I gave my mother a poem
She sent me to a shrink
I laughed hard when my eyes came across the third stanza. In a poem which initially looks like a darkened tunnel without an end in sight, these two lines are still dark, but the humor is intrinsic to the poem - at least as much as sadness is, which is true of Ensler's heartbreaking realism but tongue-in-cheek tone. Most pieces from The Vagina Monologues follow this style, especially "The Flood," which conjures up ridiculous images of Burt Reynolds and the Rat Pack swimming in a casino full of female ejaculation alongside the cruel reality of a woman never feeling comfortable with her sexuality - her skin - nor ever finding true love because a negative experience she had as a teenager discouraged her completely from doing so. On a purely content-based level, the narrators of both "The Flood" and "Bad Boys" experienced traumatic events which have influenced their interactions with the opposite sex, albeit in entirely different ways. For the Jewish woman in "The Flood," her experience with Andy totally turned her off of pursuing sex and love with men for the rest of her life. For the unnamed girl in "Bad Boys," her relationship with her father is presumably either strained or distant due to his "high expectations" which she "fails a lot," and while she is able to pursue a romantic relationship with a boy, it's pretty obvious from the way she talks about him that it is nowhere near the standard teenage girl-teenage boy relationship. How many teenage girls would date someone who "is not the most handsome boy," nor a boy who is "very angry" or who "spray painted a bomb on his bedroom wall?" Their relationship, and by extension both the girl narrator and presumably her boyfriend, are deeper than whatever appearances might say about them. What I find particularly interesting, however, is that Ensler seems to have created a male character - the boyfriend - who isn't a rapist, a slovenly pig, or a dreadful bore (but more or less "decent" guy) like Bob in "Because He Liked To Look At Them." He's deeper than these classifications which the vast majority of Ensler's male characters tend to fall into, even if we only know a little bit about him from the poem. Is Ensler saying the rare boy can be "emotional creatures" like girls can? It's all up to interpretation. In all of these respects, I Am An Emotional Creature is an extension of The Vagina Monologues, even if more subtle aspects, such as the near-perfect poetic style in the latter, suggest it's a deviation rather than a continuation. Ensler's duality continues.
Two lines can say so much. The narrator in "Bad Boys" probably thought she was writing the poem to her mother as a gift, or as a not-so-subtle way of getting her mom to pay positive attention to her. Anything other than her mom constantly desiring her daughter to be "super-thin," "getting straight A's," or "being intelligent and happy." Hell, isn't writing beautiful poetry, which the narrator most likely does considering her "connection to Sylvia Plath," considered a sign of intelligence and creativity? It is by "emotional creatures", but not for the mother, apparently, who appears to be so confined to rigid thinking that she sends the daughter to therapy. Is Ensler saying her mother can not understand her daughter's poetry because the mother herself is not an "emotional creature"? Taking into one further, maybe Ensler is even accusing the vast majority of women of not being in touch with their 'girl' side, their "emotional creature," which would also be a criticism of men, as well, since the mother is married to a man. Has the mother let herself be domesticated by society's rigidness, by her husband, and perhaps even by the burden of having a daughter? The mother does want her daughter to be a model, and the poem suggests pressure from jealousy - because the mother's sister was a model - is at least partially responsible for her wishes.
We're both troubled
I'm better at hiding it
I cut myself
This is an all too true, if somewhat subtle and off-hand, comment about American culture. If a person appears to be okay, they surely must be okay, right? In addition to mocking the perceived shallowness of American sociopolitics, I feel like Ensler writes open-endedly to show people that nothing should ever be taken at face value, and examples of this practice can be seen in both The Vagina Monlogues and I Am An Emotional Creature. The narrator in "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could" visibly says her rape offered her redemption and the opportunity to feel comfortable within her own skin for the first time ever, but what happened to her between her later teenage years and the moment when she fell in love at the women's shelter? Did she secretly struggle with what happened to her when she was thirteen? She doesn't let on anything (I will say that her somewhat rueful tone of voice at the end of the monlogue in the filmed version suggests there was some conflict here, though), and we have absolutely no way of knowing without being presumptuous, but I feel like speculating is absolutely integral to understanding the monologue's complications. These gaps in time allow for a little creativity and a little bit of guess work on our part. Ensler is encouraging us, challenging us, to look beyond what is written on the page in order to grasp fully at the ideas she presents, in the same way that she is challenging the narrator's friends, family, and especially her mother to look beyond the Sylvia Plath-like poetry and the scars and the "chopped up bangs" to fully understand what is on the girl's mind. Dismissing the girl's poetry outright, and in fact 'rewarding' her with a trip to the psychology, is Ensler's way of critisizing people for attempting to either avoid problems completely or to take the easy way out. In this case, it's throwing a wad of cash at a therapist to take on the responsibility neither parent seems willing to even attempt to take on. It's one thing to send your child to counseling when they are having conflicts, but it's an entirely different and irresponsible matter when the child is thrown to another without looking into the issues yourself first.
He is not the most handsome boy
But he's troubled
Like me
Ensler's had to dodge criticism left and right for nearly everything she's ever put to paper and the stage. Not here. The closing lines of "Bad Boys" are the purest and most heartwrenching words I've seen from Eve so far. Unlike some of her other work, which (often meaningfully and not without deliberately constructed purpose) indulges sexual and social taboos, "Bad Boys" does not, but in a way it does - love as it is described in the poem is as much a taboo as being a debauched sex-crazed slut. Although it is often said that depressive personalities don't experience sexual desire as much as other people do, the narrator has affections for her boyfriend on a purely emotional level, and I feel like this would be considered incredibly odd or deviant in an image-based society like ours. Ensler, in a move as vulnerable as the narrator sharing her poetry with the mother, proves she isn't as shallow as works like "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could" (where much of the speaker's attentions are dedicated to describing how 'gorgeous' the rapist is) may suggest. Love has many dimensions, and it's nice to know Ensler can capture all of them in her writing.
