Certainly the Founding Mothers of feminism who met at Seneca Falls in New York on the 19th and 20th of July 1848 would have been appalled at the spectacle that occurred at the Lawrence University Chapel on Tuesday evening, Feb. 19.Can one imagine Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott joining in the frenzied chant, “CUNT! CUNT! CUNT! CUNT!” with which the participants in the “Vagina Monologues” got many in the audience to pronounce with the gusto of Nazis heiling Adolf Hitler in The Third Reich?
Nor can one imagine Susan B. Anthony applauding the lesbian rape of a sixteen-year-old girl by a 24-year-old woman. (In the original production the age of the victim, whose rape was glorified and sanctified by Eve Ensler, author of the “Vagina Monologues,” was thirteen.)
The righteous cause for which this literary garbage was written is the crusade to end violence against women. Nevertheless, one has to ask what does announcing the fact that the clitoris has 8,000 nerve-endings as opposed to the penis having only 4,000 nerve endings have to do with ending violence against women?
While some of the issues of Seneca Falls remain today to be addressed, many of them have been resolved in a humane and equitable manner. Women have the vote, divorce is an option, and women’s property rights are secure.
The remaining issues such as pay equity in comparable lines of work with men and the elimination of violence against women will not occur by hysterically shouting “CUNT! CUNT! CUNT! CUNT!” and by the glorification of lesbian rape at theatrical productions of the “Vagina Monologues” or its imitators to come.
From Seneca Falls to the “Vagina Monologues”?! How sad to see a great movement of liberation fall into the hands of idiotic ideologues and crazies.
-Don Dake