{high five to JoAnne}

Another choad bashing TV with a strawman. What if the alternative was watching, not “TV”, but “The Wire” or “The Shield”?

Idiot.

If Ensler wants to put together a support group for women who have been traumatized by sexual violence, that’s great; but to think that what is therapeutic for them is relevant or enjoyable for people with relatively healthy attitudes toward their bodies and toward sex is akin to the narcissism of the recovering alcoholic or addict: just because your life was destroyed by the Demon Rum doesn’t mean that the rest of us need you warning us away from the bottle with your sermons

Matt, feminism isn’t “over.” We’re not in a post-feminist world.

You talk about women who have been traumatized by sexual violence as if they are a small minority.

They’re not. Women with relatively healthy attitudes towards their bodies are either lucky, or got that way through some hard work overcoming the effects of that violence. Just like men who have relatively healthy attitudes towards their bodies and sex and women’s bodies are either lucky or had to go through some hard work to get there.

Just because women of your acquaintance don’t talk about negative feelings they have about sex and their bodies don’t mean they don’t have them. It’s one of the ironies of insecurity about sex and your body that talking about them is considered unsexy and un-confident, so they’re unlikely to spill to you about it.

It ended with some Eckhart Tolle-influenced wavy-gravy about how we’re all fields of energy

Uh, we are. Check out QM sometime — I don’t mean the woo woo kind, I mean the kind where you calculate Phi. All matter is a wave and a particle.

Em

I guess I’m not sure why it’s important to call it the vulva when there’s no equivalent clinical term for the entire male genitalia?

Choad. Which brings me to Matt.

If a piece has multiple viewpoints in it, that’s dishonest to you. Let me ask you, if that piece of art had only one view in it, would that then be one-sided? Would you say that it was a bunch of stupid feminists marching in lockstep with one another because they can’t think for themselves?

It’s supposed to have different viewpoints in it. It represents the thoughts and feelings of multiple people.

but I’m even less a fan of the idea that women should be personally ashamed if we’ve internalized sexist messages.

I’m not sure what you’re referring to here. Did Dodson say something to this effect? And if you really mean that: does this logic extend to men as well? Because personally, I do think people, men and women, should be “personally ashamed if we’ve internalized sexist messages.” Isn’t that a pretty basic tool of feminism: shaming people for their sexism? I do it all the time. Shame is a powerful tool for getting people to admit they have a problem and ultimately for exorcising these internalized ideas. Without shame, feminism never would have gotten off the ground.

To clarify my “recovering addict” analogy: recovering addicts do have a real problem, and 12-step programs and their accompanying philosophies do tend to be relatively effective in treating the problem, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in acknowledging you have a problem and doing what you need to do in treating it.

But even if the VM were therapeutic for every woman raised in a patriarchy — and that’s a very big if — there’s no reason to think that men stand to learn anything from seeing or reading it. It focuses on themes that I find simplistic and obvious, and it seems to be trying to solve a problem that most women in my peer group seem to have dealt with pretty capably without Even Ensler’s help, i.e. fear of sex and hatred of their sexual organs.

Last weekend, there was this terrible movie on television with Zach Braff in it where he and his 30-ish buddies go through little midlife crises and act irresponsibly: cheating on their pregnant girlfriends, abandoning their wives and infant children, stalking their exes, etc. I kept waiting for there to be something interesting in the movie, but it was just irredeemably sexist garbage about how boys will be boys, and how grown men have license to act like teenagers if they feel threatened by the idea of settling down, and how any man who holds up his end of a contract he made with a woman should be celebrated as a big fucking hero. Of course, it condemned these behaviors, but it made it clear how hard it was for men to refrain from them, and how we ought to forgive them if they manage to find the immense courage and integrity necessary to do the right thing in the end.

It might have been therapeutic for certain male audience members who are still having trouble accepting grown-up responsibilities in their late 20s and early 30s, and for them, it probably had a positive impact because it patted them on the back for doing good, responsible things, albeit things that the rest of us manage to do without too much bellyaching about it. Like the VM, it addresses unhealthy attitudes some people have adopted because of their patriarchal cultural upbringing, e.g. the belief that men are entitled to a “do-over” when they decide they don’t, in fact, want to grow up, or the belief that men in committed, monogamous relationships are entitled to sleep with any hot young thing that comes along if they can get away with it. But most of us have rejected these patriarchal tropes without, as I said, any help from Eve Ensler or Zach Braff.

So: the VM, like this Zach Braff movie (”The Last Kiss”?), probably helped some people to deal with some tough issues caused by their internalized patriarchal attitudes and to come to terms with themselves as sexual, responsible adults. But neither piece is great, or even good, art, and I didn’t enjoy being exposed to either one.

Of course, it’s quite possible that I live in a dream world where people have mostly come to terms with these issues, and that in the real world most men are still arrested in adolescence and most women hate their vulvas. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t make a play or movie that panders to these pathologies a good piece of art any more than Camille Paglia’s book sale figures make her a better feminist theorist than Katherine Franke. The Harry Potter books are garbage — grown-ups especially should be reading something a bit more ambitious — but I’m glad people read them if the alternative is watching TV. My sentiments toward the Vagine Monologues are similar.

One young man posted on our online bulletin board that the sex in that scene wasn’t seduction, it was “coercion.”
I said, “How many women can claim that their first sexual experience wasn’t coercive?”
I wish the answer wasn’t “I can’t,” but that was the general response when women on this bb spoke up.
He shut up.

Ensler wants to tell a particular kind of story, about self-loathing and sexual violence, and about the possibility of recovering a positive self-image and a positive attitude toward sex….If Ensler wants to put together a support group for women who have been traumatized by sexual violence, that’s great; but to think that what is therapeutic for them is relevant or enjoyable for people with relatively healthy attitudes toward their bodies and toward sex is akin to the narcissism of the recovering alcoholic or addict: just because your life was destroyed by the Demon Rum doesn’t mean that the rest of us need you warning us away from the bottle with your sermons.

Well, this is where I object to Dodson; I don’t think it’s possible to grow up female in a patriarchy (and yes, I believe this is a patriarchy) without being familiar with these messages of self-loathing and threats of violence. They are ubiquitous. The contention that self-loathing and sexual victimization are the preserve of only a few weak or unlucky women is just not supported by the facts. It is not an individual problem.

I’m still not a huge fan of the Monologues, but I’m even less a fan of the idea that women should be personally ashamed if we’ve internalized sexist messages.

Maybe I’m not charitable. In fact, I know I’m not. But this part:

Toward the end of the evening Eve asked everyone who’d ever been raped to stand up. Only a smattering of women stood. Then she asked for those women who had been beaten to stand. Many more stood. Finally she asked all those to stand who knew any woman who’d been raped or beaten which included most of the audience. I refused to stand as an insignificant protest knowing she would never ask those of us who had never been raped or beaten and who enjoyed our sexuality to stand.

Seems to suggest that she thinks having been raped or beaten means you don’t enjoy your sexuality. Or:

Until they receive a positive sex education, young women will continue to be overly emotional, sexually passive and potential victims.

So if a girl learns to masturbate right, she won’t be a “potential victim.” She won’t get raped. And if she did get raped, it must be because her sex education wasn’t positive enough, because she’s “overly emotional” and “sexually passive.”

This has nothing to do with me or the women I know — many of whom know sex as both pleasure and violence, and wish they did not know the latter.

It may be that the Vagina Monologues isn’t the show Betty Dodson wanted to see, but that doesn’t mean it is bad.