Noted commentator and writer Christina Hoff Sommers spoke at Tufts on Wednesday night about the negative implications and consequences of Eve Ensler's wildly popular play, "The Vagina Monologues." The play, which tackles issues of domestic violence, sexual abuse and body image, is performed each year at thousands of colleges across the nation.
Hoff Sommers, while applauding Eve Ensler's humanitarian work (she donates proceeds from "The Vagina Monologues" to organizations that combat violence against women), raised many important questions about the value and message of the play, and ultimately, about what contemporary feminism's goals should be.
The intentions behind "The Vagina Monologues" are certainly laudable. The play is based on the premise that women are by and large ashamed of their bodies and afraid to talk about them, and it seeks to make women more comfortable in their own skin.
Men, the thinking goes, are proud of their sexual anatomy; women should be, too. To that end, women are encouraged to stare at their vaginas, anthropomorphize their vaginas, wax poetic on their vaginas' thoughts and feelings, and chant "c*nt" over and over with their friends. This is what liberation looks like.
But there are several gaps in this logic. First, the claim that most modern women are still paralyzed with discomfort with their own bodies is dubious at best. As Hoff Sommers pointed out, any issue of Cosmopolitan magazine can go a long way towards dispelling the myth of the prudish, self-loathing American female. And even if the Cosmo readership is not a typical cross-section of American women, there is no reason to believe in a nationwide epidemic of bodily shame and cluelessness.
Women have more access to information and education, about their bodies and everything else, than they ever have before, and many of them are making good use of it.
Second, the idea that women should celebrate their sexual anatomy because men do is just plain silly. Hoff Sommers suggested that men do not obsess over their anatomy, so a movement to encourage women to obsess over theirs is misguided.
More important, perhaps, is the question of whether anyone should congratulate themselves too much for their own biology, which they had no part in designing. If men waste time on glorifying their penises - and some surely do - women would be smart to spend their time on other and better things.
Third, the methods the play encourages - most prominently, identifying one's self with one's vagina - do seem, at first glance, to be counterproductive.
If feminism was a battle for political, professional and educational equality, so that women could exercise their minds in all the arenas available to men, what is gained by reducing women to their bodies once more? Isn't there something anti-feminist about a play that does so?
In some ways, however, "The Vagina Monologues" can be seen as a triumph for feminism. Maybe instead of anti-feminist, the play is post-feminist: With the battle for civil equality won, women can focus their attention on the more trivial, and fun, aspects of social parity (like obsessing about sexual anatomy).
And even if some women find the play inane or vaguely insulting, many women find "The Vagina Monologues" empowering, affecting and resonant.
Hoff Sommers contends that the "The Vagina Monologues'" message is bad for women, that it confirms stereotypes about women's tendency towards excitability and that its "demagoguery" has elicited "mass hysteria" among young women.
But trying to keep women away from a play that is "bad for them," or characterizing their genuinely positive reactions to it as "mass hysteria," is more insulting to women than the play itself.
Hoff Sommers raises some great questions about "The Vagina Monologues" and what it is trying to say. Everyone is entitled to come up with their own answers to these questions.
The solution is not to undermine those who contribute to, or benefit from, the play, but to encourage continued debate about its implications and premises.
