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'.

Long, beautiful hair.

That woman's husband sounds like a real prick. And it isn't just the actual thing, "his spiky sharpness sticking into me (her), my (her) naked puffy vagina” - that makes him come across as a jerk, if we’re assuming the narrator is a reliable source. He’s an adulterer (and continues to be an adulterer even after the German therapist, between her faux-understanding passive-aggressive posturing, suggested the wife do a pretty one-sided ‘compromise’ by letting her husband shave the vagina for her - is it really a compromise if the woman still has to see “a little blood in the bath tub” or feel “screaming red bumps” or deal with crass male hands clipping something even the narrator’s empathic hands have difficulty cutting?), self-centered, and doesn’t seem to care much for the emotional or spiritual side of marriage if he has no guilt “screwing around.” While the physical nor sexual component of marriage shouldn’t be ignored, marriage is as much mired in emotions as it is in the sheets. Comparisons can even be made to Marie & the Dominican's relationship from “Between the Pool and the Gardenias.” The narrator does use the words “make love” to describe sex between her and her husband, suggesting emotional attachment to him, regardless of whether the husband considers it lovemaking, sex, or fucking. Judging by the fact that he tells the psychologist his wife doesn’t “please him sexually”, he most likely doesn’t see their physical relationship as lovemaking, but rather just sex. They’re both seemingly on entirely different emotional planes. However, with all of this pushed aside, we don’t really know whether the narrator is all that interested in (she does seem to be a little ennui-crippled but I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt here) the emotional or spiritual aspects of marriage, either, and it’s equally likely she’s just as shallow as him, so it is possible the husband isn’t the only target worthy of criticism.

As you can probably tell, stories like this one make me feel quite irritated, especially because of how truthful they from my experiences. I’ve known guys just like her husband, who are absolutely repulsed by the sight of any hair on a woman’s body; it isn’t limited to just genitalia, either. Even just a little peach fuzz on the arms turned them off. It’s not something an idealistic, naive kid like me really understands: love should bypass any barriers of hirsuteness, correct? However, what I find most interesting about the first monologue is the narrator’s observation in the first paragraph. The juxtaposition of the narrator “feeling puffy and exposed and like a little girl” after shaving her vagina while the husband is “excited” whenever he got to make love to her bald genitals. The narrator is making a pretty stark comparison to pedophilia here, in that her husband likes a vagina to look unrealistically bald and naked and pure (he even describes the narrator’s unshaven vagina as “dirty” looking) like a child’s, and I can see where she’s coming from here. We do live in a society which tends to oversexualize young girls to the point where even twelve year olds are getting routine bikini waxes. Although no real research has been done on the connection between men, pedophilia, and pubic hair (or lack thereof) preference, a Salon article on waxing makes a pretty pointed observation about how most pornographic actresses now are getting bikini waxes due to the fact that it makes them look younger, more youthful, and in some cases, even underage. Since the mainstream pornography industry is a reflection of the times, and it projects the majority preference, it’s an interesting connection to be made, and one that I feel should be looked into more. At the very least, waxing - especially amongst the young, like in this MSNBC article which describes a mother arranging a waxing appointment for her eight year old daughter and the reluctance of the cosmetician - adds a whole extra dimension to the pressures with body image many pre-teens and teens feel.