Wanted: An update for V-Day

SPEAKING VOLUMES

No one could have walked into a performance of The Vagina Monologues with better street cred in terms of my companions.

I was there with my husband, a quietly feminist man who however drew the line at being dubbed 'vagina-friendly' ("sounds like a hygiene spray", he said) and with an older woman who is widely seen as a pioneering figure in the feminist movement.

All of us had read about, or at least heard of V-Day, Eve Ensler and the neo-feminist movement that has grown up around the Vagina Monologues and after the brouhaha over the play being banned in Chennai, we were determined to see it in Delhi.

The Vagina Monologues kicked off eight years ago as a series of meditations on the organ that dare not speak its name, women and their often fraught relationship with their own sexuality, and most of all, the violence and abuse that all too often formed part of the fabric of many women's lives.

Then Ensler invited women from all over, including a whole string of Hollywood actresses "" Glenn Close, Jane Fonda, Marisa Tomei "" to read some of the monologues; the play gained force, and notoriety, and performances were held the world over.

It was banned in China, and it was banned on conservative Christian college campuses in the US "" but it played in Pakistan, and went down well.

The performance in Delhi, even without the glamour of Tomei and Fonda, was brilliant; the actresses revelled in their roles, teasing and challenging the audience, and drew heartfelt applause at the end.

But I left the auditorium with a sense of dissatisfaction. Something seemed badly dated, and I wasn't sure whether it was The Vagina Monologues or me that was out of step with the times.

I'm dismissive of Alyque Padamsee's attempts to create what we must call the Dick Dialogues, since the Maharashtra government has informed him that the P-word is considered obscene and cannot be uttered in public.

I agree with Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal when she says that there's little new left for that particular organ to say: most love stories in literature are written from the male perspective, most, from Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover to John Updike's Couples, showcase the 'male gaze'.

And until most men have to face the same kind of invisibility, violence, dismissal and contempt that most women deal with, even in the 21st century, as a matter of course, you're not really going to have anything resembling an equal dialogue.

But taking Walt Whitman as my guiding light ("Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes."), let me say that one of the most striking absences in the Vagina Monologues is caused by an almost deliberate silencing of the male voice.

Men figure in the Monologues as rapists, sexually abusive fathers, indifferent husbands, insensitive boyfriends, with the lone exception of 'Bob', the lover who likes to look at women and worship them. (New York, for a brief period, was flooded with buttons that read, "I'm Bob" after the Monologues first kicked off its run.) There's a stray mention of a husband in the labour room in the monologue on witnessing a birth, and it stands out because it is so unusual.

Most of the messages that the Vagina Monologues wants to bring into the public eye are terribly dated ""which doesn't mean that they aren't relevant, just that we've been there, done that.

The subtext still locates men as The Enemy; not a relevant message in an age when literary and cultural theorists are deeply interested in decoding cultures of masculinity, or when we have begun coming round to the point of view that men suffer just as much under patriarchy as women do, and that male empowerment needs to be the order of the day just as much as female empowerment does.

The elevation of lesbian over heterosexual relationships is just as outmoded a way of thinking; equal rights does mean just that, asking for both kinds of relationships to have equal space.

And like many in the audience, I was especially troubled by a monologue that featured a young girl discovering sexual freedom after being seduced by a much older woman: does the fact that the older woman belonged to the 'right' gender obliterate the potential abuse of power in that relationship? Nor was I reassured by the monologue on rape that highlighted the agony and trauma of rape 'victims' while denying them a role outside victimhood.

If the Vagina Monologues needs to continue its triumphal procession around the world, it needs to do more than present the old wine of issues raised in the adolescence of the feminist movement in funky new bottles.

In the past decade, the gender rights movement has been demanding that gays and lesbians be allowed the right to legal marriage, the right to raise families.

On the technological front, the debate over genetics could change the way in which both sexes see birth, procreation and as a corollary, the institution of marriage as well.

The backlash against feminism hasn't receded in any way, and accompanying it is a new determination to deny the feminist male a voice.

In political terms, globalisation has also sharply underlined the fact that Third World feminist issues are very different from First World feminist issues.

The growing synergy between gender activists and ecological activists has led to new alliances and unusual ways of working out differences.

None of this is glimpsed, let alone represented, in the Olde World Vagina Monologues, and I find the insistence on locating feminism only in the area of women's sexuality far more straitjacketing than liberating.

This is not to dismiss Eve Ensler's efforts; I did walk out of that auditorium glad to see 'hidden' issues being dragged out into the clear light of day, after all.

My older woman friend and I did end up discussing her generation's discomfort with talking about sex, and my generation's discomfort with getting overtly political, after all.

And my husband and I did engage in precisely the kind of dialogue about male-female relationships in the 21st century that the Vagina Monologues is trying to spur, after all. But that didn't make up for a sense of dejà vu.

It's like going to see an artifact from another time, say, Ibsen's A Doll's House today: yes, you appreciate the message, yes, you empathise with the trap the heroine finds herself in, but yes, you've heard it all before. The revolution happened a long time ago, and we haven't come all that long a way, baby, since then.

nilroy@lycos.com