Believe it or not, there is a group of Georgetown students who would rather spend their Friday nights baking bread from scratch or watching King Richard III at the Shakespeare Theater than competing in beer-pong tournaments. These students live on the Culture and Performance Living and Learning Community (CPLLC), a unique outlet for creative Hoyas. But when the CPLLC refused to subsidize its members’ tickets to the University-sponsored production of Eve Ensler’s the Vagina Monologues, I was confronted with the sad reality that even Georgetown’s more progressive institutions are unable to escape censorship and discrimination.
When enough CPLLC members want to attend an on-campus cultural event, musical or theatrical performance, they can almost always count on CPLLC funds to help subsidize the tickets. This is not the case with the Vagina Monologues. Alexander Pruss, professor of philosophy, is the CPLLC faculty in-residence and administers the CPLLC funds. Over the past four years, Professor Pruss has applied a variety of discriminatory fund allocation policies to the Vagina Monologues, all of which have made it either difficult or impossible for CPLLC students to obtain subsidized tickets to the show.
To not attend the Vagina Monologues personally for religious reasons is freedom of choice, but to exclude subsidies with CPLLC funds for tickets on the grounds that its content goes against the values of the Catholic Church is religious discrimination. In 2003, both myself and two other CPLLC members participated in the Vagina Monologues. I requested from Pruss CPLLC-funded tickets for a large number of our CPLLC friends who were planning to attend but was flatly denied. I was told that the reason for this included the fact that the Vagina Monologues were inappropriate for Lent—in 2004 they were performed around Ash Wednesday.
The CPLLC’s refusal to fund the tickets for this overtly religious reason completely negates the commendable decision by Georgetown, a Catholic university, to allow the Vagina Monologues to be performed on its campus and to receive university funding through the Georgetown Women’s Center. Despite the attempts of many to stop the show from being produced at Georgetown, most notably those of Patrick Reilly, president of the conservative Catholic Cardinal Newman Society, the Vagina Monologues continue to flourish here at Georgetown. The CPLLC does not have the right to discriminate against those students who want to attend.
The second reason Pruss gave me for the denial of subsidies was the Vagina Monologues’ glorification of rape. However, the controversial line in question, in which a performer depicting a 13-year-old girl calls her first sexual experience “a good rape,” had been omitted from the 2004 Vagina Monologues script. Pruss rightly states that “promoting the idea that rape and pedophilia could ever be good seems deeply, socially irresponsible.”
The CPLLC does run over budget each year, leading Pruss to personally pay for the deficit or pay for it out of his personal teaching/research fund. While Pruss may justifiably be hesitant to personally subsidize students attending the Vagina Monologues, the problem lies with insufficient funding for the CPLLC, not the play. Once or twice in the past, Pruss has also declined to subsidize uncontroversial plays because he believes them to lack artistic merit. However, no other play has been consistently discriminated against.
For the past three years, following the bitter reaction by CPLLC students, including myself, to the 2004 subsidy denial, Pruss has adopted new funding policies unique to the Vagina Monologues. In 2005, CPLLC students were obliged to attend a discussion section on the Monologues, hosted by Pruss, in order to receive the subsidies. For 2006 and this year’s 2007 production, for every ticket purchased by a CPLLC member, Pruss will personally donate, without using CPLLC funds, an equal amount of money to My Sister’s Place, the battered women’s shelter and recipient of the funds raised by the show. By increasing the donations to My Sister’s Place, the discrimination against those in CPLLC who wanted to see the Vagina Monologues will paradoxically further the show’s cause to end violence against women, even more than a non-discriminatory policy.
Philanthropy is indeed noble, but not at the expense of the CPLLC students’ rights to not be discriminated against. While I completely support discussions of the controversial content of the Vagina Monologues, which undoubtedly foster reflection and intellectual growth, I nevertheless disagree with making them mandatory for all students who want subsidized tickets. The very existence of such policies stem from certain moral and religious beliefs that apply only to the Vagina Monologues and not other shows, illustrating that discrimination both on the CPLLC and at Georgetown is far from over.
