23 comments/ 17524 views/ 0 favorites Pudendic & Pathetic By: unculbact MEN RULE! I love being a heterosexual man. From the early male-bonding of my grade school gang, to the raucous and rowdy brotherhood of my high school football team, to the hard-drinking, hard-partying days of my college fraternity, and now the crowning glory of my maturity, being an All-American Male has been delirious fun. Wrestling with girls in the back seats of cars or slapping them up when they got mouthy, the fast cars and motorcycles we used as mobile platforms for hooting at girls - these are fond adolescent memories that can't be bought for money. Now at an age when older women look at me with hope and younger ones with awe, everywhere, from the steel in the cars, the towering radio and TV antennas, even unto the concrete of my city and the shape of the shore on Lake Michigan is the proof, the thunderous evidence that a Hetero American Male is not only the greatest thing in creation, but ultimately, the only hope for the human race. There is some gratification in knowing that women agree with that, though it matters naught whether they agree or not. Eve Ensler's stage play, THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES, has to be seen to be believed. It's unrelenting male bashing. It's also lesbian pornography deceptively packaged as revolution. Most strikingly, it is a celebration of stupidity. Not just any old stupidity, but the breathtaking, mindless, godforsaken female variety that men have known about all along, the sort of stupidity that would have destroyed humanity during the Pleistocene if not for the firm and wise authority of heterosexual males. It's the ultimate statement that without men and male authority, humanity fails to prosper. DANIEL IN THE LION'S DEN In my work a theater critic, I've long noted that American female playwrights write in a genre known as WimminKrap. There are many properties to WimminKrap. One of them is a pre-show that is more interesting than the show itself. Arriving at the theater lobby at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I discovered a three-ring circus of homo, lesbian, and transgender fringe groups, most of them with an ethnic slant (a Latina Resource Center is really needed?), all in celebration of V-Day, Eve Ensler's replacement for Valentine's Day. V apparently stands for vagina, victory, or vengeance. As the night progressed, I decided it could also stand for vulgarity, voodoo, vat is dis crap, and looking at some of the lipstick lesbians present, va-va-va-voom! The audience was mainly female, all budding recruits for Ensler's self-proclaimed army of Vagina Warriors, but there was a smattering of men, or what I guess might have been men. The evening's proceeds were to help the Welfare Warriors (when did feminism become so militaristic?), whose fearless leader gave a speech before the show. Though possessed of a beard straight out of ZZ Top, I reluctantly conceded that the speaker was indeed female, and marveled at her speech that condemned the dangers to children from foster families and group homes, the economic violence against Third World women, and her call for her army to arise and crush the hetero men by silencing and shaming them. Luckily, she didn't threaten to hold her breath until she turned blue. That would bring us to our knees! Then a plump, femmy homo took the stage - turned out, he was the director of the show. Inviting the assembly to join him, he triumphantly led them in a recitation of cunt, pussy, snatch, quim, yoni, hole, ad nauseum, an adolescent church service repeated at various points later on. Eve Ensler must not have had any boys around when she was growing up. My fellow junior high jocks and I got tired of doing this back in seventh grade. How ever did the girls get so far behind us? He then entertained the audience by reciting the long, dreary history of his sad, abusive childhood (alas, no violin to accompany him), and finished up by addressing whatever hetero men were in the audience, and ordering -ORDERING! - them to do what he told them to do. Orders such as ...if a woman expresses an emotion, respect it's validity as if it were one of God's Commandments... (Mothers! Remember that when dealing with your teenage daughters!). Other orders expanded this to include giving absolute credibility to anything that comes out of a female mouth, to subordinate all male needs as worthless, and although it's our property to use as we see fit, to never use the male talent for violence for anything at all. Orders? ORDERS??!! I'm in his army now? Time to borrow a tactic from the 1960's. It takes real men to resist the draft. IF YOUR VAGINA COULD ACT, WHAT SHOW WOULD IT BE IN? Finally, we did get to the show. Turns out that THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES consists of fourteen sketches, each a tale from a vagina. Supposedly the original work of Ensler, the sketches are in fact totally derivative of Nancy Friday's sexual fantasy books, letters to Penthouse, and Betty Dodson's cunt-positive movement, with a smattering of Sheri Hite's Hite Report books thrown in. Even Meg Ryan's orgasm-moaning scene from the movie WHEN HARRY MET SALLY is ripped off and presented as something new. Also, every sketch is in some way a plea to accept Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Histrionic Personality Disorder in women as being normal. (NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER: Characterized by being self-centered, seeking attention and praise, taking advantage of people, fantasizing about success and power, expecting favorable treatment, exaggerating achievements, having difficulty maintaining long-lasting relationships, and expecting others to recognize them as being superior.) (HISTRIONIC PERSONALITY DISORDER: Characterized by being manipulative, seeking attention, dominating conversations, using grandiose language, seeking constant praise, provocative dress, exaggerating illnesses in order to gain attention and hypochondria, sometimes expressed as Munchausen Syndrome, exaggerating friendships and relationships, and the belief that everyone loves them.) Religiously following the style properties of the WimminKrap genre, the vaginas in question belong to women who are nameless and anonymous. The women are also void of career ambitions, religious faith, athletic interests, adult responsibilities of any kind, and leisure activities. Motherhood and family life, when mentioned, is peripheral and alienated, friends and relatives are uncaring and insensitive, and the entire world is cold, hostile and an incomprehensible mystery to the woman who gaze at it with slack-jawed bewilderment. The women of THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES are completely alone, and defined not by what they are, but what they are not. They are all products of interrupted adult development, and are condemned to eternal adolescence. The sketches came out of interviews that Eve Ensler conducted with women - you have to wonder where she found them. In what can be called the stupid question skit, two women come out yelling My Vagina Is Angry! Turns out their vaginas are mainly angry at their gynecologist, because...My vagina doesn't know why we have to wear that paper dress...why there are those Nazi-like steel stirrups (the Nazi's invented those?)...why do they wear rubber gloves...my vagina wants mink-lined stirrups... Strangely, they don't stick around for the answers. The paper dress is sterile and can be burned afterwards, the steel stirrups are easily cleaned and hypoallergenic, the rubber gloves - well, do you really want to be examined by a finger that's already been in thirty vaginas that day? Mink-lined stirrups, like clothing, would introduce molds and fungus into the examination room. The acidic environment of the vagina is excellent proof against bacteria, but vulnerable to fungus and yeast infections. Are women so dense they can't figure this out themselves? In Reclaiming Cunt, a woman goes up on stage and conclusively proves that with practice and effort, a girl can learn to pronounce the four-letter, one syllable word all by her teeny-tiny little self! Provided she works very, very hard. Outrageous Vagina Fact describes in detail infibulation, also known as female genital mutilation, and bemoans the horror of it all. The fact that it's only practiced by older women on younger women to reinforce maternal authority is not mentioned. A Six Year Old Girl is the most obnoxious sketch - played by an adult, she is relentlessly interrogated with invasive questions like ...What does your vagina smell like? (the answer - snowflakes), ...If you could dress your vagina, what would it wear?...If your vagina could talk, what would it say...? The interrogator violating the child's innocence during this is completely anonymous. Draw your own conclusion. The Flood is an interview with an eighty-seven year old lady who's life has been barren of sex or companionship because she was embarrassed by how wet she got as a teen after kissing a boy. The 1920's were not as ignorant and close-minded as Ensler's oh-so-superior generation makes them out to be. Sexual information was there to be had, as were willing men to practice with, and there's something really pathetic about a woman who can live from the Roaring Twenties through the Depression, through World War II, through the Fifties economic boom, through the Cold War, through the Revolutionary Sixties, through SEVENTY YEARS of post-pubescence, and not learn a damn thing! We're supposed to feel pity or outrage I guess, but all I could feel was contempt. And there are men in some of these skits. They have no voice. They're all referred to second hand, and are universally brutish, uncaring, abusive and predatory. VINDICATION! So would I recommend that men boycott this play? Hell NO! Eve Ensler, perhaps unwittingly (though I'm beginning to suspect not), presents powerful validation that male behavior towards women is just, righteous, and right on the money. After all, the sketch The Woman That Loved is all about a corporate lawyer who now makes a living dressing as a man and spanking other women. I'm certain that the irony of this completely escapes Ensler. If a faux man can be sexually exciting, how much more so the real thing, taming the wild beast to submissively respond to penis and whip! I used to feel guilty about observing a well-dressed and dignified woman and imagining the pleasure of thrashing her plump, naked, trembling ass till it was a nice bright pink, with the moans and tearful pleas to be fucked providing the background music. Now, I'm SO relieved. Ensler has unambiguously told me that this is exactly what women want, which means, as a man, it's my duty to provide! The sketch The Little Coochie-Snorcher That Could has a twenty-four year old women getting a sixteen year old girl drunk so she can have sex with her (In earlier versions, the girl was twelve years old). Ensler apparently approves of statutory rape, provided it's lesbian. To be fair, at sixteen I got a girl drunk for sex, and till now, felt guilty about that too. Thanks to Ensler, I've realized the error of my ways, and apologize to all the girls that I failed to take crass advantage of. It seems I let them down. Even My Vagina Was A Village (does it have a resident idiot?), the sketch about wartime rape in Bosnia, is validation. The military science student will note how Ensler backhandedly praises rape as a weapon, highlighting it's devastating effectiveness as a means of crushing the enemy will to fight. Destroying the will to fight is the objective of war, a definition first made by General Sun Tzu circa 400 B.C., and backed up by authorities such as Patton, Trotsky and Von Clausewitz. Ensler even gives pointers on how to efficaciously deploy the weapon (Wow! Thanks!). After viewing that sketch, it's hard to imagine how any but the most negligent field commander would turn his back on such a tool. Use of rape as a weapon is sadly neglected in ROTC training manuals! I'm writing my Congressman to get that changed, and quickly too. Men of Vision, such as Larry Flynt, are also vindicated. For how long has Hustler magazine been condemned for it's objectification of women, it's reduction of them to no more than their body parts? I HAD thought there was a point to that, since I've always found the magazine to more gynecological than erotic, but Ensler is clearly saying that Flynt's vision of what women are is correct. And that's because THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES presents women as Ensler sees them. Stupid, ignorant, poorly educated, incapable of reason, morally adrift, unable to learn or observe, possessing the attention span of a chimpanzee and driven by irrationality and emotions that shift with the wind. In THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES a woman is nothing more than her vagina, without which she has no value whatsoever. To be a woman is to be a walking piece of pussy, and whatever else there is - education, career, manners, faith, literacy, athletic ability, musical talent - it's all just part of the marketing campaign for that pussy. Men have been telling women that for years! What a waste of effort. Ensler could have saved a lot of time and angst in the 1970's just by coming to one of our frat parties, proof that intergender relationships work best when women just shut up and do what men tell them to do. At those parties, we could have shown her the truth of what she believes...heh-heh...IF you know what I mean... THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES has been translated into at least twenty-five languages, and is presented all over the world, even in Afghanistan, where I suppose it serves as a substitute for food. With so many people seeing it, females everywhere now have cause to wonder what effect such an incredibly negative portrait of women may have. Don't worry your pretty little head about it. The men will take care of everything.