The Vagina Dialogues II: Snatches of Conversation
The stories you allude to are tragedies. The point of a tragedy is that what happens is bad. “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could”, which I went and read after my previous post, is not a tragedy. It is written with a happy ending. The line about “If it’s rape, it was a good rape” is not ambiguous, but the woman flat out saying that the experience was good.
Just because Habberdasher is using it to try and prove problems with liberalism doesn’t make his(?) statements wrong. The story is glorifying rape, and that is wrong. That’s not to say you couldn’t have a story about this subject, but you can’t make the rapist the hero who saves the little girl. The message of that story is that this rape is okay.
Women may feel some mixed emotions about rape. Yes, they can feel pleasure when it happens, while feeling disgust that it happens. This is not remotely in this story. There is no ambivalence. The woman thinks that what happened was good.
And, note, I used ambivalence, not ambiguity. Because there is no ambiguity about rape. If you don’t consent, that’s rape, and there is no such thing as partial consent. Claiming rape can be ambiguous sets back the movement 40 years.
That’s why I said what I said. A “good rape” story is bad. Because, you can watch this story and like it, and then come away with these horribly wrong and damaging understandings. Because you like it, you make up excuses rather than see what is plainly in front of your face.
“The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could” is a pro-rape story. Not even the age-lift and removal of the one line saves it. It’s still about a woman who preys on the sexual naivete of a young girl. And that woman is presented as the hero.
And this is why I so often have to point out that snark is not a substitute for an argument. No one said any of this. But you are praising a play that has a story that celebrates rape in it, making excuses for why it’s not really promoting rape.
At least Miller said he’s not sure. You guys are going balls to the wall defending it. Apparently, if you like something, you can’t go back and see that it might be flawed.
I do not see how the authenticity of the experience justifies anything. A spousal abuse victim may authentically believe her husband loves her, but her telling a pro-abuse story is also something I would support a college banning.
No story needs to be erased. That’s like arguing that not flying the Confederate flag means we can’t learn about the Civil War. The story can exist without the glorification, without making the rapist into a hero.
And it’s not “current sexual morality.” Lolita* was written in 1955, and we knew it was wrong then. Just because it’s Humberta instead doesn’t change this. Arranging sex with a 13-year-old nymphet was still wrong.
And while I appreciate the age-lift and removal of the rape line, the woman still treats her like a little girl, dressing her, asking her mom for permission to have her sleep over and asking if her mom would let her drink. There is no indication she thinks of this “16-year-old” as an adult.
It smacks of taking the Confederate flag and removing the stars on it and thinking that fixes the problem. Either put the flag in a museum with proper context, i.e. add a part where she is even older and realizes how fucked up that whole thing was, or, if that doesn’t suit your purpose, make a new flag, i.e. get a new real story.
*And just in case I didn’t mention this before, “Coochie” is not like Lolita, as the narrator is not presented as unreliable. We are supposed to believe that everything she says happened.
“NAWGLA” was awesome, faithfool. I LOLed.
Let’s see, who would South Park have be the celebrity with those initials as they did with Marlon Brando and NAMBLA? Of course! The North American Whoopi Goldberg Look-alike Association. Perfect.
The Vagina Dialogues III: Chatterbox
The Vagina Dialogues IV: Don’t Shut Your Pie Hole.
No, I’m snarking on the inane ‘attack,’ if you will, on what Miller said. To illustrate…
All this blather reminds me of reading the snopes boards back in the day. In their mailbag section, they’d often get frothing-at-the-mouth call outs. About what, you may ask? Well, one would accuse them of being commie, liberal, socialists who suckle at (back then) Clinton’s teat. The next would rail against their right wing, anti-progressive, moral majority, in bed with Bush mentality. And so it would go, back and forth, back and forth. Each letter writer bringing their own baggage to the table.
Now, you may ask again what that has to do with this. Lemme tell ya… all that abuse was heaped on them simply for reporting facts and the bias that these morons saw was due more to their agenda than anything resembling reality. So, I’m seeing that here. How anyone could read the above passage and not see it as a commentary on the person who spoke it, is beyond me. That’s why a lot of times on here people don’t like their own words being repeated back to them. Who wouldn’t see someone calling their heinous behavior as a “good rape” anything but, I dunno, bad? And a negative (to say the least) reflection on them?
So, yeah, I run out of patience with people that continually misrepresent another’s arguments. If there’d been no strawmanning Miller, maligning liberals and libeling the rest of us not seeing hir point of you, I’d have just ignored it for the ridiculousness that it was. But in total, I’m not pro-child rape (duh), I think the play was fine just as it was and I’m very anti-disingenuousness. Hopefully, that’ll clear up all my stances on this thread.
Gracias! 
“Shut up, you pussy!”
“I’m no pussy— you’re the pussy!”
“No, you’re the pussy!”
“No, you are!”
We need to fight ignorance here. Its a "libel’. “Slander” is verbal.
Just to clarify, I’m nit going “balls to the wall” defending the piece, although I personally happen to like it as a work of art. I’m going balls to the wall pointing and laughing at a butthurt poster who unfairly attacked a poster who offered some cogent criticism of the piece. I’m balls to the wall against hyperbole that claims a guy kicked off a school newspaper has been censored as an enemy of the state.
I’m balls to the wall against anyone who claims that I, specifically, am anti VGM now because I’m aligned with transgender protectionism (I’m not, and I’m not) while I supported it in the past because I’m pro-rape. (Still not.)
There are a lot of good reasons not to like “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could.” So far, Miller is the only one that’s presented any of them.
The fact that any attempt to discuss the play or do anything with it besides regurgitate exact pre-formulated messages disturbed the activists of 2000 enough to get the guy fired means that any notion of the piece intending to “provoke a discussion” or be ambiguous is laughable. The particulars of who had the right to fire who are irrelevant to that. They are equally irrelevant to the hilarious comeuppance that the “eliminate all wrongthink” steamroller approach to leftism is getting now, with the very play that was once Not Allowed To Be Questioned now sent into the Not Allowed To Be Seen hazmat bin because the transsexuals have used the exact same tactics against you that you once used against the critics.
The people who want to use bludgeons to end discussion instead of words to participate in it are now being hoist by their own petard. That’s ironic, and funny, and will remain so no matter what anyone thinks of the “good rape” scene.
But the story is how one woman reacted to being targeted by a sexual predator in her youth, and the story is notable specifically because the victim did not feel victimized. If you only allow the story to be framed in a way that makes the woman’s experience into a negative one, you are very much erasing her story - you’re saying that her actual experience is subordinate to ensuring that the correct political messaging is maintained.
And in 1958, Jerry Lee Lewis legally married his 13 year old cousin. Granted, the backlash over that revelation hugely damaged his career - but still, it was legal for him to marry his 13 year old cousin. So, yeah, the morality around sex with post-pubescent children is something that was in flux for a good portion of the last century.
I agree, and I think this is important to the overall piece, for reasons that I’ll get into in a bit.
Rewriting someone’s actual narrative, so that they arrive at a conclusion that’s 180 degrees away from what they actually feel, strikes me as fairly dishonest, particularly if you’re going to try to present your work as containing people’s authentic experiences. But, arguably, that ship already sailed when Ensler removed the “good rape” line and edged up the character’s age to something slightly more appropriate.
There’s also the question of what, exactly, the purpose of including that piece in the play was. Hyperventilating by some posters in this thread aside, I don’t think it’s an advocacy piece for fucking children. Speaking for myself, I found it interesting precisely because the woman’s reaction is so at odds with how someone in her position is expected to feel about having been sexually abused. There are a lot of conventional narratives of people coping with the damage caused by sexual abuse. The fact that not everyone so victimized experiences the event as victimization is surprising, and requires one to incorporate a layer of nuance to their understanding of the dynamics of sexual abuse. And note, please, that recognizing a degree of nuance in the situation does not require one to support having sex with thirteen year olds, or excuse people that do.
To my shame, I’ve never actually read Lolita, but my understanding is that Humbert is unreliable in the sense that he provides excuses and rationalizations for his actions that are self-serving, and don’t reflect the reality of the damage he’s doing to Lolita, but that the actual events of the novel are not meant to be in question: he’s not inventing scenes or characters, just putting his own spin on them that he thinks justifies his actions.
With that in mind, I’m not sure I agree with you that this is a reliable narrator. Certainly, she claims that the experience was positive, and did not harm her. I don’t think the audience is necessarily required to accept her self-diagnosis, though. Going back to what you said earlier, about the older woman treating her like a child: one thing that struck me reading the piece is that, despite the narrator’s tone, the older woman’s actions come across as very skeevy and uncomfortable. She’s very clearly a predator, and shows no particular interest in the young girl’s well being or ability to process what’s going on. I don’t think she comes across as heroic at all - it’s clear that the fact that the victim feels the experience was positive is largely luck, that there’s nothing inherent to the woman’s actions that separate her from any other sexual predator. If she’d targeted a different girl and done exactly the same thing, its clear it could have been enormously damaging.
Who are these people? Are you claiming that “people who want to use bludgeons to end discussion” are participating in this thread? Can you name one?
[Addressed to WhyNot]
Don’t you think it’s hilarious that anyone can say the above when they re routinely mischaracterized what they’re opposition saying? The incongruity is blowing up my mockery meter.
I doubt it. S/he’s yet to give a straight response to any of the refutations of his other bullshit, so why start being honest now?
Bingo. Good post.
What I’ve learned the most out of this is to not argue with anyone with a vagina, or one that has one and wishes they did not, or doesn’t have one and wishes they did.
No, I think we can be fairly certain that no one involved with any production of the play has thought of the play as such.
Yet we can also be fairly certain, I would guess, that at least one audience member, somewhere, has come away from that part of the play thinking ‘see, it’s NOT so bad for an adult to have sex with a 13-year-old!’ (Or ‘16-year-old.’)
When it comes to making a piece of work that includes the “authentic experiences” of others, there is a difference between, say, a book of testimonial essays, and a play in which performers speak directly to the audience, portraying the person who had that authentic experience.
Why this is so is beyond the scope of the thread. But the fact is that a person who wants to rationalize using kids for sex is going to get far more support from seeing an actress stand up and say ‘I was seduced at 13 and I loved it’ than he or she would get from reading an essay in which the writer says the same thing.
Theater is powerful. Cliché? Maybe…but it’s also true.
The Vagina Monologues has been intensely meaningful to many women over the years, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t written by a human being at a particular time. Perhaps Ensler didn’t really think through the way that the Coochie piece could be used to justify making use of kids for sex. Perhaps if she had thought that through at the time, she wouldn’t have included the piece.
And, perhaps, if the zeitgeist of the mid-90s (when the play was being written) had been identical to the zeitgeist of 2015, Ensler would have included a transgender monologue. According to Wikipedia, that didn’t happen until 2004. But it did happen–and so I’m puzzled at claims that the play has been ‘banned’ as being unfriendly to transwomen. Wikipedia has:
I have a friend who is transgendered, and he tells me that there is actually a lot of hostility towards transgendered people among many in the LGBT ‘community’. Some feminists think that female to male transgendered people are guilty of running away from their ‘true’ female side, or otherwise denying the superiority of their ‘female-ness’. Some gay men are hostile to flamboyant m-to-f transgendered people because they think it stigmatizes them. There have been incidents of LGB groups actively shunning or harassing transgendered people. So perhaps this opposition to the Vagina Monologues is a way of pushing back.
The bottom line is that there is nothing about being gay or transgendered that makes you a better, more tolerant person than anyone else. You will find exclusion and bigotry everywhere, just as you can find nasty racism in just about every minority community, just as you can in any majority community.
The problem is that once you’ve adopted the belief that people should be segregated into categories based on ‘privilege’, gender affiliation, race, or any other group characteristic, you open the door to others using the same tactics against you. Trying to sort out who is the most privileged becomes pretty difficult. Is the gay black rich woman more privileged than a poor white man? Is a gay person who went to Harvard more or less privileged than a straight person who could only afford to go to a state school? Is a transgendered person less privileged than a feminist or a lesbian?
And when ‘taking offence’ or being ‘triggered’ by trivialities isn’t real, but instead serves as a form of tribal marker, affiliation signal, or political tactic, just when are you supposed to take it seriously?
Here’s a radical idea - how about we treat everyone as individuals, and judge them based on the content of their character? How about we learn a little tolerance and try not to be offended by everything that doesn’t fit into our own cozy little world view? I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work.
Not in this thread perhaps, but how about the people who protest on campus to prevent Bill Maher, Ayan Hiirsi Ali, or Condoleeza Rice from speaking? How about the “#BlackLivesMatter” assholes who pushed aside Martin O’Malley and then became outraged when he had the temerity to suggest that all lives matter? How about the people who tried to use ‘John Doe’ investigations to stop a politician they didn’t like? How about the IRS targeting conservatives with audits and refusing to grant tax exempt status to conservative outreach groups while letting their liberal counterparts through quickly?
How about the flash mobs of outrage on twitter and elsewhere that seek to have people’s careers and lives ruined for saying things they don’t like? How about the people who made a scientist who landed a machine on a freaking COMET give a tearful apology because they didn’t like the shirt he was wearing when the announcement was made?
Here in Canada, we have ‘human rights tribunals’ who can and will destroy you if you step outside of what is the current politically-correct orthodoxy in a public way. They have issued lifetime gag orders against religious leaders, preventing them from speaking out against homosexuality. On the other hand, those same tribunals will defend to the death such attitudes so long as it’s coming from Islamic leaders, because they are a ‘protected’ group.
I think the thuggish and speech-suppressing nature of many on today’s left is pretty obvious to most people who aren’t part of their clan. When a tenured professor can have his career threatened because a ‘Firefly’ poster is deemed to create a ‘hostile environment’, something is out of control.