{"id":48,"date":"2007-02-01T20:17:11","date_gmt":"2007-02-02T00:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ratconference.com\/blog\/?p=48"},"modified":"2007-02-15T07:46:08","modified_gmt":"2007-02-15T11:46:08","slug":"dialogue-with-a-vagina-monologue-chapter-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ratconference.com\/blog\/?p=48","title":{"rendered":"Dialogue with a Vagina Monologue (Chapter III)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Harry Potter’s pubic goes public and a white guy in Chicago is angry<\/a> about it, although we are not sure why. But the media frenzy<\/a> suggests he is not alone. Elsewhere Tboy<\/a> is asking for the girl’s name for the boy’s name of that which is unnamable on a 17-year-old.<\/p>\n

\"equus\"<\/div>\n

Daniel Radcliffe will shed his child actor image with his clothes for his West End stage debut. Sixty people from the audience will actually be seated on stage when the Harry Potter star, in his role as the troubled groomsman Alan Strang in Peter Shaffer’s celebrated play Equus<\/em>, simulates a sex act while naked and astride a horse. The play is about a boy who blinded six horses with a groomsman’s spike, so even though it opens for previews in mid-February, it’s probably not the best night out with your Valentine. The story centers on a psychiatrist discovering the forces that drove the boy to harm the horses, and follows an intriguing discourse on myth, religion, and sexual awakening. The main argument becomes whether psychological healing will do the teenage boy more harm than good.\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Passion, you see,can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

I have been reading Germaine Greer’s beautiful book, The Beautiful Boy. I say reading, but it’s more like studying; the book is laden with full color reproductions of art and evocative photos as it documents “the boy” evolving through Western history.<\/p>\n


\nAlessandro Allori (1535-1607) The Disarming of Cupid<\/em><\/div>\n

Through this study I am beginning to understand the necessity of V-Day to exclude “the boys” from its Worldwide Celebration, except in supporting roles. I am also understanding better V-Day’s direct competition with Valentine’s Day. Cupid, that cute little sexless cherub we have as mascot, has a much more storied history in mayhem.<\/p>\n

\"cupid\"<\/p>\n

“Cupid, with his bow and fiery arrows, is always male and always immature. He is male because he is the aggressor: in no myth does Cupid play a passive role. He is a boy because a boy is more sexually active than a man, has more erections, produces more sperm and ejaculates more often. If society provides no legitimate outlet for boys’ sexuality it will be expressed in ways that are chaotic and destructive. Therefore Cupid is both blindfolded and in charge of a lethal weapon. His arrows infect individuals with with infatuation and sexual obsession, bringing havoc and anguish, disrupting friendships, households and the state.”<\/p>\n

Cupid, as this beastie boy, would always fight for his right to party<\/a>. This party animal would be exactly the wrong element to inject into the more serious V-Day celebrations. I think V-Day’s vision is that matriarchy would serve the world at large better than patriarchy. Boys being being boys, they would fuck that vision up big time.<\/p>\n

Germaine Greer acted in a 2002 V-Day production of the Vagina Monologues, but she is no fan of the script or the event. “This V-word is no victory for women.”<\/a> She seemed most annoyed that Eve Ensler did not chose one of the more inclusive words like “pussy” or “snatch” in naming the monologues, and points out that vagina is from Latin root meaning “sword-sheath.”<\/p>\n

There is more to the female sex than accommodation of a male weapon, and much more to female sexual apparatus than a hole. Having decided to focus on the hole rather than the doughnut, as it were, Ensler happily disappears up it. These days, she is apt to talk of herself as living in her vagina, as if she had transformed herself into the sword, turning herself inside out in an orgy of inverted penis-envy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Greer’s short essay, Eternal war: Strindberg’s view of sex<\/em>, she eulogizes theatre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most famous misogynist. She sees him as a true male feminist contrasting him with contemporary pseudo male feminists who having<\/p>\n

successfully trivialized the question of male-female hostility in their own cases, they are quick to denounce the more perspicacious men who have glimpsed the archetypal conflict in all its terrible grandeur.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Greer positions Strindberg as a feminist because he examines the sexual conflict not as trivial or peripheral question but as something radical, tragic, and overwhelming. The implacable eternal war.<\/p>\n

Strindberg understood that that expression of radical enmity between men and women in social and political action would have appalling consequences\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6. he embodied his vision of internecine sexual war in archetypes so simple that they could appear preposterous or simply perverse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"CapedCrusader\"V-Day’s mission proclaims Valentine\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Day as V-Day until the violence stops. In appropriating “the couple’s” holy-day, and excluding the boys, they have created a meta-theatrical version of Aristophanes’ anti-war comedy Lysistrata.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Ephemeral as all theatre is, the Lysistrata Project<\/a> came and went in 2003. And as “cock-eyed” as Germaine Greer sees the Vagina Monologues and V-Day, the Lysistrata Project was even more so. Their call-to-arms in soliciting readings and productions was “Become a Lysitrata Spearhead!”<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6to be continued.<\/p>\n

Chapter IV: Lupercalia and Women Who Run with the Wolves<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harry Potter’s pubic goes public and a white guy in Chicago is angry about it, although we are not sure why. But the media frenzy suggests he is not alone. Elsewhere Tboy is asking for the girl’s name for the boy’s name of that which is unnamable on a 17-year-old. Daniel Radcliffe will shed his child actor image with his clothes for his West End stage debut. Sixty people from the audience will actually be seated on stage when the…<\/p>\n

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