Positive Liberty

But after the penis polemic just below, it seems only fair. Kerry Howley writes, apropos of the recent debate at Cato between Notre Dame Philosophy Professor James Sterba and Independent Women’s Forum’s Carrie Lukas,

[They] only agree on one thing: pornography is really, really bad. Sterba says something incomprehensible about the fact that men’s rights are not violated by Shoebox greeting cards. Lukas mentions The Vagina Monologues, which is a relief because if anyone from IWF goes 30 minutes without mentioning Eve Ensler, the universe will implode.

Which is just so true (cf. another IWF take on the monologues, by Sara Gordon).

I’ve never been able to understand why this play is so polarizing. Yes, it’s got its uncomfortable moments — the domineering men, the whole tastes like/smells like bit, and of course the lesbian rape of an underage girl.

Um. People. It’s a play. With, like, characters and stuff. You’re not supposed to presume that everything happening on stage gets the author’s stamp of approval. It’s an examination of life. Not all of life, or of sexuality, is always as it should be. Some of it is horrible. Some of it is multifaceted and ambivalent. Some of it you’re supposed to feel uneasy about. And feeling unease isn’t a sign that there is anything wrong with the play. It’s a sign that this is literature in the truest sense of the word — it’s supposed to challenge.

But don’t let this stop a conservative with a point to make. Here’s Gordon:

The play is also extremely anti-male. The play portrays men as perverted, rude and forceful. In “Hair” a husband forces his wife to shave her vagina. In another monologue an “average” male is portrayed as a pervert obsessed with vaginas. To look at men in such a demeaning manor is wrong. The play praises a woman rapist, but then alienates a male who finds beauty and mystique in a woman’s vagina. Brilliant male professors teach us, many of us have meaningful relationships with men whether it is father, boyfriend or brother and to treat men this way is unfair.

My recollection of it was that the man who loved vaginas was one of the play’s real heroes, and that he was someone to be admired even if, in mainstream culture, men are considered to be acting like pigs when they blather on about how much they like vaginas. “Bob,” as he’s called, appears at first a conventional chauvinist, on the surface, and yet also a man who sincerely and honestly loves women. He resists easy classification, and that’s just what is so brilliant about that segment of the play.

This, though, is the point at which art and politics start arguing with one another again, and at which politics shoves art rudely aside.

Sigh.

Trackback URI |