Cult of the vajayjay

Valentine's Day, a licence to print money for greeting-card manufacturers, jewellers, flower shops and restaurants, was never a deeply meaningful occasion. But at least it was the most benign and uncontroversial of "holidays." Who could object to a day devoted to the celebration of romantic love?

The cards are still printed, little heart-shaped diamond-chip pendants still sold, roses still delivered and hokey movies still made for the unenlightened star-gazing lumpen-proletariat. But for the rarefied left-wing cultural cognoscenti, Valentine's Day has for the last 12 years been known as V-Day.

"V" is for "vagina" -- or, as Oprah coyly calls it, the "vajayjay" --and refers to Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues (TVM), a staged series of monologues "by" vaginas with various issues on their -- er -- mind, which has been translated into 24 languages and is routinely performed on college campuses and community centres across the land every Feb. 14.

It is difficult to know what to make of Eve Ensler. TVM is, objectively, a rather infantile, anti-intellectual and politically reductive phenomenon, giving the impression that public display of one's genitals to others or the general public -- in reality an impulse that generally ends at about the age of five in children, or signals mental pathology in adults -- is the only authentic route to female empowerment. Of course, TVM substitutes mouths for vaginas on the stage, but there is no mistaking the wistful fantasy of real transgression that inspired Ensler.

TVM's overarching theme is the battle to end violence against women everywhere. Yet I doubt a Somali victim of genital mutilation would find, say, a lesbian dominatrix enacting a variety of routes to orgasm, or an "angry vagina" kvetching over the hardships of tampons and pelvic exams a reassuring icon of female empowerment.

But you can't argue with success. TVM is not so much a theatrical phenomenon as a cult. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Ensler refers to her V-Day foundation, which has raised about $70-million dollars through benefit performances of TVM to fight violence against women in patriarchal cultures as a movement, active in 130 countries.

It would be churlish to overlook the good uses to which TVM-raised money has been put in the anarchic hellholes of the world, where Ensler personally treks to deliver her money and her message. Still, one has to wonder at the tenacity of TVM's hold on popular culture, and the wince-inducing stunts to which it has lent its name.

In April of 2008, in celebration of TVM's 10th anniversary, and to lift the battered spirits of post-Katrina residents, New Orleans hosted a "Super Love" extravaganza at the Superdome around the performance of TVM (an event that garnered a flurry of media attention after Jane Fonda, who was featured in the performance, used the "c-word" while publicizing it on the Today Show). New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin welcomed Ensler and her minions to his fair city with a ringing, albeit somewhat ambiguously phrased endorsement of her project, announcing he was "a vagina-friendly mayor. I am in!"

Ensler took the stage and declared that she and her cohorts had "Vaginaized the Superdome." For the occasion, Ensler had penned a new, New-Orleans oriented monologue, the motif: "New Orleans is the vagina of America."

Catchy, but not, perhaps, an advisable logo for the Louisiana tourism website.

In addition to the performance of TVM, international activists took the stage to recount truly horrifying tales of gang rapes and genital atrocities in the Congo. It was offset, though, by a stunningly insensitive appearance on the same stage by Sara Blakely, founder of the popular Spanx line of hosiery, who told her own tragic story of gender injustice. She had to battle against many a patriarchal hosiery manufacturer because "I didn't like the way my own butt looked in white pants." An actress participating in a panel discussion on the image of women in the media said that the tendency for photos to airbrush freckles from the noses of women was "visual violence against women."

I'm flummoxed by this subversive trivialization and relativization of real abuse. Eve Ensler has been named one of "America's Best" by CNN and called a "messiah" by The New York Times. But putting aside her legitimately important and virtuous work overseas, she seems to have no idea of how insulting her aggrandizement of gender trivia is to women who really suffer. Feminists mock Sarah Palin for being ignorant and out of step with women's values. Women in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

bkay@videotron.ca