College Cancels ‘Vagina Monologues’ To Avoid Excluding Women Who Don’t Have Them

The Vagina Monologues?is an annual tradition production at Mount Holyoke College. The school is all-women, so the play makes sense ? until now.

When Eve Ensler penned her play in 1996, she was celebrating the vagina and women’s sexuality. It was shocking. But it seems the play is no longer shocking. Now it is not inclusive enough!

By Nicky Fernandes from Hiroshima, Japan (Vagina Monologues Poster.jpg) via Wikimedia Commons
By Nicky Fernandes from Hiroshima, Japan (Vagina Monologues Poster.jpg) via Wikimedia Commons

Student Erin Murphy explained in the Campus Reform:

“?at its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman …”

“Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive.”

A fundraiser named itself, ?A Night Of A Thousand Vaginas.? The people who opposed it felt it was hurtful to those who didn’t have a vagina.

Who doesn’t have a vagina? Well, men, of course. The group also includes women who have had a hysterectomy and women born without a vagina ? it happens. I knew one man who was born with a vagina. He had to get annual pap smears just like the rest of us.

Yet there is another group I had not considered ? some of the transgender individuals. Here is how that happens. A trans individual lives fully as a woman, and she has not had the genital reconstructive surgery.

But the argument that the play is blatantly transphobic is flawed. Sure, some women and self-identifying women do not have vaginas. That does not invalidate The Vagina Monologues.

The far greater majority of women have a vagina. So, The Vagina Monologues traditional show is valid.

Death Of A Salesman is dated, yet it has many universal aspects.?Plays cannot be all things to all people, and that does not make The Vagina Monologues transphobic.

My concern is that in an attempt to be all-inclusive, we women fall into the trap of furthering misogyny.

This is an era where the farthest right wing people blush when they hear the word ?vagina.? I’m not sure they can pronounce it, because I don’t believe I’ve ever heard them say it.

So let’s hear it for vaginas ? loudly and often!