Reflections on Female Plumbing

The Vagina Monologues.

This is probably the first book that I've had to stop and wait a week before finishing the second half because I had to take in what I had read. This book was very intense. But I loved it.

Reasons why I adored this book:

1) The brutal in your face truth. I consider myself to be pretty in touch with things like sexuality and my inner workings, so when I read about women who hadn't been "down there" for years, I thought it was not really relevant. However, as I continued reading, I realized that I was quite in the dark myself. In fact, I believe that this book gives us a 360-degree experience you couldn't get any other way. Maybe I was in touch with myself and the way I handle being a woman, but i was totally blinded to how the rest of the world sees it. Lesbians, geriatrics, women who go through menopause-- they all have their own perspective. Even from hearing the different names for this one organ made me realize my "in touch" perpective related only to me. This books awakens you to the vast mystery it really is to the world as a whole. Vaginas were a private experience that was full of code words and no-go zones until Eve Ensler finally rounded up a selection of the women in the world and began to set the record straight.

2) The reality of the novel. In popular culture, vagina is a word that when used, is used in relation to very few topics. We hardly think of a vagina as a victim of warfare, or as an unexplored land, or as something one might wish for at Christmas. For me the sections that stood out the most were the ones where their relationship with their vagina was unconventional-- lesbians, transgenders, and victims of sexual warfare. I never thought about taking my vagina for granted until I read a peculiar story about a girl born without one. I'd never imagined the feeling that i was destined to have a different gender-- it was incredible to read the story of those who felt that they always should have had a vagina, even from childhood as a boy. I honestly don't think that Even Ensler put these stories in for the "shock factor". I think that she wanted a truly diverse perspective. It felt like a novel of memoirs from a war-- everyone seeing the battleground as a different tale to tell. It felt so real-- never made up.

3) The do-gooder component. This book does plenty on its own as a revitalizing movement of feminism, but it made me so much happier that this play goes beyond that and has become a movement to help others. I especially loved the ten year addition because it went into further detail as to how the movement has developed.

NOW, a note on the play from a theatrical perspective (now that I have all of my mushy feelings out of the way):
I would be extremely interested to see how the staging of this play played out, as the vignettes are so polar in scenarios. To switch from one character to another (especially if done as a performance piece, or in a confined space) could be really challenging. This is going on my list of plays to see for sure.