Cruel awakening.

Is it wrong to feel both horror and satisfaction with the way the narrator's memory as a thirteen year old played out?

Let's talk about the "gorgeous twenty four year old woman" with the "hooked up" apartment. She's a predator. The narrator calls the woman a "savior" who transformed her "sorry ass coochi snorcher and raised it up into some kind of heaven." She isn't a savior - not by intent. She turned something innocuous into a Giger-esque perversion. Sexual, sensual, romantic awakening is beautiful, to feel affirmation in all aspects of one's self. For an African-American girl who has grown up in relatively limited means, has not seen her father since she was ten, and was raped by her father's best friend as well as being subjected to her father shooting and paralyzing the man attacking her, the narrator needs affirmation in herself more than anyone else would. Children, especially girls (pardon whatever sexism saying this might entail), feel a unique kind of pressure by their peers to feel attractive, intelligent, wanted, and loved - this is something many of us can empathically connect with. However, the monologue shows a destructive and negative way to go about it. The time of awakening should not be decided upon by some third party, as the woman did, and if the awakening is done with another person there should be more to it than shallow urging. The narrator is also only thirteen. She isn't mature enough to distinguish between making love, love, sex, or fucking. For instance, the narrator says she's "so in love" with the woman at the end of the monologue. Everyone's perception of love is entirely different, but could anyone reasonably say there is any love between the girl and her rapist? There's no depth to their relationship. The narrator even says she never saw the woman again after she was raped. "Hit it and quit it," right? Once the woman has experienced the joys of awakening a young girl, the thrill of being the first to touch them sexually and ensure no male hands will touch them afterwards must run its course. The woman obviously isn't concerned about the narrator beyond fulfilling her own selfishness. Her libido, her fetishes - there's "a picture over her bed of a naked black woman with a huge afro." The narrator is, of course, black. We don't know if the woman is white, but the narrator's mom does consider her "successful," which could infer her ethnicity as white if context is taken into consideration. Does the woman prey exclusively on black girls due to some kind of fetish? We don't know but the fetishistic potential certainly paints the monologue in a nightmarish fairytale light, which is why I decided to use one of John Wayne Gacy's paintings in this blog posting. I'm just glad the V-Day edition of the text takes out the "it was a good rape" portion of the monologue or else I would've had to rant even more over the next paragraph.

Although according to Ensler's introduction to the monologue her inspiration for the story found genuine love with another woman later on in life, and while this is wonderful, the event that happened to the narrator as a thirteen year old could have been (and it might even have been, as Ensler doesn't describe what happened to the woman who was raped when she reached her mid teens, late teens, twenties...) incredibly traumatic. While the fact that the predator seems like she helped the narrator feel comfortable in her own skin, there are numerous mistakes, morally or otherwise, in which the rapist approached the 'awakening'.