IT’S no secret that the mayor and his wife aren’t close. So is Donna Hanover trying to embarrass Rudy by agreeing to appear in Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues?”
Sure looks that way.
The play is vulgar and quasi-pornographic, the kind of sleazy “art” that offends Giuliani voters. And it was written by Eve Ensler, a close friend and political associate of Hillary Clinton’s.
But the disgrace is not Rudy’s; it’s his wife’s – and the city’s.
Do other metropolises have to see their first ladies take the stage and play a character who talks about the wonders of masturbating with a group of women?
Must they endure their first ladies taking the role of a monologist fondly recalling how liberating it was to have been raped at 13 by an older lesbian?
What other city has a first lady who may speak as a lesbian dominatrix who discourses in “Penthouse Forum”-like detail about what she does to her female lovers?
Say what you will about the hicks in Peoria, but I bet the wife of that city’s mayor won’t stand on stage and talk about asking a 6-year-old girl to describe the aroma of her private parts.
Poor Rudy. You gotta feel for the guy. What a nightmare.
Actually, there’s no telling which of the monologues Hanover will deliver when she joins the cast next month, and which will be taken by her two as-yet unnamed co-stars. But there’s very little material in Ensler’s Obie-winning effort that befits the dignity of the first lady of New York City.
To be honest, there’s very little in the thing that befits the dignity of any woman not in the employ of Runway 69. “The Vagina Monologues” is trash-talking feminist agitprop so juvenile and moronic as to be near-parody. It’s a Cosmo article masquerading as defiant art.
The play is a series of monologues Ensler says she based on interviews with a cross-section of women. She says it was only when she started saying the word “vagina” aloud that she realized how messed up she was.
“I did not see my vagina as my primary resource, a place of sustenance, humor and creativity,” Ensler writes.
How sad for her! Evie solved that problem by becoming an evangelist for vaginal consciousness. She wants women to think of their vaginas at all times and in all places – “in your car, at the supermarket, at the gym, in the office.”
Oh, brother. When males sit around talking about their penises, we call them “15-year-old dorks.” When females do the same, we’re supposed to call them “courageous” and “liberated.”
This is not progress – but it is typical of feminism’s rhetorical bait-and-switch, in which male goatishness is condemned, but the same thoughts and actions by women are praised and encouraged.
“The Vagina Monologues” are little more than intellectual navel-gazing, moved about five inches south. One of Ensler’s monologues is dedicated to Betty Dodson, a “brave and extraordinary” woman who has spent the last 25 years running workshops in which she teaches women, alone or in groups, how to diddle themselves.
The monologist then speaks in the voice of a woman at such a workshop who undergoes spiritual and emotional convulsions while looking at herself in a mirror, as alternately solemn and ecstatic as if she’d discovered the Ark of the Covenant.
An even more sinister view comes from a “Southern woman of color,” who testifies that her mother’s bad advice and a childhood sexual assault by a male made her think ill of her vagina. Then she was seduced and raped in adolescence by an adult lesbian.
“Now people say that it was a kind of rape,” the monologist says. “I was only 13 and she was 24. Well, I say, if it was a rape, it was a good rape then, a rape that turned my [defective vagina] into a kind of heaven.”
Need we speculate how the heavens would fall – and should – if a play presented an adult male sexually initiating a 13-year-old girl as a liberating act?
Again, the offensiveness of the material is constantly undercut by its triviality vamping as seriousness. Ensler conducts a questionnaire in which women interviewees are asked to flesh out their vagina’s personality, e.g., “If your vagina could talk, what would it say, in two words?”
Well, if I had a vagina, I know what it would say, in two words, about Donna Hanover’s plans to appear in this play: “No class.”
e-mail: [email protected]