This year, the Grand Valley Women’s Center staged its 10th annual production of the Vagina Monologues, drawing audiences of over 1,000 people. It was a huge feat for the Women’s Center, which has had much smaller audiences in the past. The show’s proceeds are divided between production costs, the rights to produce the play, and women’s organizations in Grand Rapids. This is no ordinary play production – the money at the door supports women’s projects in the community.

The Vagina Monologues is a play about female empowerment, celebrating the global community of all women. It communicates complexities of female sexuality, self-discovery, and the parallels between all women and their nuanced relationships with their, well, vaginas.

This is what all Vagina Activists are told when we tryout or volunteer for the show. This year was my first time participating as an actor, and the group of women I worked with was fantastic. However, everything seemed in line with traditional “western, third wave feminism”- women calling for justice, recognition, and equality within a context that is, unfortunately, almost completely undiversified and classist.

I teach a women’s studies course at the Gerald R. Ford Job Corps center, a trade school for predominately black young adults, many of whom have children and haven’t finished high school yet. Additionally, many of these women do not have large support networks or many positive female role models. As a Vagina activist, I thought it was imperative that my young students come to the show. I asked the Women’s Center, which was helping the GVSU student organization Eyes Wide Open hand out free tickets to GVSU students, if they would be willing to donate 10 tickets to my students. Their response: a stern, “We can’t, and we won’t.”

I was told that the tickets were for “poor college students” and that the Women’s Center, who produces and organizes the show, was not authorized to give away tickets. I came to find out that hundreds of free tickets were being given away and not just to GVSU students. I learned that tickets were being given away to whomever. When I asked the Women’s Center When I asked if my students could sit in seats that might otherwise not be used the Women’s Center also said that was not possible. Even the open Fieldhouse bleachers, drawn out in case much larger crowds showed up, were not open to my students. These seats were private property.

With all the galvanizing rhetoric about women’s experiences and the importance of uncovering the common threads shared by all women, there is something very critical about the event’s demographic – it ends up engaging predominately white, middle-class activists who have already been involved in female emancipation efforts. It is easier to rely on the activists and their friends as the bulk of attendees and supporters than to reach out into the community and find the patriarchal men and the marginalized women who need to see this show most.

In fact, there is hardly any representation on stage of women from the Grand Rapids community – minority women, poor women, abused women- and it’s likely that these women don’t go to the Vagina Monologues (at least not at Grand Valley.) If we were to draw conclusions from actor and audience demographics, this is a show for women who have already been exposed to feminist ideals through a college education and can afford the price of a ten or twenty dollar ticket. Where are the women who haven’t heard the Vagina message? Women who might benefit from seeing strong and empowered women talk about women’s issues?

I truly appreciate Eve Ensler’s mission, and I can’t deny I loved working with my fellow activists. I don’t take issue with the script or with the themes of the show – I only wish to point out how the show has been organized in a seemingly exclusionary and preferential way.

However, the Women’s Center has done many great things for the community by donating time, money, and student volunteers to numerous projects. But there is a clear disconnect between the proclaimed values of the Vagina Monologues and what actually takes place in organizing the event. If the goal is equality and access, my students serve as a testament to the failures of the Vagina production to reach the most marginalized women. They, and their vagina stories, remain unheard. I can’t help but wonder what we could learn from them and what they would say. Hopefully in the future, the Women’s Center takes a much more active role in getting all women onto our campus and involved with the Vagina Monologues. This is important in the struggle for women’s liberation and connecting our global community of women together. If the show is to truly meant for all types of women, there should be a greater effort made to reach out to them.

Meredith Osborne

Philosophy and Liberal Studies