Remember, Parents Pay Thousands of Dollars for This

Getting Blitzed by campus organizations is a dicey affair. Most of the time, you’ll delete those blitzes without a second thought. Other ones have some tangential relationship to an interest of yours and you might look at the subject line before sending them to the trash. You might open a couple if you’re bored. Of these Blitzes, most are mundane, some are silly, few are funny. The smallest subset is the group that actually gets you interested in whatever it is they’re advertising.

Then there are Blitzes like this (warning: the included link is most definitely not safe for work):

Write a monologue for the Vagina Monologues show on
February 26th and 27th!

**What?**

*V-week* wants to shake up the Vagina Monologues yearly
production by including student-written, Dartmouth-focused
monologues in the show! (**You CAN choose whether or not
you want to perform them or have someone else do so.)

**Guidelines?**

The monologue has to touch on any aspect of being a woman
at Dartmouth. Beyond this, anything that resonates with
your own experience goes!

Haven’t seen the Monologues before? Here’s an example for
guidance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI7x9wzjAKY&feature=related

**Due Date?**

The FIRST Friday we return to school, January 7th.

Have your writing performed for over 800 members of the
Dartmouth community and contribute in a meaningful way to
an already powerful production!

Feel free to blitz with any questions.

This was sent out to the whole campus a few days ago, though being blessed with a Y chromosome, I think I lack certain perspective on any aspect of being a woman at Dartmouth. I therefore feel a little unqualified to write a monologue.

For those of you who require some background on this whole V-Day thing—and yes, that stands for Valentine’s Day and something, well, more crass—it’s a “movement” started by playwright/activist Eve Ensler in the late 1990’s that sprang from her widely performed The Vagina Monologues, meant to counteract sexual violence against women. In theory, it’s a great idea. Who could possibly be against such a goal?

However, if you watch that link in the Blitz, you’ll quickly find problems with the infamous monologues. They and the movement basically operate on the idea that loving one’s own (female) body is like kryptonite to sexism or sexual abuse. As a result, there are monologues in which  women discuss all sorts of unsavory things. If you’re one of those folks who has a morbid fascination with this sort of thing, you can find what I’m just going to go ahead and assume is a script of the whole sordid affair here. Or watch them on YouTube. No, I’m not going to post a video; this is a family site, folks.

One wonders if Ensler ever thought about the possibility that identifying an entire gender with such a specifically sexual body part, thereby dehumanizing them and reducing them to objects, defeats the purpose of the exercise. Probably not.

—Sterling C. Beard