Clark University: Promoting a Theology of Violence

At their website, the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute has an excellent article refuting the lies of those who promote the anti-Catholic production The Vagina Monologues, a pornographic play which encourages violence against women.  Entitled, "The Vagina Monologues Facts vs. Fallacies," the article refutes the top ten common claims made by V-Day organizers and supporters:

1) Claim: "The play empowers/liberates women."

False: The Vagina Monologues is a lie. It does not empower women with its message that: women's identity and image are wrapped up in their sexual organs. True empowerment lies in the heart and the mind. Consider these images from the play:

•"The Woman Who Loved To Make Vaginas Happy" is a monologue about a successful tax attorney who leaves her career to become a lesbian dominatrix prostitute, specializing in the use of sexual "props," i.e. whips, handcuffs and ropes. Liberating or ironically violent?

•"The Vagina Workshop" describes a woman who attends an orgasm workshop and participates in a group masturbation session. The workshop leader tells the woman her sexual organs are "the essence of me, both the doorbell to my house and the house itself." This mindset is exactly what the early suffragettes were fighting against.

•Reclaiming C**t” invites the audience to participate in cult-like chanting of an explicit word to describe a woman's private parts. And this exercise empowers women because?


2) Claim: "The play raises awareness about violence against women."

False: The play offers women little more than encouragement to view themselves as a single body part and become obsessed with their sexuality and sexual behavior. It does not provide healthy or practical information about how to protect themselves against violence and/or recover from a violent experience.

•The opening monologue states that playwright Eve Ensler's biggest anxiety was not about adequately and responsibly addressing violence against women. She wrote this play because she “was worried about [her] own vagina” as far as “what we think about vaginas and even more worried that we don't think about them.” How about worrying that laws setting punishments for sexual offenders are not strong enough? Or that most women are unfamiliar with basic self-defense techniques?

•Questions raised throughout the play make a mockery of meaningful ways to address and learn about violence against women. They include, “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?,” “If your vagina could talk, what would it say?,” and “What does a vagina smell like?"

3) Claim: "The play is not anti-male."

False: Men are only mentioned in a negative way throughout the play as adulterers, abusers, weirdos, and rapists. Consider the following examples:

•The cheating husband who “forced” his wife to shave her vagina in the monologue “Hair.”

•Andy Leftkov, who in “The Flood,” calls his date “a stinky weird girl.”

•Supporters of the play will often ask, “What about Bob?” Bob is featured in “Because He Like To Look At It.” “It” meaning a woman's vagina. What we learn is that Bob is ordinary, boring, and unappealing, that is, until the woman character discovers his one redeeming quality: a perverted obsession with women's private parts.

4) Claim: "If you don't want to see the play, you don't have to."

False: Advertisements, promotional materials, and other events surrounding the play around campus are equally offensive and degrading.

•Roger Williams University was flooded with signs that read, "My Vagina is Huggable," "My Vagina is Flirty," and "My Vagina is Regal."

•University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill allowed tee shirts that read "I Heart My Vagina."

•Boise State University distributed vagina lollipops.

•Florida State University had an orgasm workshop.

•Arizona State University constructed a 40-foot inflatable vagina on campus.

5) Claim: "The play is not pornographic"

False: It includes extremely graphic descriptions of women's sexual experiences.

•One monologue has an explicit depiction of two lesbians having sex. “She's inside me. I'm inside me.” And it gets much, much worse.

•“The Vagina Workshop” describes one woman's experience with masturbation. “I bounced and landed, landed and bounced. I came into my own muscles and blood cells and then I just slid into my vagina.”

6) Claim: "Opponents of the play are anti-feminist."

False: Those who oppose the play are pro-woman. We reject the effort to convince women to think of themselves as sexual objects. And we object to this play as a way to bring meaningful attention to the serious issue of violence against women. In addition, the early suffragettes—the original feminists—fought hard for equal rights and treatment under the law for women. They fought against the very notion that a woman is reducible to a single body part. By opposing this play, we honor their efforts.

7) Claim: "The play does not venerate child rape."

False: The child rape that occurs in “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could” is presented as a sympathetic and spiritually redeeming experience for the young girl who is violated. She describes the rape as “surprising, unexpected, politically incorrect salvation” that “transformed my sorry-ass coochi snorcher and raised it up into a kind of heaven.” The monologue describes how a 24-year-old woman plies a 16-year-old girl (she is 13 in the original version) with vodka and then sexually violates her. And in the original version, this monologue ended with the line: “If it was rape, it was a good rape.”

8) Claim: "Funds raised by the play are ending violence against women."

While some of the funds are being sent to community programs and organizations that help victims of violence, the play itself does not effectively address this issue, its cause or any meaningful solutions. Rather, it encourages the very attitude that often leads to sexual violence: treating women as objects. According to V-Day organizers, groups who have also received proceeds from the play include Equality Now, Feminist.com, gay and lesbian centers, Planned Parenthood, and Girls, Inc.—groups with specific political agendas that reach way beyond violence against women.

We hope the V-Day marketing ploy and the lunacy of the play will be exposed. We also hope women, men, professors, and administrators will reject this demeaning portrayal of women. Until then, our approach is to inform, equip, and support reasonable students who are offended.

9) Claim: "The play is based on real women's stories."

False: In her book, Eve Ensler states, “Some of the monologues are close to verbatim interviews, some are composite interviews, and with some I just began with the seed of an interview and had a good time.” The "V-Day" website provides no evidence these interviews actually occurred or that any of the women mentioned exist.

10) Claim: "Opponents of the play are against free speech."

False: Opposing the play and advocating censorship are two very different things. We do not propose violating the First Amendment. In the free marketplace of ideas, the best idea will win out.

V-Day Unveiled was created to offer positive approaches that students can use to offer alternatives and/or express their disapproval of the play being performed on campus and with school funds. (See here).

But Jeremy Levine, a student who writes for Clark University's student newspaper The Scarlet, is quite content with the pornographic agitprop which encourages violence against women.  For Jeremy, true empowerment does not lie in the heart and mind.  For Jeremy, a woman's identity is wrapped up in her sexual organs.  He writes, "The vagina is much more than a body part, its the essence of what it is to be female, the epitome of feminine empowerment, and every single one is unique, not just on a biological level."

And this at a time when a student was sexually assaulted on Clark's campus.


Jeremy's review of The Vagina Monologues is so disturbing that it reads like the transcript of a serial rapist who is fixated on women's vaginas: "The performances themselves were fabulous. Stage productions often rely on acting, but not this one. Sure, the lines were memorized, and agonizing hours went into rehearsal, but the feeling was sincere. The people on stage really cared about vaginas, and really understood how the women they were portraying felt. This made [it] much easier to connect to the message....I learned about angry vaginas, young vaginas, old vaginas, neglected vaginas, adored vaginas, mysterious vaginas, overeager vaginas, and shy vaginas. One woman described her vagina as being “better than the grand canyon,” while another stated that hers “stays closed, and [she] doesn’t go down there.”..I always knew that sexuality was complicated, but this brought it to a whole new level... Every person on stage had a completely different take on her vagina and her interactions involving it...Vaginas are complicated, but their complications go beyond the physical. Each individual woman (and each individual man) has his or her own relationship with particular vaginas, and vaginas in general. These are not relationships to oversimplify, neglect, or generalize. They are the epitome of understanding one’s sexuality, and the beginning of trying to understand that of other people." (See here).

What Jeremy (and Clark University) is advancing is a theology from Hell. It is most ironic that his article is entitled "Peace, love and Vagina Monologues," for this pornographic play has nothing to do with love.  It is, rather, representative of today's cruel demand for sex without love, for a licentiousness in sex which has wrought a heartless society in which individuals do not care for anyone but themselves. The fruit of this demonic theology is the slaughter through abortion and euthanasia of human beings created in the Imago Dei. It is a theology of violence which is rooted in hatred of truth. For at the heart of immorality is falsity, the hatred of truth. Fr. Vincent Miceli explains: "...violence entered creation from the rebellion of Lucifer. This rebellion arose from the heart of pride. But the sin of pride is the offspring of the vice known as hatred of truth. Hatred of truth is the result of the creature's attempt to rearrange God's hierarchy of beings and values into an order which the creature prefers to the plan of God. This attempt immediately produces the violence of disorder, the chaos of falsity and immorality. For hatred of truth is really hatred of God who creates all things wisely and governs them lovingly. Lucifer, the Morning Star, was instantly deformed into the Prince of Darkness because he attempted to live a lie. He wanted to dethrone God and become God himself..." ( Essay entitled The Taproot of Violence).

At one university, the student Knights of Columbus group issued an open letter deploring the, "..performance of trash that demeans women and only serves to degrade the dignity of the human person...The Monologues will not further the mission of our University. A woman is a person, not an object. God blessed humanity with the gift of sex as a way of celebrating the love between spouses and of bringing new life into His world...."

This is the essence of the new anti-Christian sex education in preparation for the Moloch State. As George Kendall explains in Witness for the Truth, this sex education "radically separates sex from the very idea of the covenanted love of man and woman. Sex becomes merely a self-centered appetite to be satisfied and not a gift of self to another. As a result, what this kind of education produces is the lonely, autonomous individual. This is the ultimate in alienation. The autonomous individual is alienated even from his own body, which becomes to him only a thing, too - a thing to be used as a means to his autonomous pleasure. The end result is depersonalization which, if it lasts into eternity without being healed, means eternal loss.

Few have put it as eloquently as Randy Engel did: 'Is it any wonder that the state must wage war against the family? For the state requires not individuals who dream, and think, and pray, but rather what has come to be called 'the mass man' - rootless, unaffirmed, a reactor - a mere reed blowing in the wind - a thing to be manipulated, to be used, to be disposed of, but never, never, to be loved, for the giant has no heart. And since the modern state has no heart, that which men previously have done out of love, must now be done out of fear, and hatred, and brute force.' So clearly, contemporary sex education, 'Catholic' or otherwise, is a profound attack on human dignity and on the human person.." (Witness for the Truth, pp. 399-400. citing Randy Engel "The Family Under Siege," Wanderer, March 6, 1980).

And now I would add, satanic. The United States, like the other Termite Nations of the West, is fast-becoming a Moloch State which claims total jurisdiction over man. It is becoming a demon-state which rejects God's Commandments and His plan for the human family. This demon-state (and make no mistake about it, our leaders increasingly have recourse to demons) denies that there is any transcendent, higher-than-human voice or authority that cares for man. R.J. Rushdoony explains that:

"The Moloch State simply represents the supreme effort of man to command the future, to predestine the world, and to be as God. Lesser efforts, divination, spirit-questing, magic and witchcraft are equally anathema to God. All represent efforts to have the future on other than God's terms, to have a future apart from and in defiance of God. They are assertions that the world is not of God but of brute factuality, and that man can somehow master the world and the future by going directly to the raw materials thereof."

Clark University has succumbed to hatred of truth.  For this reason, the institution is now succumbing to a lust for violence.  Our Lord warned the Pharisees that men who reject God's plan for their salvation will imitate Satan's deeds.  Enter the Moloch State and he who will rule it with hatred and violence in his own name. (John 5: 43).