Parental Advisory

[venta]

Does anyone know anything about The Vagina Monologues ?

I'd been told, by people who I'd regard as reliable, that they were extremely funny. Last night, I accidentally found a performance on the telly. The 2 minutes I watched seemed to consist entirely of a woman explaining how she'd "reclaimed" the word cunt, and then repeatedly saying it in different silly voices.

Which the audience seemed to find hilarious. Which I found incomprehensible. It's not like I found it offensive, it just... wasn't funny.

[One Notional Kudos Point to anyone who realises why I suddenly remembered about this :) ]

Comments

Re: Next time I shall have to be more clear...

[condign.livejournal.com]

I can't understand how you can't understand. These feelings do hold people back. That's life. Perhaps you're blessed (though some might say cursed) with excessive, unconsidered self-confidence and acceptance, but that's true of very few people. If you don't understand that a feeling that your own body is shameful can ruin your life, I would say that's a failing in you, and you could do with a lot more understanding and compassion for other people's problems.

I think there is a somewhat substantial gap between 'feeling that your own body is shameful' and how it can ruin one's life, and the need to redefine the emotional load of a relatively uncommon expletive. There is no cognitive dissonance involved in believing a) women should not feel ashamed of their bodies and b) a woman standing on stage muttering a swear word in strange voices is both offensive and silly.

Perhaps there is someone out there that might be helped by it--I can't prove otherwise. I doubt its up there on any top-ten list of things to improve, even if that list is filtered for gender issues. And reclaiming the word does lose something pretty valuable--all of its power. You mention that 'vulva' or 'vagina' don't cover the entire issue (and I'll admit to lack of knowledge of the anatomical borders of 'cunt'), and are 'clinical', but there are very few situations, particularly in polite society, where one needs a word to describe sex organs--take away its emotional load and cunt will become dry and clinical, it having nothing else it needs to carry.

(And, incidentally, it's amusing how often a the world sees a lack of compassion in the insistence that something be effective to be important.)

Again, missing the point. Prick does not carry the same weight as cunt. It's not even a question of degree: it's qualitatively different.

How so? I will admit here to what seems to be a lack of knowledge as to the precise usages of curse-words, though I'll also point out that I've always believed such words, and their power, came from not having precise definitions--that wonderful webpage about how 'fuck' can be used in every part of speech...