Monique Stuart was a teenager when Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues" first appeared off-off-Broadway a decade ago.
But by the time the 24-year-old saw the play in her senior year of college, she'd already made up her mind that it wasn't worth much.
"It really confirmed everything I already thought about the play," she says.
I don't know about you, but I form all my opinions from snap judgments based on little or no evidence.
Which explained why she was standing behind a lectern at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Northwest recently, telling other young women how to be good conservatives -- and how to bring some protest drama of their own to Ensler's work.
"It's disgusting," she said. "The play defines women as their sexual organs."
I think her choice of words is pretty telling. She might as well have said "It's disgusting, it smells bad, it looks weird and it gets slightly wet when Ann Coulter is on T.V. I hate my vagin...I mean The Vagina Monologues."
The show has always had its detractors, but this year conservatives worked to transform the season of "The Vagina Monologues" into a season of the Vagina Debates. Stuart can take some credit for that.
As program officer at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, a Herndon-based group with ties to some of Washington's most powerful conservatives, Stuart helped coordinate the movement.
Holy shit. This nitwit gets paid for this job? I wonder what her business card says? "Vagina Agitator?"
The play strings together interviews with 200 women into a series of stories, some full of humor, some full of pleasure, others full of abuse and violence. "Women's sanity was saved by bringing these hidden experiences into the open, naming them and turning our rage into positive action," feminist Gloria Steinem wrote in 1998.
But Stuart sees a different message, one that "tells women to look for their own fulfillment through sex."
Stuart asks, "Is that supposed to liberate them or empower them?"
The lowly vagina, you see, is not meant to be an empowering sexual organ. That distinction belongs soley to Teh Cock.
It's been a road to empowerment for Stuart, at least, who seems to have found her conservative voice through protesting the play. She took up the cause as a student at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I.
Stuart grew up in a liberal Connecticut family, but in her sophomore year, she attended a debate that included conservative commentator Ann Coulter and came away enthralled. Soon she had joined the College Republicans.
Well no wonder she has a problem with vaginas. The sight of Coulter's parchment-like flesh, emaciated frame and tooth'd maw is enough to shrivel any wang and dessicate any cooter within a 1,000 yard radius. Also: "enthralled"? Did the WaPo reporter check Stuart's neck for Coulter fang marks?
Then, the summer before her senior year, while she was an intern in Washington, she went to an event featuring conservative author Christina Hoff Sommers, who attacked the play.
Stuart finally read it -- and decided she was on Hoff Sommers's side.
Anyone else getting the picture of someone really desperate to rebel against her "liberal" family background? So desperate that she's willing to absorb any half-baked conservative idea without question or analysis? Just an observation.
During winter break of her senior year, she retyped "The Vagina Monologues," replacing every use of the word "vagina" with "penis," and called the result "The Penis Monologues."
"When you call it 'The Penis Monologues,' that's ridiculous. It's ridiculous on the other side as well," she says.
Actually what's really ridiculous is spending a significant amount of time retyping "The Vagina Monologues," replacing every use of the word "vagina" with "penis," and calling it a clever send-up. Quite simply, the amended version would completely lack and meaning or context. It'd be like replacing every reference to "liberals" in Ann Coulter's entire ouvre with the word "booger". It's sophomoric and utterly nonsensical (though in the Coulter/booger case, a vast improvement).
Stuart held a reading of her rewrite last spring and invited Hoff Sommers to campus for a lecture. To promote it, a friend of Stuart's dressed in a six-foot phallus costume and distributed fliers.
It impressed Hoff Sommers enough that she wrote about it in the National Review online.
If you read the Hoff Summers NRO article is pretty funny. She takes great issue with the play's "vulgarity" and sums it up as a "raunchy play, which consists of various women talking in graphic, and I mean graphic, terms about their intimate anatomy." It's clear the conservative ire with the "Monologues" is simply this: they don't want to hear about those gross, dirty, smelly vaginas. In other words, the Vagina Monologues backlash is precisely the kind of partiarchal, anti-sex, anti-woman crap the play was written to counter in the first place. But anyway, back to little Miss Vagina.
Stuart traveled the country and visited local campuses to organize the campaign. In November, she was on Georgetown University's campus, where Luce was co-sponsoring a talk by conservative Michelle Malkin. Stuart handed out books resembling Playbill that criticized "The Vagina Monologues."
Early last month, Stuart joined a conference call with more than a dozen women's outreach directors from the College Republicans to talk about protesting the play, says Sarah Armstrong, the national women's outreach director. "We try to get good speakers who are not only real role models but who can help us in our states with increasing activism," Armstrong says. "She's coming from the same place we're coming from."
What place is that? The Land of Trivial Obsessions?
Georgetown freshman Anthony Bonna took a copy of Stuart's Playbill back in November. A few weeks later, he called her to get one of the institute's anti-V-Day kits, with posters that ask, "Aren't women worth more than their private parts?" He and a few friends plastered the campus. Later, shortly before one of the "Vagina Monologues" Georgetown shows, he went door to door in a dorm to raise money for the same battered women's shelter that the show was benefiting.
It was an act to "show you can help out women without seeing a play that attacks traditional values," he said.
I can see the placard now: "Vaginas are not a Family Value".
these fuckers really parody themselves, don't they?
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