The Vagina Monologues II
In 1996, Eve Ensler wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” which was performed on a stage, but was less a play than a series of vignettes in which she discussed love, sex, rape, menstruation, masturbation, incest, orgasm and other related topics. In the beginning, Ms. Ensler was alone on stage, but as feminists glommed onto the script, it was suddenly being performed around the world with different women reciting the words, often with one actress per vignette. Twenty years later, the show is still being performed somewhere on earth. Each year, Ensler, who’s now 63, adds a new vignette, one of the last ones dealing with the persecution of women by the Taliban.
In 1996, Eve Ensler wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” which was performed on a stage, but was less a play than a series of vignettes in which she discussed love, sex, rape, menstruation, masturbation, incest, orgasm and other related topics.
In the beginning, Ms. Ensler was alone on stage, but as feminists glommed onto the script, it was suddenly being performed around the world with different women reciting the words, often with one actress per vignette. Twenty years later, the show is still being performed somewhere on earth. Each year, Ensler, who’s now 63, adds a new vignette, one of the last ones dealing with the persecution of women by the Taliban.
In the U.S., thanks to Hillary Clinton and her coterie of female acolytes, the vagina is once again front and center. As an example, Gloria Steinem, 82, claims that young women are only flocking to Bernie Sanders because that’s where the boys are.
That’s a strange thing for her to say because it ignores an extraordinary phenomenon. Apparently she is so deep in the tank for Hillary Clinton that she’s not even curious why young men are flocking to support a 74-year-old Jew with a Brooklyn accent. It also ignores the fact that when she was a young woman, for all her talk about women needing men the way a fish needs a bicycle, she was what, in polite circles, used to be called easy. If there were boys around in the 60s, you could bet Gloria would be nearby. She could have had calling cards made up like TV’s Paladin, reading: “Have Vagina, Will Travel.”
She also seems to have forgotten that a few years ago, she said “Bernie Sanders is an honorary woman.” But apparently the fact that he lacks the obligatory genitalia disqualifies him for the presidency.
Adding her own voice to the Clinton chorus is her fellow former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who consigned females who didn’t vote for Hillary to hell.
I would understand that women who think Obama has been a wonderful president would support Hillary Clinton in the general election against a Republican. But why would they want to see her on the ticket, her with the baggage of Benghazi, the reset with Russia and the private server weighing her down, when they could have an honorary white-haired woman who is not being investigated by the FBI?
After all, Hillary has never done anything for any woman other than herself. Instead, unlike Ms. Ensler, she has turned her back on women living in Muslim nations and slimed every woman her husband has ever preyed upon.
If anything, Steinem and Albright would stand on firmer ground if they supported her because she’s elderly, not because she’s female. But, then, Bernie is even older than Hillary.
Speaking of Mrs. Clinton’s private server reminds me of one of my many bugaboos. I’m referring to all those damn passwords we have to keep track of in this computer age. Inasmuch as we keep hearing that one major company after another, along with the Pentagon and other federal agencies, have been hacked by the Chinese, the Russians and the North Koreans, what’s the point? If the Pentagon can’t conceal its secrets, what chance do the rest of us have?
Although, come to think of it, that should really be “the rest of you.” It just so happens I don’t have any secrets. I’m not crazy enough to do any banking on my computer, and every thought I have makes its way into an article, so what am I concealing? The only risk I run is that of forgetting those passwords, which I do with a regularity that my bowels can only envy.
After I wrote about how I would have spent the money if I had won the billion dollar Powerball, I heard from a reader pointing out that I didn’t mention donating to charities. He’s right, although I did say I would contribute to medical research, especially the work being done to eradicate cancer, Alzheimer’s and childhood afflictions.
The thing is I would prefer donating it to worthy individuals, decent people who through no fault of their own have fallen on hard times, due to a catastrophic illness or as the result of military service. I realize that middlemen are needed to run most charities, but I see no reason I should pay his or her salary. Besides, the charity might help people I wouldn’t like if I knew them personally. As I see it, being needy isn’t the same thing as being deserving. That is why I oppose most forms of tax-supported welfare, which, by and large, provides politicians with the legal means by which to bribe people to vote for them.
Speaking of charity, the other day, someone sent me a video showing that great humanitarian Vladimir Putin performing and singing at some charity event in Moscow. I never did find out what charity benefited from his playing the piano and singing “Blueberry Hill,” but perhaps it was for the widows and orphans he’s been responsible for creating in Ukraine and Syria.
The striking thing about the video was spotting Kevin Costner, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, in the audience laughing and clapping for the despot.
Then it occurred to me that in the world of celebrity, there are no moral judgments. If you’re in the club of famous people, you simply accept every other famous person as a fellow member of the fraternity. So the fact that Putin is a blood-thirsty tyrant who murders the opposition, be they Ukrainians, political opponents or Russian journalists, is of no consequence to Costner, Hawn and Russell.
In the same way, it made no difference to basketball freak Dennis Rodman that North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un was starving his people in order to pay for a nuclear arsenal with which to threaten the United States; no difference to Sean Penn that Saddam Hussein and El Chapo were butchers; and no difference to Gwyneth Paltrow and her fellow Hollywood pinheads that Barack Obama has shredded the U.S. Constitution in order to push his leftist agenda.
For the media, the big news that came out of the GOP debate in Manchester, New Hampshire, was that Chris Christie pointed out that Marco Rubio repeats his talking points about Obama robotically. What Christie said was true and when Rubio then proceeded to do his Robbie the Robot impression a third and even a fourth time, I got my only laugh of the evening.
The fact is that during a lengthy campaign, everyone repeats himself, though generally not four times in 10 minutes. How many times, after all, have we heard Christie tell us why only governors are fit to sit in the Oval Office? How many times has John Kasich told us that he balanced the federal budget? How many times has Jeb Bush told us he loves his relatives and hates Donald Trump?
How many times has Donald Trump told us that Mexico is going to pay for the wall he plans to build? I guess the good news is that so far he’s only dropped the f-bomb once. But, then, it’s only February.
The thing about Rubio’s repetitious contention that Obama knows what he’s doing and that his destruction of America is intentional is that it’s a pointless observation. By this time, everybody knows that Obama meant it when he promised back in 2008 to radically transform America. There’s simply no way he could have created so much mischief accidentally without even once doing something good for this nation.
The only disagreement is between those of us who detest what he’s done and those who approve of his actions and are anxious to elect one of the two elderly morons who vow to do even more of it.
By continuing to focus his attack on Obama, who will be gone in 11 months, Rubio is like a malfunctioning CD that keeps repeating a lyric. Someone needs to give his head a whack so he can move on to the next tune.