for that. She was busy.
So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues. I talked with over two hundred women. I talked to older women, young women, married women, single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African American women, Hispanic women, Asian American women, Native American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. At first women were reluctant to talk. They were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn’t stop them. Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one’s ever asked them before.
Let’s just start with the word “vagina.” It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: “Hurry, Nurse, bring me the vagina.” “Vagina.” “Vagina.” Doesn’t matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say. It’s a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct—“Darling, could you stroke my vagina?”—you kill the act right there.
I’m worried about vaginas, what we call them and don’t call them.
In Great Neck, they call it a pussycat. A woman there told me that her mother used to tell her, “Don’t wear panties underneath your pajamas, dear; you need to air out your pussycat.” In Westchester they called it a pooki, in New Jersey a twat. There’s “powderbox,” “derrière,” a “poochi,” a “poopi,” a “peepe,” a “poopelu,” a “poonani,” a “pal” and a “piche,” “toadie,” “dee dee,” “nishi,” “dignity,” “monkey box,” “coochi snorcher,” “cooter,” “labbe,” “Gladys Siegelman,” “VA,” “wee wee,” “horsespot,” “nappy dugout,” “mongo,” a “pajama,” “fannyboo,” “mushmellow,” a “ghoulie,” “possible,” “tamale,” “tottita,” “Connie,” a “Mimi” in Miami, “split knish” in Philadelphia, and “schmende” in the Bronx. I am worried about vaginas.
Some of the monologues are close to verbatim interviews, some are composite interviews, and with some I just began with the seed of an interview and had a good time. This monologue is pretty much the way I heard it. Its subject, however, came up in every interview, and often it was fraught. The subject being
HAIR
You cannot love a vagina unless you love hair. Many people do not love hair. My first and only husband hated hair. He said it was cluttered and dirty. He made me shave my vagina. It looked puffy and exposed and like a little girl. This excited him. When he made love to me, my vagina felt the way a beard must feel. It felt good to rub it, and painful. Like scratching a mosquito bite. It felt like it was on fire. There were screaming red bumps. I refused to shave it again. Then my husband had an affair. When we went to marital therapy, he said he screwed around because I wouldn’t please him sexually. I wouldn’t shave my vagina. The therapist had a thick German accent and gasped between sentences to show her empathy. She asked me why I didn’t want to plea
se my husband. I told her I thought it was weird. I felt little when my hair was gone down there, and I couldn’t help talking in a baby voice, and the skin got irritated and even calamine lotion wouldn’t help it. She told me marriage was a compromise. I asked her if shaving my vagina would stop him from screwing around. I asked her if she’d had many cases like this before. She said that questions diluted the process. I needed to jump in. She was sure it was a good beginning.
This time, when we got home, he got to shave my vagina. It was like a therapy bonus prize. He clipped it a few times, and there was a little blood in the bathtub. He didn’t even notice it, ’cause he was so happy shaving me. Then, later, when my husband was pressing against me, I could feel his spiky sharpness sticking into me, my naked puffy vagina. There was no protection. There was no fluff.
I realized then that hair is there for a reason—it’s the leaf around the flower, the lawn around the house. You have to love hair in order to love the vagina. You can’t pick the parts you want. And besides, my husband never stopped screwing around.
I asked all the women I interviewed the same questions and then I picked my favorite answers. Although I must tell you, I’ve never heard an answer I didn’t love. I asked women:
“If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?”
A beret.
A leather jacket.
Silk stockings.
Mink.
A pink boa.
A male tuxedo.
Jeans.
Something formfitting.
Emeralds.
An evening gown.
Sequins.
Armani only.
A tutu.
See-through black underwear.
A taffeta ball gown.
Something machine washable.
Costume eye mask.
Purple velvet pajamas.
Angora.
A red bow.
Ermine and pearls.
A large hat full of flowers.
A leopard hat.
A silk kimono.
Glasses.
Sweatpants.
A tattoo.
An electrical shock device to keep unwanted strangers away.
High heels.
Lace and combat boots.
Purple feathers and twigs and shells.
Cotton.
A pinafore.
A bikini.
A slicker.
“If your vagina could talk, what would it say, in two words?”
Slow down.
Is that you?
Feed me.
I want.
Yum, yum.
Oh, yeah.
Start again.
No, over there.
Lick me.
Stay home.
Brave choice.
Think again.
More, please.
Embrace me.
Let’s play.
Don’t stop.
More, more.
Remember me?
Come inside.
Not yet.
Whoah, Mama.
Yes yes.
Rock me.
Enter at your own risk.
Oh, God.
Thank God.
I’m here.
Let’s go.
Let’s go.
Find me.
Thank you.
Bonjour.
Too hard.
Don’t give up.
Where’s Brian?
That’s better.
Yes, there. There.
I interviewed a group of women between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-five. These interviews were the most poignant of all, possibly because many of the women had never had a vagina interview before. Unfortunately, most of the women in this age group had very little conscious relationship to their vaginas. I felt terribly lucky to have grown up in the feminist era. One woman who was seventy-two had never even seen her vagina. She had only touched herself when she was washing in the shower, but never with conscious intention. She had never had an orgasm. At seventy-two she went into therapy, and with the encouragement of her therapist, she went home one afternoon by herself, lit some candles, took a bath, played some comforting music, and discovered her vagina. She said it took her over an hour, because she was arthritic by then, but when she finally found her clitoris, she said, she cried. This monologue is for her.
THE FLOOD
[Jewish, Queens accent]
Down there? I haven’t been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with Eisenhower. No, no, it’s a cellar down there. It’s very damp, clammy. You don’t want to go down there. Trust me. You’d get sick. Suffocating. Very nauseating. The smell of the clamminess and the mildew and everything. Whew! Smells unbearable. Gets in your clothes.
No, there was no accident down there. It didn’t blow up or catch on fire or anything. It wasn’t so dramatic. I mean . . . well, never mind. No. Never mind. I can’t talk to you about this. What’s a smart girl like you going around talking to old ladies about their down-theres for? We didn’t do this kind of a thing when I was a girl. What? Jesus, okay.
There was this boy, Andy Leftkov. He was cute—well, I thought so. And tall, like me, and I really liked him. He asked me out for a date in his car. . . .
I can’t tell you this. I can’t do this, talk about down there. You just know it’s there. Like the cellar. There’s rumbles down there sometimes. You can hear the pipes, and things get caught there, little animals and things, and it gets wet, and sometimes people have to come and plug up the leaks. Otherwise, the door stays closed. You forget about it. I mean, it’s part of the house, but you don’t see it or think about it. It has to be there, though, ’cause every house needs a cellar. Otherwise the bedroom would be in the basement.
Oh, Andy, Andy Leftkov. Right. Andy was very good-looking. He was a catch. That’s what we called it in my day. We were in his car, a new white Chevy BelAir. I remember thinking that my legs were too long for the seat. I have long legs. They were bumping up against the dashboard. I was looking at my big kneecaps when he just kissed me in this surprisingly “Take me by control like they do in the movies” kind of way. And I got excited, so excited, and, well, there was a flood down there. I couldn’t control it. It was like this force of passion, this river of life just flooded out of me, right through my panties, right onto the car seat of his new white Chevy BelAir. It wasn’t pee and it was smelly—well, frankly, I didn’t really smell anything at all, but he said, Andy said, that it smelled like sour milk and it was staining his car seat. I was “a stinky weird girl,” he said. I wanted to explain that his kiss had caught me off guard, that I wasn’t normally like this. I tried to wipe the flood up with my dress. It was a new yellow primrose dress and it looked so ugly with the flood on it. Andy drove me home and he never, never said another word and when I got out and closed his car door, I closed the whole store. Locked it. Never opened for business again. I dated some after that, but the idea of flooding made me too nervous. I never even got close again.
I used to have dreams, crazy dreams. Oh, they’re dopey. Why? Burt Reynolds. I don’t know why. He never did much for me in life, but in my dreams . . . it was always Burt and I. Burt and I. Burt and I. We’d be out. Burt and I. It was some restaurant like the kind you see in Atlantic City, all big with chandeliers and stuff and thousands of waiters with vests on. Burt would give me this orchid corsage. I’d pin it on my blazer. We’d laugh. We were always laughing, Burt and I. Eat shrimp cocktail. Huge shrimp, fabulous shrimp. We’d laugh more. We were very happy together. Then he’d look into my eyes and pull me to him in the middle of the restaurant—and, just as he was about to kiss me, the room would start to shake, pigeons would fly out from under the table—I don’t know what those pigeons were doing there—and the flood would come straight from down there. It would pour out of me. It would pour and pour. There would be fish inside it, and little boats, and the whole restaurant would fill with water, and Burt would be standing knee-deep in my flood, looking horr
ibly disappointed in me that I’d done it again, horrified as he watched his friends, Dean Martin and the like, swim past us in their tuxedos and evening gowns.
I don’t have those dreams anymore. Not since they took away just about everything connected with down there. Moved out the uterus, the tubes, the whole works. The doctor thought he was being funny. He told me if you don’t use it, you lose it. But really I found out it was cancer. Everything around it had to go. Who needs it, anyway? Right? Highly overrated. I’ve done other things. I love the dog shows. I sell antiques.
What would it wear? What kind of question is that? What would it wear? It would wear a big sign:
“Closed Due to Flooding.”
What would it say? I told you. It’s not like that. It’s not like a person who speaks. It stopped being a thing that talked a long time ago. It’s a place. A place you don’t go. It’s closed up, under the house. It’s down there. You happy? You made me talk—you got it out of me. You got an old lady to talk about her down-there. You feel better now? [Turns away; turns back.]
You know, actually, you’re the first person I ever talked to about this, and I feel a little better.
VAGINA FACT
At a witch trial in 1593, the investigating lawyer (a married man) apparently discovered a clitoris for the first time; [he] identified it as a devil’s teat, sure proof of the witch’s guilt. It was “a little lump of flesh, in manner sticking out as if it had been a teat, to the length of half an inch,” which the gaoler, “perceiving at the first sight thereof, meant not to disclose, because it was adjoining to so secret a place which was not decent to be seen. Yet in the end, not willing to conceal so strange a matter,” he showed it to various bystanders. The bystanders had never seen anything like it. The witch was convicted.
—The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
I interviewed many women about menstruation. There was a choral thing that began to occur, a kind of wild collective song. Women echoed each other. I let the voices bleed into one another. I got lost in the bleeding.