To the editor:
Two very controversial public events have recently been held on South Whidbey: first, the showing of the sexually explicit play, the “Vagina Monologues,” and next, the announcement that condoms will hereafter be made freely available to South Whidbey teenagers. These two events are related, as I will explain in a later letter, but right now I want to address the “Vagina Monologues.”
Written by Eve Ensler, this play, overflowing with brutish language regarding the female anatomy and sexual activity in general, has been showing around the world, gaining more notoriety, for over 12 years now. Its stated purpose is stopping violence against women by calling attention to the problem and earning money for programs which support abused women. There is no question that this is a worthy cause, but doesn’t it therefore deserve other, less obscene ways to promote it? After all, the female body and the sexual act can be beautiful and should be presented in that way. The gross, unnatural sexuality in the play may, ironically, bring about the very results the play ostensibly is trying to overcome.
No doubt some women do find some kind of psychological relief by being able to shout out four-letter words that, for centuries before us, have been a violation of an inherent sense of modesty and decency held by most people. The women in the play act like a young child who has just learned his/her first “dirty word” and, to appear grown up, goes around impressing her/his friends and shocking his elders by happily shouting it.
Having forced myself to read the play, I’m puzzled at how it can be hailed as a great leap forward in raising consciousness about sexual abuse against women when, at the same time, it is glorifying pedophilia, child molestation and lesbian rape. In fact, in a play that is 124 pages long, there are only 151 lines that deal with violence against women. The rest is all about heterosexual, homosexual and autoerotic sex and the female sex organ.
It seems that what this play is really all about is giving immature young women (and older ones who are still “unnaturally inhibited”) a sense of liberation from conventional sexual mores that historically have given protection to families and societies and, therefore, have made civilization possible. Gone are the old moral strictures — mostly, but not only, sexual — that have prevented societies from unraveling into chaos. This play clearly demonstrates a thoughtless, careless use of rights and freedoms for personal gratification without any responsibility for maintaining a stable, orderly, caring society that all humans, especially children, need in order to stay physically and mentally healthy. We can begin to see in this perverse, destructive, behavior what the brilliant, modern American philosopher Ken Wilber referred to as “boomeritis” — the sickness of the Baby Boomer generation in its self-centered, narcissistic approach to life. This inability to balance freedom with restraint and responsibility, he said, prevents them from achieving a higher level of spiritual consciousness.An earlier commentator on the American scene was the great statesman and our second president, John Adams, during the time of the American Revolution. The great vices such as avarice, or ambition, warned Adams, “would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people.”
Many people say they’ve come to live on Whidbey Island, to find a healthier, safer place to raise their children than they had found in parts of the discouragingly self-centered, over-consuming, sex-saturated mainland. Sadly, it seems to me that some of us brought those values with us.
Fred Olson
Clinton
