On Feb. 22, Christina Hoff Sommers decried the influence of the popular work "The Vagina Monologues."
Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the book "Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women."
In "The Vagina Monologues," various female characters share bluntly candid views on their vaginas. The play has for the last decade been performed on Valentine's Day in many locations worldwide in a festival known as V-day. The proceeds from these performances raise money to support organizations combating violence against women.
Claiming that Eve Ensler's play represents a dangerously retrograde feminism concerned solely with women's bodies and not with their minds, Sommers made three main objections to the work.
First, she said that it is atrociously written. Second, that it is "poisonously anti-male." Finally, that the play "claims to empower women when it in fact portrays us to be desperate and pathetic."
On her first point, Sommers appeared upset that "for many kids, this is the only play they'll see in college, but this isn't great poetry."
She noted that female sexuality has long been an inspiration for great literature, and that Ensler's work - and here Sommers read mockingly from a scene in which a woman describes the thrill of finding her clitoris - is cheap and uninspiring.
"College is the one period of the life when you can enrich yourself in works of transcendent genius," Sommers said, bemoaning the amount of time young women put into the production of Ensler's play.
But it was on the second two objections that Sommers focused the most. She highlighted the fact that "The Vagina Monologues" features only one male, Bob, who is portrayed as not very interesting or attractive, but obsessed with vaginas.
Sommers was particularly upset by the way "The Vagina Monologues" is seen to empower women.
"What in this play could be empowering?" Sommers asked. "Is it the freedom to obsess about your intimate [body parts]? The freedom to say the v-word or the c-word over and over again?"
Calling the play and the whole V-Day phenomenon "silly, hysterical and narcissistic," Sommers stressed that "this play is reactionary. This play takes you back to your body."
"Empowerment is not staring at your vagina in the mirror - it is writing a great paper, running a marathon," Sommers said.
She did not in anyway discount the transformative experience that many college women have had taking part in the play's production, but Sommers noted that "You can have authentic experience from the speeches of demagogues and I think this is a demagoguery."
The dark side of "The Vagina Monologues", the violence that men bring upon women, was also very upsetting to Sommers.
Making a comparison to a hypothetical play in which white characters are only seen committing acts of violence against blacks or Hispanics, Sommers stressed that the representation of men as perpetrators is completely unrealistic and blown out of proportion.
According to Sommers, the violent acts in "The Vagina Monologues" do not represent the totality of society, but instead problems within relationships.
What the work creates is not the "pathology of a patriarchal society; it's a pathology of intimacy," Sommers said.
She claimed that the abuse portrayed in the play is not limited to men acting upon women and pointed out one scene in which an older lesbian takes in a very young girl and gives her alcohol.
Sommers called the numbers of women excited about "The Vagina Monologues" "not a measure of goodness, but a measure of hysteria."
She warned her audience, "You should not be falling into the abyss of discredited feminisms of yesterday."
Sommers, however, was not against every repercussion of the work. Early in her speech, she acknowledged the positive impact of V-Day celebrations that raise money to combat violence against women.
"Nothing I say here tonight should be taken as criticism of [Ensler's] humanitarian work," Sommers said.
She emphasized, though, that "her campaign would be far more successful if she were more respectful of truth, less contemptuous of men...[and] celebrated women's brains, their capacity to think," instead of their genitalia.
