Sunday, January 18, 2015

Vagina Monologues retired for not being inclusive enough

Mount Holyoke, a women's college in Massachusetts, retired its annual performance of The Vagina Monologues for not being inclusive enough.
This year, however, Mount Holyoke’s Project Theatre Board is defying tradition by permanently retiring the play. In a school-wide email from the Theatre Board, a representative from the group, Erin Murphy, explained the problems with the play and the reasoning behind its discontinuation.

“At its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman...Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive,” the email, obtained by Campus Reform, said.
Before anyone starts crying "PC Police!" I think it's important to note that it was the theatre board's decision to retire the play, which is a tad outmoded regardless, but it does illustrate the left's predisposition for over-correction. If something can't speak to all, it shouldn't speak to anyone -- and that's a little disappointing. Elizabeth Nolan Brown puts it succintly:
Yet I am a woman with a vagina, and this becomes an area of my concern when people start saying that I shouldn't reference or acknowlege that—that it's in fact bad and intolerant so 20th century to even speak about it. The fact that some trans women don't have vaginas doesn't negate the fact that the vast majority of women do. And now, in the name of feminism, "female-validating talk about vaginas is now forbidden," as one anonymous writer on a Mount Holyoke messageboard put it. "That's so misogynistic under the guise of ‘progress.'"