After a busy couple of weeks, I got myself out to the theatre on Friday night to see the ACT production of the Vagina Monologues. I don’t normally bother with amateur productions of anything, precisely because they are amateur but I thought it would be good for a laugh. And it really was rather good, particularly the ‘meant to be amusing’ monologues; of course they might have been even funnier if I could have managed to get a glass of wine in Ledra Street before the performance. This proved to be rather more difficult than I anticipated. Where are all the wine bars? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do before the theatre? I couldn’t even get a glass of white wine in the theatre because they had run out of white and, although it is apparently fashionable to drink red wine in Nicosia these days, I only ever drink the white stuff.
Naturally, it is impressive that anyone in Cyprus wanted to put on a play in which women do nothing but talk about their sexual organs (even if it is 15 years after it was first performed everywhere else). In a question and answer session afterwards, all the participants said that they had found it very liberating to perform. But having said that, one of them then mentioned that she wouldn’t let her dad come and see it. I wonder why? Is it not just a harmless celebration of female sexuality that involves repeated use of the word vagina, otherwise known during the play as ‘down there’, ‘my itsy bitsy’ and the ‘little coochie snorcher that could’.
An American academic and author, Harriet Lerner, complained that the misuse of the word vagina in the play is basically akin to a form of linguistic female genital mutilation. She founded a club called the V-Club back in the 1980s with a group of New York feminist scholars. The point of the club was to raise awareness of the correct use of the words vulva and vagina. She claimed that too many parents go around teaching their daughters to use the word vagina for anything ‘down there’, when what they are really referring to is the vulva. Apparently half the people she interviewed thought that the vulva was a Swedish car. So we are perhaps not as liberated as we think. At least we weren’t back in the 1980s!
I, on the other hand, am feeling very smug because even 25 years ago, I was pretty liberated about the use of another word in the play, the C-word. There is a whole monologue dedicated to illustrating just what a lovely word this is. It is called ‘reclaiming cunt’. During this monologue, the actress invites the audience to share in this little celebration by shouting out the word in unison. Great. Back at college in the 1980s, just when the V-Club was getting going on the other side of the Atlantic, I started my own feminist C-Club of one. This involved using the C-word at every opportunity possible. I remember arguing with all my lefty, liberal and male college friends about my right to use the word any way I liked. This usually had less to do with naming the female genitalia and more to do with abusing a few right-wing idiots around me. But nevertheless, I think I did reclaim it rather well, quite a few years before the Vagina Monologues ever appeared on the big stage.
