Your gender-war educators of boys and girls at work
---------- Forwarded message ----------
E-mail Author
Send to a Friend
Print Version
May 02, 2005, 8:08 a.m.
Why Can't They "Just Get Along"?
V-Day meets P-Day on campus.
By Christina Hoff Sommers
Warning:The following contains adult (in this case, collegiate) language,
along with gratuitous references to male and female genitalia.
College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters Eve Ensler's play
The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate "V-Day"
(short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at
Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of
V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis
Monologues, the official reaction was horror. Two participating students,
Monique Stuart and Andy Mainiero, have just received sharp letters of
reprimand and have been placed on probation by the Office of Judicial
Affairs. The costume of the P-Day "mascot" - a friendly looking "penis"
named Testaclese, has been confiscated and is under lock and key in the
office of the assistant dean of student affairs, John King.
The P-Day satirists are the first to admit that their initiative is
tasteless and crude. But they rightly point out that V-Day is far more
extreme. They are shocked that the administration has come down hard on
their good-natured spoof, when all along it has been completely
accommodating to the in-your-face vulgarity of the vagina activists.
V-Day has now replaced Valentine's Day on more than 500 college campuses
(including Catholic ones). The high point of the day is a performance of
Ensler's raunchy play, which consists of various women talking in graphic,
and I mean graphic, terms about their intimate anatomy. The play is
poisonously anti-male. Its only romantic scene, if you can call it that,
takes place when a 24-year-old woman seduces a young girl (in the original
version she was 13 years old, but in a more recent version is played as a
16-year-old.) The woman invites the girl into her car, takes her to her
house, plies her with vodka, and seduces her. What might seem like a scene
from a public-service kidnapping-prevention video shown to schoolchildren
becomes, in Ensler's play "a kind of heaven."
The week before V-Day, the Roger Williams campus was plastered with flyers
emblazoned with slogans such as "My Vagina is Flirty" and "My Vagina is
Huggable." There was a widely publicized "orgasm workshop." On the day of
the play, the V-warriors sold lollipops in the in the shape of--guess what?
Last year, the student union was flooded with questionnaires asking
unsuspecting students questions like "What does your Vagina smell like?"
None of this offended the administration or elicited any reprimands,
probations, or confiscations.
The campus conservatives artfully (in the college sense of "artful")
mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the school with flyers that said,
"My penis is majestic" and "My penis is hilarious." The caption on one
handout read, "My Penis is studious." It showed Testaclese reclining on a
couch reading Michael Barone's Hard America, Soft America.
"Testaclese" tipped the scales when he approached the university Provost,
Edward J. Kavanagh, outside the student union. Apparently taking him/it for
a giant mushroom, Provost Kavanagh cheerfully greeted him. But when
Testaclese presented him with an honorary award as a campus "Penis
Warrior," the stunned official realized that it was no mushroom. After this
incident, which was recorded on videotape, the promoters of P-Day were
ordered to cease circulating their flyers and to keep Testaclese off campus
grounds. Mindful of how school officers had never once protested any of the
antics of Vagina warriors, the P-warriors did not comply. The Testaclese
costume was then confiscated and formal charges followed.
It is easy to understand why school officials would not want a six-foot
phallus wandering around campus; nor why they would ask students not to
paper the college with posters describing all the things it likes to do.
But that is just the sort of thing the vagina warriors have been doing,
year after year, on hundreds of campuses. In fact, P-Day at Roger Williams
was mild by comparison. Wesleyan College hosted a "C***" workshop; Penn
State held a "C***"-fest. At Arizona State, students displayed a 40-foot
inflatable plastic vagina. It was not confiscated and no one was ever
threatened with probation.
Unhappily, P-Day may be the only effective means of countering V-Day with
all its c-fests, graphic lollipops, intrusive questionnaires, outsized
effigies of vaginas and its thematic anti-male play. The prospect of public
readings from P-Monologues on campuses around the country just might be the
reductio ad absurdum that could drive the vagina warriors to the bargaining
table. The student activists opposed to V-Day will gladly cancel P-Day the
moment the V-warriors abandon their vagina-fests.
But for the short term, college administrators should brace themselves. The
rebels at Roger Williams are talking about a Free Testaclese Fund. And word
is spreading to other campuses. P-Day and Testaclese will be back next
year. And not just in Rhode Island.
- Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute. She is the co-author of One Nation Under Therapy: How the
Helping Culture Undermines Self-Reliance, just out from St. Martin's Press.
* * *
> http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/sommers200505020808.asp
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater?
Donate or volunteer in the arts today at Network for Good!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/pkgkPB/SOnJAA/Zx0JAA/pyIolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/boysed/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
