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:
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“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)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)