THE OTHER V-DAY: Highjacking Valentine’s Day
With Valentine’s Day comes the other “V-Day.” The latest gimmick of those, as many father’s rights activists put it, “in the domestic violence industry,” is to appropriate wholesome holidays about good things that make us feel joy and turn them into diatribes against men.
A few years back, members of the Elizabeth Freeman Center of Berkshire County, Massachusetts put advertisements in the Berkshire Eagle on Mother’s Day from men promising not to beat the daylights out of their wives. (For more on that, read my 2003 article, Why Make the Pledge)
To domestic violence advocates, who see the entire canopy of the male/female experience as the subjugation of the former against the latter, hijacking holidays dedicated to love or motherhood is a natural manifestation of their mindset. To them, domestic violence is not something that sometimes raises its ugly head in relationships, it is something that nearly always raises its ugly head. They are the proverbial fanatics who will not change their minds and will not change the subject in otherwise general discussions of divorce or child custody.
V-Day, now in its eleventh year, is the brainchild of politically correct playwright Eve Ensler, author of the play Vagina Monologues. The play is a series of monologue skits about women discussing their private parts in such graphic detail it could cause the raunchiest comedians to blush.
V-Day takes place on the real V-Day, Valentine’s Day. This year, men, surprise her with flowers, a card, a nice dinner and tickets to a play (as Christina Hoff Sommers put it best) that is “poisonously anti-male.” Artist and sexologist Betty Dodson stated: “That’s the main problem with V-Day. Women end up celebrating sexual violence and not the creative or regenerative pleasures of erotic love.” Internet searches indicate that that Vagina Monologues is played in countless places across the United States and to a lesser degree, throughout the English speaking world.
The Vagina Monologues is laced with endless references to a women’s anatomy to such an over the top extent that it lends itself too easily to parody; humorous ones can be found on the Internet, including one by Mad TV where ex-president wives unlikely read from the play’s manuscript with its legions of references to a woman’s private parts. There is no doubting that the play has a certain puerile humor, much like an impish elementary school child who finds unceasingly repeating swear words to be the acme of all that is belly-aching humor.
In Vagina Monologues, the victims of domestic violence are all women, and V-Day is only used to finance domestic violence against women. It is the cause célèbre, “the fight against the patriarchy” complete with Jane Fonda et al. Male victims of domestic violence, such as forty-nine year old Pittsfield, Massachusetts resident Arthur Martin who was allegedly stabbed to death by his wife this weekend, are not only of no concern, they are invisible. It doesn’t fit into all that victimized earth goddess granola stuff.
Martin’s murder is hardly unusual. While a law student at George Washington University, I was part of the Project for Older Prisoners: my client was a woman that had doused her husband with gasoline and set him on fire when he was asleep after she caught him cheating. As a father’s rights activist, I have been inundated with so many e-mails with news clippings about women on male/women on child violence that I have stopped reading them.
Vagina Monologues ignores the fact domestic violence is not always perpetrated by men against women. The reader may go to BerkshireFatherhood.com and put “Martin S. Fiebert” in the search engine to get a list of 246 scholarly investigations, 187 empirical studies and 59 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 237,750. Dr. Fiebert, who works at the Department of Psychology California State University at Long Beach, last updated the biography in September of 2008. (The list is periodically updated.) For some reason, I don’t think Fiebert’s name gets tossed around in a lot of college Women’s Studies courses.
As it attacks the patriarchy, Vagina Monologues is not afraid to challenge convention. In one monologue, The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could, an adult woman fondly reminisces about being a 13-year girl who was sexually molested by an adult lesbian, and describes the experience as a “good rape.” You will have to consult a professor of feminist studies at Smith or Wellesley College to fully understand the whole “good rape/bad rape” thing, and I am afraid to admit I cannot provide you with further edification. And while you are at it, could you ask them why a group of people that are supposedly opposed to viewing women as a bunch of body parts champion a play that does just that.
At least there are fewer performances of the Vagina Monologues being done at Catholic college campuses. The Cardinal Newman Society (CNS), a Virginia-based organization dedicated to preserving Catholic identity in Church-related institutions of higher education, reports that The Vagina Monologues will be staged at 15 Catholic schools this year– down from a high of 32 in 2003. But performing the Vagina Monologues around Valentine’s Day has become to college post-feminist women’s groups what the Nutcracker is to ballet companies during Christmas; everyone seems to do it.
But there is hope. There are other views of domestic violence and men other than those expressed in Vagina Monologues. Some of these voices are not from father’s rights activist at all but, believe it or not, lesbian feminist. This past weekend, in Nashville, “Read Our Lips” was performed, which was inspired by the Vagina Monologues. It will focus on consent issues. In one of the monologues, Story Book, a little girl meets a little boy, who has been molested—the gender of the adult is not known, but the piece shows that victims are of all genders. It is a departure from the female only victim mentality of the Vagina Monologues.
I interviewed Chelsea Loves, a co-Director/co-Producer of Read Our Lips. Loves describes herself as a “third wave feminist” and Even Ensler as a “second wave feminist.” According to Loves, the first wave of feminist concerned getting the vote, the second wave of feminist concerned violence perpetuated by the patriarchy, but the third wave of feminism concerns victimhood of everybody. While Loves communicates unflagging reverence for Ensler, she admits that the Vagina Monologues is decidedly one-sided.
Loves believes that everyone should be brought to the table, and that violence against everyone is unacceptable. Loves recognizes the potential for victimhood in everyone, and the potential for evil. Loves plans on doing three performances of Read Our Lips over this past Valentine’s Day Weekend, at three different venues, including the Lipstick Lounge (a lesbian bar in Nashville), Outcentral (a Nashville based Gay and Lesbian organization), and the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville. Eventually, Loves plans to do a Penis Monologues that might include a heterosexual male that is a victim of a heterosexual female.
No one group has a monopoly on victimhood or oppressive conduct. Perhaps Loves’ “Third Wave Feminism” that departs from stereotypes of violent men and female victims to an understanding of the good and bad in all groups, something so palpably missed by Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, is a pathway to a greater awareness than Ensler’s barbaric male and female victim stereotype.
Somewhere this Valentine’s Day, men and women will celebrate their mutual deep desire for each other, the tenderness of the heart, erotic passion, and the magical workings of that mystery called love that unites man with woman. But not if the purveyors of V-Day have anything to do with it.
~ The Author ~
Rinaldo Del Gallo, III is a practicing family law attorney, spokesperson of the Berkshire Fatherhood Coalition, and a columnist whose articles have appeared in newspapers across the country. E-mail:
His columns have appeared in many newspapers and magazines including the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the Buffalo News, the Albany Times, the Springfield Republican, the Charlestown Gazette, the Washington Times, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, Gun Digest (approximate circulation of 65,000), the Lowell Sun, the North Adams Transcript, the Berkshire Eagle, the Brooklyn Eagle, the Gloucester Daily Times, the Pittsfield Gazette, Men’s News Daily, American Daily, Intellectual Property Today, and countless other publications. You may read some of his previous columns at the home page of BerkshireFatherhood.com. He writes about law related matters, often in the area of family law, in addition to political issues. He has written about non-family law related issues, such as judicial salaries in New York, immigration law and the Second amendment.
Any man that hits his wife is the lowest scum on the face of the earth! Quit drinking that liquor and get ah old of that temper man! Turn to GOD! HE WILL HELP YOU!!!
PS. not saying some of-em don’t need it