I would like to thank Jessica Bachman (“Censure for a Censor”) for raising important questions about my not funding subsidies for tickets to the Vagina Monologues in my role as Faculty in Residence for the Culture and Performance Living and Learning Community (CPLLC). I would also like to thank her for writing a balanced article, even though the editorial staff of the Voice cut out most of her quotes of my substantive arguments. (I’ve seen the original form of her piece, and it is much better and fairer than what the Voice published.) I would, nonetheless, like to respectfully disagree with Ms. Bachman’s opinion that my conscientious decision not to subsidize tickets to the Vagina Monologues was religious discrimination against the students who wanted to see it. My current policy is to personally match the price of each ticket purchased by a CPLLC member with a donation to My Sister’s Place, the charity that the Monologues support. I feel that this is a reasonable compromise between either subsidizing the tickets or not subsidizing them.
The production of the Vagina Monologues is aimed at fighting sexual violence against women. My main reason for denying funding is that I believe that, despite the best intentions on the part of the actors and producers, the Monologues promote the very values that are at the heart of acquaintance rape. For, by identifying women with vaginas, the Monologues objectify women. And by promoting a view of sexuality as being about personal pleasure rather than about unselfishly giving oneself to another in the expression of faithful, committed love, the Monologues promote the ideology of the date rapist.
The Monologues are not art for art’s sake (if there ever is such a thing), and the script is generally of low artistic value (though I did see some excellent student performances when I went to see the play on campus). Nor are the Monologues simply a report of women’s experiences but rather a carefully chosen sampling and reworking of those experiences. The ease with which a thirteen-year-old victim of rape in one edition of the script becomes a sixteen-year-old consenting participant in another edition raises the notion of how much one hears the voices of women and how much one hears the voice of Eve Ensler, the playwright.
Georgetown has a commitment to education of the whole person, including moral education. In part because of this commitment, I could not in conscience sponsor, outside of the context of academic discussion, tickets to a play that I believed is promoting values harmful to women. Likewise, if a student group put on a theatrical version of Birth of a Nation, the famous 1915 film glorifying the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and if the theatrical version promoted the same skewed values, then certainly the right response would be to refuse to sponsor tickets without requiring an academic discussion. And if the play were put on year after year, then the policy would have to be applied year after year. Of course, I recognize that a number of members of the Georgetown community disagree that the Vagina Monologues harm women in the way that Birth of a Nation harms African Americans, and I recognize that the intentions behind the production of the Monologues include some noble goals. But ultimately we each need to follow our own conscience, after having striven to form that conscience as best we can.
