Criticism
The Vagina Monologues includes a section entitled "The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could". This portion of the play, as originally performed, has been criticized for including a scene where a 13-year-old girl is given a drink by a 24-year-old woman who then has sex with her. At the conclusion of the segment, the narrator (the grown-up thirteen year old girl) fondly reminisces about the event, claiming that it helped to nurture her and help her grow as a woman, and included the line, "If it was rape, it was good rape".
The segment received criticism not only for depicting the event as a "good rape", but also for forming a double standard, as elsewhere in the play, male-on-female rape is depicted as not only inexcusable but the ultimate act of violence against women. The scene was modified in later performances; the young girl's age was changed to 16, and the "good rape" line was omitted.
Feminist Camille Paglia criticised Ensler's "obsession with male evil", suggesting that this combined with her "claimed history of physical abuse and mental breakdowns" made her "the new Andrea Dworkin". Bernard Goldberg listed Ensler at #96 in his 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37).
Read more about this topic: Eve Ensler
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)