Vagina Monologues offer perspective on sexual violence

Onstage Thursday night in the ballroom of the William Pitt Union, four students will answer the question, “If your vagina could speak, what would it say?” 

The Campus Women’s Organization at Pitt has staged a production of the Vagina Monologues for roughly eleven years, according to CWO Vice President Suzanna Hinkle, who is also the producer of this year’s performance. However, for the first time, the proceeds from this year’s show will benefit Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. According to its website, PAAR’s mission is to respond, educate and advocate to end sexual violence. The show will also include American Sign Language performers for the first time. CWO will perform at 7 p.m. on both Thursday and Friday in the William Pitt Union Assembly Room. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m., with a suggested donation at the door.

Hinkle said the 11-year-old show is still culturally relevant because violence against women is still an overwhelmingly common issue.

“The show addresses the attack on women at a personal level,” Hinkle said. 

According to Hinkle, the monologues direct the audience’s attention toward prevalent issues in society that perpetuate sexual violence and abuse. These issues include a lack of informative sexual education and a culture of silence on issues that affect only women, Hinkle said. 

Director Desta Gebregiorgis, a senior psychology major and community outreach co-chair for CWO, said women face violence and internalized hatred because of their placement in the societal hierarchy.

“I also see women’s strength and endurance in the Vagina Monologues,” Gebregiorgis said, “This show makes me feel even more proud to be a woman.”

In a powerful and graphic monologue, a Bosnian woman describes her experience at a rape camp during the Bosnian War in the 1990s. 

The monologue, performed by two women, shifts between her perception of her vagina before she was brutalized — describing it as a picturesque stream that flowed and babbled freely — and after, as a place she no longer dared to think about or look at, much less discuss openly.

The stigma around discussing the trials and tribulations of being a woman drove Eve Ensler, the show’s creator, to conduct the interviews and create the production in 1996.

In an interview with the Guardian in 2014, Ensler said, “I think we have to create a space for the over 3 billion women who have vaginas to talk about vaginas.” 

Ensler rails against violence toward women around the country, including the prominence of female genital mutilation worldwide as well as female burn victims in Pakistan. 

Additionally, the World Health Organization reported in 2014 that 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced physical and/or sexual violence, and 71 percent of women in Ethiopia have been victims of intimate sexual violence.

The monologues address the shame women often feel regarding their “down-theres” with a script that fluctuates between comical and bone-chilling in each performance. 

“Shame is a result of feeling alone,” Gebregiorgis said. 

The show grows each year to include a wider spectrum of women.

In a monologue about transgender women added in 2004, according to Hinkle, the performers are depicted as a Greek chorus, allowing them to be one united voice. The women describe having “the girl beaten out of their boy.” The violent language is dramatized by American Sign Language performers standing beneath the stage. 

The inclusion of members of the ASL Club will be a new addition to CWO’s performance this year. The idea began a couple of years ago when one student asked her friend to translate her reading into ASL onstage. 

At the group’s practice Tuesday night, the performers stood beneath the actresses and mimicked being punched in the face during a monologue from four other performers on being a male-to-female transgender woman. The addition made the violence that non-cisgendered people face become more real. 

The introduction to the “They Beat the Girl out of my Boy” monologue states that transgender women are 28 percent more likely to face violence than cisgendered people. 

This specific monologue, which portrays biologically male characters who face beatings and cruelty as a result of their feminine characteristics, according to Hinkle, entered the spotlight this year after Massachusetts-based Mount Holyoke College’s decision not to put on the production. 

In an email that was sent out campus-wide and obtained by Campus Reform in January, the president of Mount Holyoke’s Project Theatre board wrote that they had decided to retire the show because it “offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman,” by not being trans-inclusive of female-to-male transgenders, or biologically male participants who identify as women. 

Hinkle agreed that the show has shortcomings — it doesn’t include those who don’t ascribe to a gender binary.

However, she maintains that the Vagina Monologues are a good starting point in the ongoing discussion about the female anatomy. 

“The conversation needs to be opened up,” Hinkle said. “[It’s important to] recognize a part of anatomy as not evil.” 

She said that ending vagina censorship is still a relevant goal based on reactions she’s witnessed to the name of the performance. Hinkle said when the group went around Pittsburgh to raise money, people were insistent about not “donating to vaginas.” 

Once people were told that the money would be going toward victims of sexual violence, they were much more willing to donate, according to Hinkle. 

“People need to know how victims of sexual assault and rape will likely carry that burden in some way for the rest of their lives,” ASL performer and French and urban studies major Sarah Belanger said. “And that it happens every day to people you might pass in the Cathedral or sit next to on the bus. It’s a real problem, and it’s happening everywhere.”