Robert Swope

(Our guest writer, Robert Swope, is a junior at Georgetown University. This article was censored, and he was subsequently fired, by his editors at The Hoya.)

"Your vagina, untouched by man, smells so nice, so fresh, wish I could keep it that way forever." Thus spoke the 24-year-old woman before she statutorily raped a 13-year-old girl in Eve Ensler's play, The Vagina Monologues, which thanks to the New Press (and your tuition dollars), was performed last month in Bulldog Alley on the Georgetown University campus.

The older woman, who immediately before making this rather, shall we say... illegal observation, had given a vodka and orange juice to the young girl who was spending the night at her house. The girl's mother for some foolish reason admired this woman and hoped that her daughter would benefit from the two spending some time together. When she later calls to check up on her child, worrying of all things, about boys, the woman tells her to "Trust me, there's [sic] no boys around here." Wink-wink.

After getting drunk on the older woman's booze, the 13-year-old then tells the audience how "She gently and slowly lays me out on the bed and just our bodies rubbing together makes me come [sic]. Then she does everything to me and my coochi snorcher [vagina] that I had always thought was nasty before, and wow." When it's all over, the little girl concludes that thanks to the experience, "I'll never need to rely on a man." Mission accomplished.

Now some might call what just happened to the little girl a rape, and indeed, if a 24-year-old man had gotten her liquored-up and then had sex with her, rational people (which one would hope includes members of Georgetown's student government, which couldn't support crucifixes on the walls of a Catholic school, but could find time to sponsor the Monologues) would consider that rape, even if she consented, and assuming we ignored for the moment the fact that an inebriated 13-year-old isn't quite capable of consenting to much of anything.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case when the play was performed. Like clap-ridden sailors in a Southeast Asian strip joint, the mostly female audience who attended the Monologues hooted and hollered, laughing and clapping at just about every piece presented, including this perverted one entitled "The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could." In their revelry, the audience suprisingly missed a very important point: that rape is wrong, no matter the sex or the sexual orientation of the person who commits it or whether it is statutory or not.

For the record, the little girl's part in the play reads: "Now people say it was a kind of rape ... Well, I say if it was rape, it was a good rape then, a rape that turned my sorry-ass coochi snorcher into a kind of heaven." Is there such a thing as a good rape? Or, to put it another way, why is rape only wrong when a man commits it, but when it's by a woman committed against another woman, who just happens to be 13-years-old, it is celebrated and a university club sponsors it?

While the play's producers did eliminate the sentence in which the girl calls her rape "good" from this year's performance (last year it was kept in), they failed to show enough maturity and still allowed for everything else in the monologue to be presented. The message put forth was that the molestation this girl experienced is a good thing.

Ironically, the alleged reason for performing these Monologues in the first place was to combat violence against women! One wonders then, why it is that a generous reading of the play's 115 pages yield only 15 that actually deal with violence against women. There is a monologue about Serbian gang rapists, and the 13-year old was molested by one of her father's friends before she was molested by a woman (who is that particular monologue's unstated hero), along with some "vagina facts." But that's about it. The rest of the Monologues deal mostly with the promotion of lesbianism, sado-masochism, and female masturbation. In one particularly disgusting segment, a six-year-old girl is queried about her vagina. "What does it smell like?" asks Ensler.

The university must somehow discipline the Women's Center and the New Press for implying that the illegal and immoral crime committed against the first little girl is to be in any way endorsed. Some may claim that the Women's Center had nothing to do with it, but the simple fact of the matter is that the Women's Center and its members were responsible for The Vagina Monologues presence at Georgetown, and its continuance. As documented in last semester's Hoya, the Women's Center helped revive the New Press in 1995 after it had gone unpublished for several years, and it is the organization that originally brought the play to campus last year under the supervision of Prof. Margaret Stetz, the Center's advisor.

The producer and directors of the play all work at the Women's Center, and one of these Directors (who happens to be the editor-in-chief of the New Press) is the paid personal assistant to Nancy Cantalupo, the Director of the Women's Center. All this is not a coincidence. The Women's Center has a history of radicalism on-campus and in the past has shown its disrespect for Georgetown and its Catholic identity, not to mention the individual Georgetown students who don't subscribe to the Center's radical feminist orthodoxy. It is long past time the university stopped funding both organizations, letting them exist or not in the marketplace of ideas without subsidy.

With events like this, it's unbelievable that the Jesuits could wonder why people laugh whenever somebody calls Georgetown a Catholic school.