Discovering The Vagina

The Vagina Monologues are a rare treat on the inner thoughts of women.  Things women would not have dreamt of saying out loud, come out in a series of interviews done by the author Eve Ensler.  The interviews are so intimate; it is as if speaking to the women's private parts, and the things they would say if they had a voice.  In these interviews, the vagina has a voice, and it speaks of all the different ordeals it is subjected to; genital mutilation, menstruation, rape and have happier experiences orgasms and births.  The words seem to flow as if "it was like this force of passion, this river of life just flooded out of me."(27).  Once the vaginas started talking they had so many stories to tell, and they camped together in solidarity to tell the world of all the things that happen to them.  In order to be heard the vagina "needed a context of other vaginas- a community, a culture of vaginas.  There's so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them...(5) the darkness started unfolding with the stories of the rape camp in Bosnia.  During the war, like most wars worldwide, men raped women, and sometimes many men raped the same women regardless of age.  The women felt shameful and scarred, they could scream, but how could their vagina scream? How can it say stop to such brutality, and how can women remain sane and controlled after such horrific ordeals?  "Women's sanity was saved by bringing these hidden experiences into the open, naming them, and turning our rage into positive action to reduce and heal violence."  (xv) Apart from the violence the vagina is subjected to, be it rape or genital mutilation, there is also the biological aspect of the menstrual cycle.  Tampons are hard to deal with and most women wonder why not lubricate them in a way that will make it easier on the women to insert it in their vagina's.  It's as harsh as the cold tools the gynecologists use when examining the vagina.  It seems that nobody up till now thought of the vagina or of its identity. Most men tend to think of the vagina as purely sexual, while Lesbians insist that it's not just sexual but deeper than that.  For when they are playing with each other's vaginas, it's like touching themselves, "We notice our own". (116) The author herself was completely shocked, when after interviewing women about all the different things vaginas want to say, she realized that the only time she really understood what they about was when her daughter in law gave birth. "If I was in awe of them before the birth of my granddaughter, Colette, I am certainly in deep worship now."