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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Look, you dopes, we should all be feminists. But even me -- cocked and ready to respond to anyone who wants to address the questions of gender equity, me -- from my privileged, well-educated, media-savvy, urban perch: I am about ready to hurl.
"Are there are any registered vaginas in the house?" Ensler asked the mostly white crowd at the Apollo. No, actually. But there are registered women. "I have never been so afraid in my being," Ensler said, urging the audience to "pull out that other paradigm living inside of us waiting to be born." What? "Step into your vaginas and get the vagina vote out." Aaaaah! What does stepping into your vagina mean? It sounds like it would hurt! And since Ensler wants us to be frank about our bodies, let me tell the truth: My vagina's role in voting will be pretty minimal compared to the effort my hands and eyes and brain are going to put in.
But it's confusing, watching all this. Because there are the real ideological bright spots, the rush of relief at hearing anyone pay attention to women. It would be like throwing out the baby with the bath water to ignore Monday night's very fine performance by Vanessa Carlton, who followed Ensler onstage and announced, "This is the most vaginal evening I've ever been to. But I'm proud. To have one, I mean," before singing her song "White Houses," with a verse about losing her virginity that MTV has been censoring.
And then there was the B-list stew of stars who showed up onstage and at the press conference before the event. Roseanne Cash and Gina Gershon and Hazelle Goodman -- I'm glad they were there. I love seeing someone whose work I admire -- like Edie Falco or Patricia Clarkson, neither of whom were at Vaginas Vote, Chicks Rock, but who have been faithful feminist foot soldiers -- stand up for issues that register so profoundly for me. But I wonder how much impact they will have. I wonder how many swing-state women will wake up early to vote on Nov. 2 because of Marisa Tomei and Isabella Rossellini's rip-roaring reading of Eve Ensler's "V-World" monologue at a theater in Harlem? "V-world is the center of us, and it is round," they intoned, as V-words like "voluptuous," "vivid," "viva," "Venus" and "vaudeville" appeared on the screen.
"Vaudeville"? How about "vomit"?
I'm pretty damn sure the voters won't be pouring out of their Midwestern homes because of Ensler, the media hog who cannot keep her mouth shut. On the press line before the program, arm in arm with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, Ensler kept interrupting. And no, I don't want her to pipe down cause she's a woman. I want her to pipe down because I want to hear other people who have things to say about aspects of feminism not directly related to the clitoris.
Watching Fonda and Steinem work the cameras was inspiring. They moved with lithe confidence, Fonda in a V-day T-shirt and boulder-size turquoise jewelry, Steinem in black silks and gold sandals. "Anyone got questions?" Fonda bellowed gamely at the rope line, her arms slung around the shoulders of the rest of her kick-line. When a Fox News reporter asked her about the photo of her and John Kerry at an antiwar rally that keeps getting passed around Republican circles, a Vagina Warrior press person quickly stepped in and cut him off. But Fonda happily held forth on the Iraq war with as much candor as she once did the Vietnam conflict. "It's a lie," Fonda said about Iraq. "I agree with the military experts who say it's a quagmire." And about the upcoming election she said, "I don't think there's ever been such a clear choice between radicalism and moderation. I mean, we are dealing with a radical ideologue here." Steinem elaborated on what she thought would inspire younger women to get out and vote: "Maybe they want to go to college. College tuitions have risen 30 percent under the Bush administration. Maybe they drink water; the Safe Drinking Water Act, which has been protected by six previous administrations, has been badly damaged under George Bush. Maybe they eat salmon, which is now dangerous because of environmental damage. Nothing is safe now."
Next to them, Ensler could be heard telling another interrogator, "Vaginas are catchy!"
It had the same hollow ring as her later introduction of two Afghan women -- Malalai Joya and Zoya -- and an Iraqi woman named Yanar Mohammed whom Ensler referred to as her "shero." I listened to these women plead with the Apollo crowd to vote in November and thought back to parade of Middle Eastern women who had been trotted in front of delegates and reporters at the Republican Convention last month as a testament to George Bush's dedication to women's rights. I'm not sure that they're not all being used for the same thing: as emotional baseball bats with which to kick the other side in the nuts.
