Aren’t we all just a little sick, by now, of The Vagina Monologues? I’m old enough to remember when they first came out in 1996. I remember seeing pictures of Eve Ensler performing them, as the show first began to gain momentum and popularity. I was in awe of her—I thought she looked so beautiful and sophisticated and powerful with her severe bangs and black dress. I thought it was thrilling that she went around talking about vaginas, and I wanted to be like her—beautiful and unafraid.

I was ten in 1996; I’m twenty-two now. According to Ensler’s website, The Monologues have become the “bible” to a new generation of women. And that’s just it, isn’t it. No longer revolutionary or even shocking, The Vagina Monologues have become commonplace through repetition. The solution seems obvious: stop performing them. Move on to something more radical, more provoking, more fresh. But the institution of V-Day demands that, nightmarishly, we keep rehearsing the same drama over and over again. The rallying cry of V-Day is “until the violence stops.” Really? Are we really going to keep performing the vadge monologues indefinitely? I’m more than happy to chuck in my eight bucks to support the Advocacy Center, but can’t we see something new?

In the 1998 print edition of The Vagina Monologues, Ensler writes: “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.” That means that she purposefully crafted the performance from the raw material of her interviews; she chose the words, phrasing, and pace, presumably based on what she thought would sound good, be poetic, be moving, be funny. The Monologues, therefore, is a work of art—yet it’s rarely criticized on that basis. The Monologues have created a humorless following of vagina cultists that never question the merits of the piece—as a tool in women’s activism, as a piece of art, as a worthy use of ninety minutes. For these believers, Ensler’s message and the supposed value of the piece as an instrument of change are substitutes enough for having a good time when you go to the theater. Lauding The Monologues for its content alone is a dangerously utilitarian approach to art; more akin to Soviet socialist propaganda posters than to anything “liberated.”

Personally, I can’t stand The Monologues. Each one has a similarly sentimental, poetic quality that I can only cast as Ensler’s voice, despite wildly varying origins (Bosnia, Brooklyn, the deep South). The prose is fraught with clichéd metaphors (flower, house, cellar, sacred vessel) and references to “discovery” and “exploration.” Culturally chauvinistic vagina “facts” about female genital cutting are coupled with frankly ridiculous assertions, such as “it’s not so easy to even find your vagina.” Not only is this insulting and stupid, it plays into self-excusing male pleas of ignorance on the subject, like “well, yuk yuk, it’s all just so complicated down there,” and contributes to the notion that the clitoris is a bizarre and possibly imaginary Avalon, stumbled upon by feckless travelers every couple of centuries. A shrieking letter-by-letter “reclamation” of the word “cunt” is absolutely, eye-wideningly, mortifying (incidentally, I don’t want cunt reclaimed—I want to be able to call someone a hateful cunt and have it pack the same gut-punch as calling them a fucking prick). The jokes, probably because they mainly relate to the supposed inaccessibility of the vagina, mostly fall flat. Most of all, it’s the overt emotionality of The Monologues that I find embarrassing—it’s too share-y, too like a group therapy session. It’s self-centered and self-indulgent, not like a thick slice of cake but like a two-hour whining jag.

Vagina Fact: I would see a sexist Greek tragedy, or a rapper whose lyrics champion violence against women, or a Shakespeare play with no significant female characters, over The Vagina Monologues any day. Until we start taking feminist art seriously and criticizing it on its artistic merits, we’ll never produce a feminist Sophocles or a Shakespeare. The example of rap is an interesting one—female, woman-positive emcees hold their own against their male counterparts, probably because the music industry is so unforgiving. M.I.A., Missy Elliot, Jane Doe—these women are at the top of their game; people don’t listen to Missy Elliot because she’s a woman, they listen because her music is sick. She got where she is by being excellent, as good as or better than the male rappers. And yes, that’s a lot of pressure, but we don’t have a choice. That’s not to say that we can’t address tender, emotional subjects, but can we please do it with a little more self-consciousness, a little art, a little humor? Can’t we dress it up a bit more? Turn up the volume? Otherwise it’s not art—it’s confession.

As much as I find The Vagina Monologues boring, sappy, and outdated, I’m even more skeptical that they have any real utility beyond their capacity to generate large crowds and raise funds for organizations that support victims of violence. The idea that talking about vaginas will stop violence against women reflects the conceit that uneducated, “unliberated” women are more likely to be violated. There’s a tendency among smirky upper middle-class feminists to patronize lower-class women—it’s a Streetcar Named Desire mentality, as if low-income women are somehow more masochistic or more drawn to violent, abusive men then their wealthy, educated counterparts. When wealthy women come forward with rape or domestic violence accusations, the media goes wild, while lower-income women suffer invisibly because we expect then to be raped and brutalized. All the money, smarts, and vagina-talk in the world can’t shield women from male violence, because women are raped by their fathers, husbands, brothers, teachers, priests, uncles, cousins, and best friends, and every woman has fathers, husbands, brothers, teachers, priests, uncles, cousins and best friends. I’m not even sure that being a powerful vag-loving feminist helps women deal with trauma after the fact—body-positive rhetoric seems pretty hollow in the face of the violation of that body. If less educated women are more vulnerable in any respect it’s in the system’s response to acts of violence—there are fewer resources (community centers, therapists and support groups, day-cares, rich relatives, trusted doctors, hotshot lawyers) available to low-income, uneducated women who’ve been battered and raped. It’s this end of the inequality that we can certainly address. We can replace our winking, nudging attitude towards rape with a real culture of intolerance. Nowhere does this need more work than on college campuses—see Fraternity Gang Rape by Peggy Reeves Sanday.

The monologues themselves encourage a radical degree of objectification and identification—in “Because He Liked to Look at It,” vagina-lover Bob says to his partner, “I need to see you,” by which he means, of course, “I need to see your vagina.” In “I was There in the Room,” a monologue based on Ensler’s experience of the birth of her granddaughter, she compares the birthing woman’s vagina to a heart. Doesn’t this amount to an objectification—picking a part of a woman’s body and equating her whole self with it? How is that different from the distortions that inspire restaurants like Hooters, where walking pairs of boobs offer you spicy buffalo wings? The same degree of what I’ll call genital identification in men inspires groans at best and horror at worst. What do we think of men who say they “think with their dicks” or, when charged with rape, assert that they can’t help themselves because it’s in their nature? When we identify primarily with our sexuality, we lose distance from it and the ability to control it. Sexuality is no longer something that a woman has power over, and can shape according to her personality. It is her personality, her core.

I wonder how male-to-female transsexuals feel watching The V. Monologues¸ which so clearly assert that womanhood is conferred by certain anatomical characteristics. The existence of such surgeries as vaginoplasty, where surgeons can actually construct or re-construct “functional” vaginas that allow intercourse and in some cases even vaginal childbirth, suggests that there must be a “textbook vagina” that surgeons refer to. I find it pretty horrifying to imagine the distortions that become possible—are plastic surgeons crafting Stepford vaginas that conform to heterosexual male notions of size, texture, color, etc? Since, as Ensler rightly points out, we rarely talk about it, how are we to know what these ideal parameters might be, or how unrealistic they are? It’s terrifying to think that vaginas might be subject to an aesthetic doctrine that we don’t even know about, that only becomes apparent when, for one reason or another, we must go under the knife. The very notion that vaginas require repair or cosmetic refurbishment reflects functional and aesthetic notions of what vaginas should be—vaginas are for a certain purpose, and should look a certain way. These parameters are bound to reflect heterosexual male preoccupations—how could they not, when hetero male doctors write the textbooks and perform the surgeries?

Maybe we could celebrate a more generalized “victory week” next year, one that didn’t exclude our trans-sisters, who are also disproportionately victims of sexual violence. In place of The Monologues, I’d love to see radical gender-fucker and badass emcee Peaches invited to perform, or a reading of Homebody/Kabul, or a screening of Shortbus. “Until the violence stops” is a long time—we’d better start lining up the entertainment.