Students braved the cold on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights to go see The Vagina Monologues: Cave of Wonders, at the Knight Spot. Monologues is an annual tradition on campus sponsored by the Womyn's Action Coalition, and has become well-loved among the student community. The Monologues proved its popularity again this year by selling out all three nights.
The show is designed to enlighten viewers through laughter and a head-on attack of uncomfortable subject matter. This is certainly not a show for children or those who easily take offense to discussions of sexuality. The titles of the different acts prove the show's controversial nature, and range from the seemingly innocent "The Wear and Say List," "My Short Skirt," and "Happy Fact," to the suspicious, like "Hair," "Because He Liked To Look At It," and "The Flood," to the outright
unapologetic and blunt "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could," "Reclaiming Cunt," and "The Woman Who Loved To Make Vaginas Happy." Sometimes scandalous, the monologues are spoken so frankly and powerfully, that even the most outrageous comments gave the audience pause and reason to reexamine their usual ways of thinking about the presented topics.
At the beginning and end of the show, collective shouts of "Vagina!" could be heard from the backstage area, a sort of mantra which held the show together, reminding everyone what they were there to hear. The introduction, "Cave of Wonders," was crafted to explain exactly how the Vagina Monologues got started. "We were worried about vaginas" the cast declared, as sophomores Ashley Saltzman and Kathryn
Starczewski explained how the monologues were crafted from hundreds of thousands of interviews with women about sex and personal experiences.
The cast got together throughout the show to be the voices of hundreds of women, explaining experiences with first periods in "I Was 12. My Mother
Slapped Me," or declaring what their vaginas would wear or say in the aptly named "The Wear & Say List." Some Monologues were short, like "Not So Happy Fact," which discusses genital mutilation of women
in 128 different countries. Others lasted for several minutes, like "My angry Vagina," where freshman Ronnia Girgis ranted about how her vagina needs to be pampered, not abused by her gynecologist's "mean cold duck lips!"
The show, because of its nature, was quite one-sided. "Because He Liked To Look At It," was the only skit that portrays men in a truly positive light, since it described an "ordinary" man named "Bob" who made his girlfriend appreciate her own vagina. Otherwise,
men are not friendly in the show, often portrayed as cheating husbands, abusers and the like. However, "Because He Liked To Look At It," showed that the show did not consider men "the enemy." In fact, in a lot of the skits the woman herself is the cause of her self-doubt or unhappiness.
Though a few times in the show the phrase "though this is politically incorrect," was thrown about, it seems that the whole show was about being brutally honest, and therefore anything to the contrary would shatter the whole thing. This is probably why the show is so attractive to so many
people - truth to this degree can breed self-honesty, laughter and new realizations.