Several conversations have sprouted both from my involvement in the Vagina Monologues and the relevance of the play in the first place.

One of my grad friends mentioned that he was amazingly disappointed with it. That it barks more than it bites and really is not saying anything new or particularly insightful. Understandable. Though VM is a play definitely worth seeing, youth plays a big part in its impact. Someone with a fairly liberal and informed sexual background will find most of the things VM touches on familiar — things they thought about when discovering sex and discovering themselves. If you’re past that stage of sexual discovery, you find the play entertaining, but not eye-opening. In a so-called liberal place like Cornell, why would we even need to be putting on such a performance, right?

Wrong.
Though not for everyone, the play does happen to be eye-opening for many people. Sexual discovery is a tricky thing that seems not to be as correlated with age as it seems at first. A close friend of mine, a man in his fifties, talked to me about this once — about his discovery of the female orgasm, and how he enjoyed it. It turns out that he discovered how enjoyable the female orgasm is just a couple of years ago. When he was 48. He’d tell me it was hard to talk with his college-aged son about it, trying to make sure his son understood the importance of this earlier than he had.

Then, on the other side of the spectrum, girls can have orgasms at very early ages, as early as four or five years old (the clitoris works just fine with or without puberty) and it is not that uncommon to hear of girls masturbating at that age. It seems sexual discovery can definitely come at any stage in life.

Though I agree that there were things I had a hard time believing were new for other people the first time I saw VM, part of the incredible impact of the play is realizing that, indeed, sexuality is different for everyone. Our experiences with sexuality produce a very wide spectrum.

I have come to learn that, individual cases aside, we still need some work with sexual liberation. The passive oppression of pleasure leads to increasingly more fucked-up responses to it and increasingly more polarized ways of looking at sex and what it should represent. We have a polarity of conversations. There’s the fact that pornography’s more extreme facets are seemingly getting to be more mainstream (see Esquire’s George Clooney interview, or the appalling amount of Youtube video responses, to the “Two Girls, One Cup” video, which I am in no way prepared to watch, thank you). This would be totally fine if people were approaching these more hardcore versions of sex for the right reasons … only the majority of people are not.

Compare that to the conversation I had with a friend about VM giving people the wrong message, a message too focused on sex; she believes people should not be encouraged to have sex as promiscuously as VM seems to portray.

My friend’s conversation seems to be a similar vein of thought as the one Christopher Hendrix ’12 put up in his column criticizing Filthy/Gorgeous a couple of weeks ago. The idea that promiscuity or talking openly about sex is somehow demeaning. And though I understand where they are coming from, I don’t think supporting monogamy needs to disapprove of sexual pleasure, and promiscuity does not have to be seen as “deviant” if the person in question is not in a monogamous relationship with someone else. Furthermore, Hendrix made it sound like promiscuity were a purely gay thing, just as my friend makes it sound like the “right” way to think about sex is not to think about sex altogether. I find both these statements untrue: Many people that are straight are promiscuous (probably in around the same proportion as homosexual populations, if not more), and not thinking about sex to maintain purity, though a very noble cause, can be restricted to a very small section of the population. This population is getting smaller by the minute and may not propose a solution to the problem of not talking about sex the way we should be talking about sex.

And how should we be talking about sex?

I’m certain I don’t have the whole answer. However, I think we can start with making sure people know sexual pleasure is not “wrong.” On the contrary, pleasure is an immense source of knowledge and self-discovery that, if open and talked about, makes people know more about themselves, what they can offer and what they want to receive from other people.

Sexual knowledge gives people confidence. A lot of it.

But we need to have spaces where talking about sex does not mean to talk about the most extreme nor the most mellow facets of it, a place that goes beyond virginity issues and Sex 101 but does not get to zoophilia or coprophagia. We need to regress to the mean, to find the middle ground where knowledge gives people the power to grow and to know when saying “no” is fine. Where the knowledge of their own worth is enough to understand the worth of others and, as such, can try to stop the perpetration of sex crimes around the world. In a relatively intricate way, this is what I believe VM is trying to accomplish: It tries to provide this middle ground, it tries to get the real conversations started.

VM tries to raise awareness of something further than the “simple” notion of being a woman. It tries to foster an environment of self acceptance and of awareness of the lack of such an environment for the people outside this bubble of “liberal,” “tolerant,” “accepting” environments that we are so delicately wrapped in, while also trying to address those pertinent problems that fill our delicate bubble as well.

The serious vagina monologues, interspaced between the laughs the funny monologues provide, are a voice of the suffering of women being tortured, raped and neglected around the world yesterday and today. Don’t even go outside the U.S. to look at it: 250,000 women are raped in the U.S. per year. That’s half the students in the entire Human Ecology college per day. Whatever we can do to lower that number, both inside and outside of our comfort zones, seems worth my while. Does it seem yours?

Florencia Ulloa is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She may be reached at fulloa@cornellsun.com. Innocent Bystander appears alternate Tuesdays this semester.