"You can't pick the parts you want."

The genre of this piece of literature is drama, meaning that Ensler wrote these monologues to be performed. Why do you think she wants vaginas to be publicly performed? Why does she want vaginas to be physically embodied? What effect does this have on the way we see and think of vaginas?

In The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler is opposing the reality that currently exists (or in some places, fortunately, existed) for women in this world—silence, oppression, ridicule, fear, hiding.  By designing her monologues to be performed, to be shared in public, to be heard by anyone who will listen and even some who initially will not, she is not allowing for the passivity that can come with reading.

She herself, even in the form of her narrators, is speaking directly to you. 

She is speaking to me.

She is soliciting accountability.

 

Once you have seen them, once I have seen them performed, we cannot go back.  When you or I read a book, it can be put aside.

You do not have to acknowledge having read it.

Neither do I.

Books can have incalculable impact.  But it is different when one person looks you in the eye and speaks directly to you.

It is different for me, too.

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In The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler is trying, by personifying the vagina, to give it back a presence.  She argues that this very real, anatomical part of the human body has lost that presence; more so, she argues that its physicality has been taken away.  Not given up by choice, but taken away. Women, she says, do not see their vaginas as they do their arms, their legs, their eyes, even their hearts and brains.  We do not seem them as one of those essential physical building blocks to our character, our self-confidence, our carriage.  In “The Vagina Workshop” the narrator tells us that “[she] did not think of [her] vagina in practical or biological terms. [She] did not, for example, see it as a part of [her] body, something between [her] legs, attached to [her]” (45).

This is in part because women do not acknowledge this part of their body.  They do not embrace it, nor do they, in many cases, recognize it as a part that needs as much care as any other.  As is conveyed in the opening monologue, many women feel that they just don’t have the time or desire to be in a conscious relationship with that part of their body and therefore that part of themselves.

The aforementioned personification takes place through several vehicles.  Ensler asked the women she spoke with what their vagina would wear—just like she might ask about a person.  She also inquired as to what their vaginas might say—again, speech is characteristic to people.  And people carry a presence.  They have a name. “If I could name them,” one narrator says, “I could know them” (85). 

But we do not know them.  We don’t talk about them. We aren’t allowed to talk about them.  When we don’t acknowledge their presence, their role in our femininity, we are allowing for a perpetuation of the cycles of abuse that have led to the silence, the oppression, the ridicule, the fear, the hiding.

And so Ensler asks us to say the word out loud.

Vagina.

She asks us to look, to touch, to get to know.

Vagina.

Once we have taken back control of the physical body part, the anatomical structure that should be a part of what, and who, we are, we can take back the other characteristics the vagina symbolizes, because they are overlooked.  As the narrator of “Hair” says, “You can’t pick the parts you want” (11).  The same goes for women.  They—we—are whole individuals, and the world cannot just chose the parts that it wants to see while repressing the others.