Thank you, thank you, Mary Mortimer (“Moving away from the heart,” Letters, May 1) for your sane and sensible response to the Vagina Monologues. What a relief it was to read your letter!
You’re like the first brave voice in the crowd who spoke out about “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As you said, the entire production and content are devoted to such a minor part of us as women. It debases us, goads us to be crass and brash about our bodies, and truly sets us back decades in terms of the evolution of women in the world.
Now is not the time to trade in our feminine mystique and grace for unbridled vulgarity and a lexicon of unpleasant and unusable words.
Ladies, we’ve been had!
It was many years ago that I attempted to watch a performance and I lasted little more than half an hour. I wanted my money, “our” dignity and those wasted minutes back. Later, I wondered if I’d just been out of sorts that day and perhaps I’d missed something important and revealing, so I read the transcripts. I’d missed nothing (just more minutes I couldn’t get back). What drivel. What betrayal. And, most of all, what marketing!
Again, thank you Mary for your monologue and our dialogue. (I don’t know what my friends will think, either... perhaps we should share a can of spinach some day!)
Kate Bridger
Nelson