I Think, Therefore I Am (...A Vagina?)
Meet feminism as patheticism, a not-quite-a-word that came to mind while I was writing this blog post.

I've never understood women who get all excited about "The Vagina Monologues."

I'm empowered -- by my brain and my willingness to speak up for what I feel is right and against what I feel is wrong (even when I'd meet with criticism or suffer consequences).

The Vagina Monologues seems, if anything, a celebration of women as the lesser sex. (Men don't feel a need to buy tickets to Broadway-stage encounter groups to scream about their penis.)

Christina Hoff Sommers has a transcript of her 2004 speech on this at AEI -- the ridiculousness of the content of the play. Poor dear, she sat through the whole thing.

A few of my favorite bits from her piece:

The play itself consists of several monologues, which are distilled from more than 200 interviews Ensler conducted with women on the topic of their vaginas. At the Off-Broadway production I attended, the theater concession stand sold lollipops and cookies in the shape of a women's-well, take a wild guess. The young man who ushered me to my seat wore a nametag that read, "Hi, I am Vagina Larry." The theater was packed with women who laughed riotously at each mention of the v-word-which was more than 100 times.

I have so many objections to the play it is hard to know where to start. I'll limit myself to three. 1) It is atrociously written. 2) It is viciously anti-male; and 3) and, most importantly, it claims to empower women, when in fact it makes us seem desperate and pathetic.

Her favorite awful quote from the play:

"My vagina is a shell, a tulip, and a destiny. I am arriving as I am beginning to leave. My vagina, my vagina, me." P.50

More:

But perhaps the most appalling and insulting aspect of the V-Day phenomenon is the way in which it demeans and weakens women even as it claims to empower us. Empower. That's the buzz-word for this play.

...The woman who "discovers" that her clitoris is her "essence" and says, "My vagina, me," is insulting herself, and all women. One of the many laudable goals of the original women's movement was its rejection of the idea that women are reducible to their anatomy. Our bodies are not our selves. Feminist pioneers like Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth fought long and hard so women would be respected-not for their sexual anatomy-but for their minds. The struggle for women's rights was a battle for political and educational equality. Feminist foremothers like Mary Wollstonecraft or Elizabeth Cady Stanton demanded that women have the opportunities to develop their intellects and to make full use of their cognitive powers.

...I feel sorry for young women who consider themselves empowered because they have said the word "vagina" over and over again. I am sorry for girls who consider V-Day to be the high point of their college career. Some high point! College is the one period in your life when you can immerse yourself in the works of transcendent genius. It is a time to develop yourself by studying biology or astronomy or economics-or learning Latin, or reading the history of philosophy. If you want to see genuine female empowerment, look at the work of Nobel Laureates such as Barbara McClintock and Rita Levi-Montalcini. Or, to mention my personal favorites, look at the astonishing achievements of two of the greatest field biologists of the 20th Century-both women: Diane Fosse and Jane Goodall.

Jane Goodall provides an instructive contrast to Eve Ensler and her work. Goodall radically transformed the field of primatolology by taking a very personal (some say conventionally female) approach to the chimpanzees she studied. She was the first to give individual names to the chimpanzees-instead of referring to them by numbers. Some of Goodall's colleagues accused her of anthropomorphizing and ridiculed her feminine sensibility.

Yet Goodall persevered, and in the process, she revolutionized the fields of primatology and ethology (the study of animal behavior). It was Goodall who discovered that Chimpanzees use tools, hunt for meat, and engage intensely complicated emotional relationships. It was Goodall who pioneered the study of chimpanzee societies in the wild, and of the intricate hierarchies and social maneuvering that occurs.

Now that is empowerment. Becoming so passionate, so devoted to your field of study, that you overcome prejudice, orthodoxy, and dogmatism and succeed in transforming the way people approach your subject.

Here's a woman I know -- Dr. Barbara Oakley -- who doesn't have to go around screaming about her vagina.

She was too busy going into the army, working as a translator (and the only non-Russian) on a Russian trawler in the Bering Sea. (When I was in Michigan, we went with my boyfriend to dinner with Elmore Leonard, who absolutely loved a hilarious story she told about how she started a squirt gun fight on the boat that ended up getting a KGB agent thrown off.)

And then, despite failing her math and sciences class in high school, she taught herself how to do math, became a tenured professor of engineering, and went on learning from there -- to the point where a Coursera course she created -- on learning how to learn math and science -- became their second biggest course ever, with over half a million students in the first two sessions.

Here's her recent (and terrific) book on learning how to learn, the number one best-seller in its category on Amazon: A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra).