Take over all the things
Next weekend, a free screening of
wait for it
The Transvagina Diaries.
Yay! Nothing I want more than to watch a movie about homemade vaginas.
Isn’t that sweet, it’s “presented for National Women’s History Month – the story of men with fake vaginas. What’s that got to do with Women’s History Month? Well, not a god damn thing, but that’s the bliss of it. There is nothing more affirming than taking something meant for women and handing it over to men instead.
The Vagina Monologues was a play in which women of all types told stories about experiences with their vaginas — good, bad, funny, and tragic. All of them had the ring of truth.
Artificial vaginas constructed out of the penis are sometimes … disappointing. Sometimes it goes very wrong indeed. Yet I suspect that none of the tales in The Transvagina Monologues will be negative in that particular way. It might be too emotionally difficult.
Oh, so might be negative. They might talk about how the speaker had to get his vagina remade, and remade, and remade, with more and more and more surgeries, and it was so painful, and ciswomen have so much cisprivilege, because their vaginas aren’t subject to the whims and errors of the surgeon’s knife.
Wait – isn’t all that biological stuff irrelevant to gender?
Or: is it only relevant to your gender if it’s achieved via surgery?
I wonder how many of the ‘transvaginas’ will turn out to be untransitioned penises.
Or anuses.
Here again, substituting the synonym ‘fake’ for ‘trans’ clears things up.
Is the original play going to be renamed The Cisvagina Monologues?
There were protests of The Vagina Monologues, forcing cancellations of performances, over concerns it would offend transgender people. What do you want to bet that nobody involved in this play cares about offending women?
The City of West Hollywood has a ‘transgender advisory board and women’s advisory board’? Chosen by whom? Where do they meet and just how are they part of city government? And how have they managed to delay merting them into a single body ruled by the tallest and loudest members?
@GW
A quick search of “vagina monologues transphobic” comes up with
1.) women’s college ceases annual tradition
2.) eliminating the word “vagina”
3.) scrapping it in favor of a different “Our Monologues” play
Thanks.
https://www.stanforddaily.com/2019/03/13/vagina-phobic-monologues/
“Nothing is wrong with defending women who don’t have a vagina or defending members of the community who do not see their oppression represented in “The Vagina Monologues.” To the contrary, there are important issues here that need urgent address. Producing a new show to address them is commendable. What is infuriating is effacing the vagina to do it. Taking its voice, blaming its presence for anyone else’s absence. What’s infuriating is expecting the vagina to be answerable for the sufferings of the penis, and the sufferings of other genitalia, and silencing all the voices that imagine it not to be. And that’s what the vagina’s enemies are doing.”
I.e.: Yes, it’s true, TWAW, of course, as we all know! And we should have another show about them, called, maybe, “The Penis Monologues”, in order to include all women. But we shouldn’t let them take up all the space devoted to women. Just some of it.
Baby steps, I guess.
GW, as a playwright, one thing I’ve learned is that a play must include total diversity to be acceptable; total diversity meaning you can leave out all white people and all ‘cis’ women, but everyone else must be included and in a positive portrayal. I have seen that this is most commonly a critique of plays written by white women; while white men’s plays may get snarky or nasty comments, they do not usually become pariah plays or get the level of nasty hounding.
Of course, if a ‘cis’hetero white woman includes anyone in her play other than ‘cis’hetero white people, she is instantly accused of cultural appropriation and cancelled. This happened to Eve Ensler when she attempted to make The Vagina Monologues more inclusive; suddenly she was evil for including the people she had been evil for excluding before.
I have been hit with the full force of that nastiness myself on occasion. It seems to me that inclusivity does not need to mean every single minority group (or even a single minority group) needs to be represented in every single play; it means there needs to be a space for a diversity of voices to tell their stories. And theatre has done extremely well at this, but refuses to acknowledge certain basic facts: (1) they are using a narrative that is at least 20 years out of date (2) they have some things very right; it’s time to correct others (3) the only groups of writers that are underrepresented in theatre at this time are white women and Hispanics (4) African American writers are actually slightly overrepresented in theatre (5) accepting #3 and #4 and working to correct them is not the same as saying there need to be fewer people of color; since the most overrepresented group in play production is white males, the addition of more white females and Hispanic writers could be accomplished by reducing the number of white males (6) white male writers have a huge overrepresentation of gay males, which might make 5 difficult, because a lot of people will immediately scream about exclusion.
I think the diversity of theatre is something to celebrate, but people in theatre continue to bash white women (represented at about half their percentage in the population) for not including people of color (represented at nearly twice their percentage in the population). Instead of celebrating their great work and saying now how do we expand that to include more white women and Hispanics, both traditionally and currently underrepresented, they shut off huge numbers of play contests to white women, making them for women of color.
A lot of the problem is that most theatre people have extremely poor understanding of math and statistics, and believe that appropriate representation will come only when all the groups have an equal number of individuals from each category, but which apparently excludes white women because, well…Karen.
The older I get, the more I find myself choosing terminator answer number 5 as a default for almost any interaction with a stranger these days.
I’ll bite. I’ve seen none of the Terminator movies, and web searches are not being helpful. Could you explain “Terminator answer number five”?
iknklast@12:
So, tl;dr, women aren’t allowed to write plays.
This somehow reminds me of the teenage girl on AVEN (the Asexual Visibility and Education Network) that wrote that she was asexual, and then a few weeks or months later she wrote: “Now I’ve come to realize that I’m only semi-asexual: I’m still asexual toward women, but I’m no longer asexual toward men! So now I’m semi-asexual.”
She deserves a medal, and “semi-asexual” (with the definition that she gave) deserves to be in the DSM-IV.
(Connection to your comment: Apparently, in order to not be asexual one needs to experience sexual attraction to everyone on the planet, just as in order to be diverse one needs to include every single demographic.)
GW, you (almost) nailed it. tl;dr is that white women are not allowed to write plays.
GW: I saw a reference today to hypersexual asexuality and some belief that it’s a thing.
iknklast@16;
Butbutbut female BIPOCs can be white, too! Multiracial Whiteness, remember?
latsot@17: Oh yeah, I encountered that on YouTube once! I actually kindasorta understand what (I think) it means, and can almost sorta defend it, albeit not so well,
GW@18: Yes, but in that case, they are white. So, no, we aren’t being racist by insisting BIPOC women not write plays that don’t center trans, because those particular women are white, white, white! In other words…Karen!
GW: I couldn’t sustain enough interest to do anything more than roll my eyes at the term, I’m afraid. Time is short and the list of bullshit is growing by the day.
I have to confess I don’t understand this paragraph:
“What’s infuriating is expecting the vagina to be answerable for the sufferings of the penis, and the sufferings of other genitalia, and silencing all the voices that imagine it not to be. And that’s what the vagina’s enemies are doing.””
How can a genital appendage be “answerable” for anything? Or are we going back to pre-modern conceptions that thoughts and morals are somehow associated with various body parts?
I just find it weird to fixate on the sufferings of my body parts as conscious entities? Why not a play called “My Impacted Fingernail Monologues” I had an impacted fingernail the other week that I was scared may require nasty antibiotics or surgery Can I write a play about? I’m a cycling. My new work is MY ACHING QUADS AND KNEES. See it soon at your local university theater.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the first one, but in it there’s a scene in which we get the Terminator’s POV as its internal display brings up possible responses to something said to it. After a moment’s thought on deciding between them, it chooses “FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE” as the most appropriate one.
I’ve only seen the Vagina Monologues once, decades ago, but IIRC one of the characters is a woman injecting testosterone who says she’s a man. So it is ‘inclusive’ of TIFs (who have vaginas).
Sackbut,
In the original terminator movie there is a scene where the building super of the hole where the terminator is staying asks through the door, “Hey buddy, you got a dead cat in there?”
The next frames show the terminator’s perspective with an option screen of possible responses.
Number 5 is’ “fuck you asshole”, which of course flashes as the one selected and next we hear Arnold delivering the line.