Vagina.It looks funny when you read it and can sound a little funny coming out of your mouth.But, it has become a part of my everyday vocabulary as the director of SANAA’s V-Day movement and “The Vagina Monologues” on campus. The play is about everything from self-pleasure, to pubic hair, to orgasms.It is also about sexual abuse, female genital mutilation and rape.The idea is that when we don’t address sexuality at all, we silence all the good things that can come from it (orgasms) along with all the bad things (sexual abuse).We take sex – the reason humans continue to exist – and hide it under the sheets.
Why hear women talk about their vaginas in an age where women already have equality? I used to be so sure that we were on the cusp of a post-gender society, that sometimes we feminists whined a little too much, and it scared me when they talked about how much everything wrong in the world was because of oppression by men. As women, were we throwing chains on ourselves by holding onto anger over these “patriarchal structures”?
Women are enabled: Hillary Clinton, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and PepsiCo Inc.’s Indra Nooyi. Suffrage was just granted in the 1920s; give us time to catch up.
These thoughts run through my mind when I hold my tongue in class discussions about the my gender’s supposed oppression or when I hear fellow feminists discuss their anger over sexist male privilege. With progressing female rights, is the feminist fight still as relevant as it was a few decades ago?
The women’s stories within “The Vagina Monologues” remind me that the feminist movement is not yet obsolete, since we are the only ones advocating against “sex-ism,” rather than sexism. By “sex-ism,” I mean sexual assault and violence – when sex is used as a weapon of violence against others. We use the word vagina to open up an avenue to discuss all the good and bad things that can happen to them.
We don’t normally talk about sex, so even between sexual partners the lines can remain blurred as to what consent really is. In 2012, more than half of female rape victims reported that they were raped by their intimate partners.
The nation does not pay heed to research that has shown that countries with higher levels of gender inequality –including gender violence – have higher levels of insecurity and instability. If we begin to think about our “sex-ism” – the biases we have to keep quiet about the act of sex – and accept the innate nature of human sexuality into a normal practice in our societies, it would be less permissible for it to be misused.
This kind of “sex-ism” is not just about women. In 2004, CBS’ “60 Minutes 2” received information on American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq raping both male and female prisoners – sodomizing them, as well as sexually assaulting them, with objects including a truncheon and wire. If standing up against sexual abuse labels one as a feminist, then feminism needs to become a part of every other -ism in the book; it has to be everyone’s fight.
At the V-Day event The State of Female Justice, our team met Eve Ensler, the founder of the entire movement. She kept telling us that there was energy in the air, that something was moving, shaking and that she felt it all around the world, including when she was speaking with female survivors of war rape in Congo and V-Day organizers in India. I think I know what the energy is – the rebirth of feminism. It is aching, quaking, quivering, pulsating to be reborn into humanism, too big to stay put in a woman’s womb.
Time for the delivery. I invite you to come to one of our other V-Day events. I hope you decide to come to one that makes you particularly uncomfortable. Just by saying the word vagina you have crossed a threshold most people do not allow themselves to venture over.
Mohammed is a fourth-year communication studies and international development studies student and the director of the Social Awareness Network for Activism through Art’s V-Day movement.