My friends and I have tossed around the phrase "girls are wierd" for a long time and I think applies in some ways to what I'm about to talk about.
So, what is this little rambling I'm going to inflict you with?
Let me explain.
There's this thing, a traveling show really, called The Vagina Monologues. I think perhaps most of you have likely heard of it. You know that empowering shouting about your own sexiness, your vagina, and how it's all related to common household furniture? Ok, so I made up that last part but I do that sometimes.
Moving on.
They recently showed the Monologues on campus, and it stirred what someone termed a "controversy" because some people weren't exactly the first to proclaim the lauded program as an important or amazing achievement. I can't say I think it's a controversy, but I also understand the point of the guy trying to understand the point of the whole show. I mean sure there's the whole part about trying to make the term 'vagina' demystified [whatever exactly that may be], but this is really my first stop on this tour of misunderstanding.
Why 'demystify' the term vagina? I mean, let's be honest, I don't really want to hear about someone's vagina or penis any more than I'd like to hear about their anus. It's not what I consider the most important part of any person I meet, and I really don't want to hear about how it makes them feel...yes, it may help someone who is having personal issues feel a little bit better about themselves, but why would anyone else pay to go see this?
Personally I expressed similar views to this, including my disdain for the idea that boys need to have cramps or feel the panic of not having a tampon [something expressed by Lucille Clifton in her poem "wishes for sons"], and started getting cornered eyes from a female friend of mine. What? I wouldn't wish the hormones I had as a thirteen-year-old boy on anyone I know, nor some of the more embarrasing moments I've had since that time due to the very fact I was male. I really would go into more detail but then I'd be going against the very point I'm trying to make; I don't want to know, and I can't imagine why anyone else would either.
Not that anything is going to stop people from going, and you know what? If it makes someone better to say someone elses words about their "privates" [as a performer] or to hear those words [as a member of the audience] that's cool by me. I just don't get it, even with the DM article's argument that guys feel free to grab their crotches and make penis jokes all the time; I don't want to see/hear either of those either.
Some people have joked about writing "The Penis Diatribes," including myself, but as I've thought about it and written the above I've come to realize that such a project is really only interesting as just that; a joke. I wouldn't want to put effort into or pay to see such a performance if it was a real, serious series of monologues.
I guess it's just me being stuck in my ways, but let me know when something that doesn't envolve a detailed analysis of an intimate body part and how it relates to who someone is as a person is making the circuit again.