Sunday, February 12, 2012

Eve Ensler's crazy vagina monologue on Lateline

Watched Lateline the other night and saw an interview with Eve Ensler, writer of The Vagina Monologues. Sorry to put it bluntly, but the woman is clearly as nutty as squirrel poo.

Basically, she's more obsessed with vaginas than most men are -- but in a very different way, of course. Like a busted record she's stuck on this idea that the whole world is bent on denying female sexuality. Not unlike climate change evangelists, she attributes everything bad that happens to this patriarchal scourge. And she thinks that women can achieve liberation by quacking on endlessly about their panty hamsters.

Sure, there is an undeniable strain of anxiety in many societies about the sexual power of chickdom. But it's not nearly the whole story. And even if she is right, and you are oppressed by this, how is yammering about your reproductive organs gonna free you from it?

Sure, you might become as much of a blowhard as Eve Ensler, but that hardly qualifies as liberation. (It's certainly not liberating for anyone within earshot of you. Auditory torture, more like.) 

What's amazing is that she's been heralded as an insightful, revolutionary genius for ages -- a dinkum pubic intellectual. And she continues to get respectful treatment in the mainstream media. But just imagine how the same crowd would react to a bloke similarly obsessed with his wedding tackle.

Her interview with Emma Alberici on Lateline is chockas with daffy theories, bizarre assertions and heaps of msinformation. For example

EVE ENSLER: And I think part of the reason of doing the play was that so many women I had interviewed had not only, not said the word "vagina", they never saw their vaginas, they didn't know what they looked like, they didn't know how their vaginas functioned, they didn't know what gave them pleasure. They didn't even know their vaginas were their own.

Now that we're all trying to get over this stereotype of women as dippy, emotional airheads I don't think that observation is very helpful, do you?

EVE ENSLER: And I think what happens to women a lot, I think particularly when they're powerful, is the way the media, the way the world reduces them is to focus on these very shallow, these very superficial, these very insignificant aspects, as opposed to the brilliant and wise and visionary things that they're saying.  

Well, yes, Julia Gillard has said many brilliant, wise and visionary things during her reign. If only the media would focus on those!

Maybe Ensler's idiocy is infectious, because the usually sensible Emma Alberici asked some silly questions, such as this:

EMMA ALBERICI: One interviewer just last week asked our Prime Minister does she cry often. Is that a question you expect to be asked of men?

EVE ENSLER: Well, I wish it was asked of men. And I wish men were crying more, you know, I think often we see these questions about emotions as reductive questions as opposed to seeing ... the problem of the world from my point of view is it is all head and no heart. And until we have head and heart together ... it's very difficult, for example, to have empathy if you have no heart, right?


Of course. Think how much stronger the economy would be if the male politicians were sooking up all the time. (And just on that point about heart: If anyone in politics in Australia seems truly heartless, it's Julia Gillard.)

EMMA ALBERICI: Do you think the word "feminism" has become a dirty word?

Emma, is that a question you expect to be asked of men?

Ensler concluded her characteristically insane response with this:

EVE ENSLER: But I will say that we really have to look at the fact that 95 per cent of the violence done to women is done by men. One out of three women on the planet will experience rape or violence in her lifetime. That's a billion women, a billion women.

Now, there are men who are doing that. And I really just want to say to all the good men if they were busy standing up and speaking to the men who were committing the violence and asking them why and making violence against women their central issue, and as important, for example, as football is, I bet you violence against women would end very, very, very rapidly (laughs).


That's just such nonsense I don't know where to start ...

She seriously believes that men beat, rape or abuse women primarily because of peer pressure (or lack thereof). She clearly has no understanding of the manifold causes of the social problems she pontificates about.

Why is such an obvious fool given so much respect?

2 comments:

  1. That whole "one out of three women get raped" nonsense has been exposed as a feminist lie, a ludicrous exaggeration resulting from deliberate juggling of the figures. Christina Hoff Sommers in her excellent book Who Stole Feminism spilled the beans on this and other feminist lies.

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  2. Yes, I read that book back in the mid nineties. Really opened my eyes. Other good books I read on the subject back then were The New Victorians by Rene Denfeld as well as Sexual Personae, and Vamps and Tramps -- both by Camille Paglia.

    Sadly, feminism still seems to be dominated by the scam artists, man-haters and victim-centric ideologues. Then there's their fixation on abortion. Anne Summers recently opined that if you were against it you couldn't be called a feminist.

    And they wonder why they have this reputation for being a bunch of dogmatic, often incoherent, gimlet-eyed cranks!

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