Double Standards Within The Vagina Monologues

Audience reaction is crucial to Ensler’s overall project. Why? Why won’t she allow us to simply read without having a reaction, whether positive or negative? Why do you think she wants to push us out of our comfort zones? Which monologues resonate most strongly (positively or negatively) with you and why? 

I believe that Ensler wants her audience to feel some sort of emotion in order to bring attention to the issues at hand. She wants people to become uncomfortable, and she also wants them to relate to the monologues. She wants people to feel anger and happiness and relief and anxiety. When people feel something, they are more likely to remember what happened and remember what the message was.

To read the Vagina Monologues without a reaction would be a waste of a book. No one writes a novel or play without the intention of making people react. The Vagina Monologues is a book that pushes people farther than other pieces, that's for sure, but all written work, besides maybe certain text books, are supposed to cause the reader to reflect and think about what was just read.

The monologue that pushed me the farthest out of my comfort zone was probably "The woman who loved to make vaginas happy". This particular monologue went so in depth with the language of getting a woman off, that i almost had to stop reading it. I didn't know how to take it, it was extremely vivid and it made me extremely uncomfortable.

The Vagina Monologues- First Response

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?

Eve Ensler's intentions were to give the vagina a voice. A lot of women are extremely shy about what goes on 'down there', and Ensler wanted to shed light on what the vagina actually is, and what it actually stands for. By writing monologues that are meant performed in front of an audience, she wanted to reach a large amount of women at once in order to enlighten them about their own bodies, and make it okay to talk about in general.

Ensler wants the vagina to be seen as it's own entity, which, if you think about it, it is. She wants women to realize that the vagina isn't just a reproductive organ, it's what makes every woman special, and in order to visualize that you need to be able to see it as something other than a crevice hidden in between your legs.This changes the way that we view the vagina because instead of something that isn't understood or something that is scary and awkward, Ensler puts the vagina on a pedestal as something to be celebrated and embraced, and by rejoicing the vagina, you are able to rejoice in the rest of your body and in yourself in general.

Night Women: A Response

The first thing that I noticed about the story “Night Women” was that the woman’s son was wearing his Sunday clothes to bed. That struck me as strange because I know that when I was little, I never wore my nice clothes to sleep because my mother would scold me for getting them wrinkled. So for her to allow him to wear his Sunday clothes to bed means that there’s either a special occasion, or a special reason. Later in the story you find out that she tells her son that “we are expecting a sweet angel, and where angels tread the hosts must be as beautiful as floating hibiscus”. This put everything together for me, that she hides her line of work from her son by saying that the men visiting at night are only angels passing through, but she also worries about him catching her in the act. She had already prepared a lie, just in case he should wake up during one of her late night visits, “I will tell him that his father has come, that an angel brought him back from heaven for a little while.” I liked how all of her thoughts returned to her son, and how she wishes she has a better life for him, and that she wishes that they didn’t live ‘in a place where nothing lasts’.

19 Varieties of Gazelle: First Response

For my first readers response I wanted to focus on the poem “Arabic coffee”. I especially enjoyed this poem because it reminds me of my own father, and times that we have shared together. I started drinking coffee because I wanted to be just like my father; he would always wake up promptly at 5:30 AM and would drink his coffee with two creams and two sugars. This poem is also about how coffee brought people together throughout their hardships. No matter what kind of struggles my father was going through at the time, he would always wake up, 5:30 AM and drink his coffee with two creams and two sugars. The sense of consistency always brought me a sense of serenity. When I started going to an out of town high school, I had to start waking up at 5:30 AM, and I started spending my mornings with my father, drinking my coffee with more than two creams and two sugars, but still learning from him. Those mornings were spent watching the news, discussing plans and how the family was doing. While I was in high school my father lost his job, but we still spent our mornings together. In the poem “Arabic coffee” there is a line about “the hundred disappointments… and the dreams tucked like pocket handkerchiefs into each day”. This reminds me that no matter how much was going against him, my father would always wake up every day, 5:30 AM, and he would bear all the weight of the problems, and just keep going on.