Our Bodies, Our Surgeons
BROOKS, DAVID
Our Bodies, Our Surgeons Feminism in the Age of Body Worship. BY DAVID BROOKS We're almost an hour into The Vagina Monologues, but so far, for some reason, I'm not really connecting with it. Eve...
...You are not healthy...
...Online sisterhood magazines like gURL.com let it all hang out...
...And by making that most private thing public, she turns it into a political object and a career move...
...The old-fashioned desire to look pretty for the menfolk has been transmuted into a newer desire to look fit and taut as a symbol of strength, power, and mastery...
...The urge to strive and succeed at work was there from the beginning...
...In other words, this is the Starbucks crowd's version of a night out with the Chippendales, those perfect male strippers who go around sparking make-believe riots in female-only nightclubs...
...Personally, I just don't get it...
...Succeed...
...Some people prefer to use a human growth hormone to reverse facial aging...
...But look at that woman in the sleeveless pullover...
...Madonna struts across the nation's consciousness showing off her privates and her perfectly muscled back...
...Ensler's performances, and the main vibe you get from it is "effort...
...And the show has the feel of male pornography, from the stupid puns on the poster ("Think Outside the Box"), to the structure (a series of unrelated sexual encounters), to the worldview (women want to have sex all the time), to the underlying message of each episode (great sex is possible between people who have absolutely no emotional commitment to each other...
...These women want everyone to know you can be a careerist and a sex-tiger at the same time...
...It's not as if they've made me feel unwelcome...
...But outrage isn't the right reaction either, because of a fact central to the success of The Vagina Monologues: It's pretend...
...The seventyish matrons with trim Catholic-school-bake-sale haircuts—they look like they came in from Long Island and got lost on their way to Cats—are whispering giddily to each other after each skit...
...We have a panoply of empowerment tools just waiting for the financially well-endowed striver...
...It was taken just after one of Ms...
...Ensler repeats...
...Normally women of a certain age have a little looseness to their upper arms...
...I say, if it was a rape, it was a good rape, then, a rape that turned my [guess what?] into a kind of heaven," Ms...
...Lust seems to have replaced rage as the hip feminist passion...
...But nowadays the movement has changed...
...So while the people around me are swept up in high hilarity, I am bored...
...The personal is political," the feminists used to chant...
...It's about a make-believe world in which women are all united by their sex organs, in which women enjoy sex without emotional complexities, in which desire is wanton and simple, and in which spiritual bliss is achieved through the enjoyment of endless orgasms...
...You are 60...
...Naomi Wolf wrote a book, Promiscuities, celebrating female desire...
...Salt-N-Pepa are as proudly randy as the boy rappers...
...One of the great success stories of the last decade is the WNBA, attracting thousands of young girls to sports and athleticism...
...Needless to say, if this play were broadcast on network television, Alan Keyes would be president tomorrow...
...As he tore my ticket, his glance seemed to say, "Isn't it wonderful that we're supporting our feminist sisters...
...But as you look around the audience of The Vagina Monologues, you see on full display the urge to strive and succeed in a Cult-of-the-Body era, when upscale virtue has been redefined along Spartan lines to include taut skin and toned muscles...
...She's wearing black from head to foot—black leather boots, pants, jacket, two black leather bags—and all that cowhide is rolling and tossing like waves in a storm...
...Most of the women are in their forties, fifties, or sixties, and a few are in their seventies...
...This audience is middle aged to elderly...
...Ensler's world...
...It takes about six hours to inject enough stuff to plump up an entire face...
...There's a weird rule that applies in this crowd...
...Moreover, the message of this play is that womanhood is defined by sex...
...The fortyish woman in front of me with porcu-pine-moussed hair is throwing her head back and roaring so heartily I fear she's going to snap off at the neck...
...But on the other hand, there's a drawback...
...And the plastic surgeons have never been busier...
...The hippies may have started by dropping out of the rat race to live off the land, but it wasn't long before they were producing high quality ice creams and fruit juices from the land, and building large corporations to market the stuff worldwide...
...The personal is professional...
...Very few real women actually go to female prostitutes...
...It's like going to one of those beaches in northern Europe where naked Germans lounge around all August grilling knockwurst and playing Frisbee...
...The women may be getting up there in age, but many of them are remarkably fit...
...The older you get, the blonder you're likely to be...
...In short, everybody around me is having a rollicking good time...
...All around me, women are doubling over with laughter...
...Of course not...
...The number of facelifts has nearly doubled in the past seven years, to over 100,000 a year (remember when enlightened people used to condemn Barbie for being artificial...
...But somehow I find Ms...
...Young women may be naturally beautiful, but the women in this audience have achieved beauty...
...You can sense the drive, the ambition, the little engine that knows no rest—as they used to say about Abraham Lincoln's drive to succeed...
...We have gyms...
...Upending the patriarchy and upending oppression have been supplemented by the determination to upend the ravages of time...
...Ensler is supposed to be challenging actually were broken down a quarter century ago, with books like Our Bodies, Ourselves, The Sensuous Woman, and all the other self-fondling tomes of 1970s consciousness raising...
...This really is an ambitious country...
...Luigi Barzini captured the ethos pretty well, quoting some of his own earlier writing in his memoir O America: Opportunity in America went hand in hand with a crippling personal burden—"the individual moral duty not to waste one hour [of life, to] achieve success and make money, build and produce more and more, and at the same time, persistently improve the world, untiringly trying to teach all men how to live, work, produce, consume and rule themselves the American way...
...We're getting to be friends," Ms...
...Meanwhile women of the younger generation flaunt their strength...
...Every seed that's planted turns to ambition in the end...
...No real person is exclusively defined by sex, as Ms...
...In theory it should be erotic, but after a few hours in the presence of all that lumbering nakedness, the mere thought of sex makes you want to throw up...
...No real world is as totally sex-centric as Ms...
...Women in their twenties and thirties are the beneficiaries of your struggles, and while the first feminist cohort was chided for being humorless, these younger women are funny and sassy and erotic...
...It takes work...
...You are not empowering yourself...
...Many of the women in their sixties have colored their hair an elegant Lexus-blonde shade, and if you look over the audience, there are patches of silverish yellow, concentrations of lustrous manes that are three shades lighter than the accompanying eyebrows...
...Foreigners see this as the mark of the Americans, this application of the achievement ethos to every aspect of life...
...So if you look around the audience of The Vagina Monologues, it's an impressive sight...
...During the first burst of mass feminism, writers defended aging women against traditional notions of beauty...
...Everything—even the most intimate parts of the body—can be measured according to the criteria laid down by what poets in the pre-feminist era used to call that bitch goddess, Success...
...If you are an American social conservative, you're a social conservative and a striver...
...Women's work today has become in large part how we look," Nancy Friday writes in Our Looks, Our Lives...
...There are serious passages in the play—most notably a moving monologue by a Bosnian rape victim...
...But generally Ms...
...it has to be done carefully or the fat will migrate...
...Achieve...
...But maybe that's just because women are from Venus, men are from Hell...
...Where do you fit in...
...You are going to take control...
...It's expensive, about $1,000 a month, and it's painful (it's self-injected six times a week through the thigh), but as Erica Jong noted before her facelift, when her friends had theirs done, they felt that their attitudes were lifted as well...
...The benefit of taking your injected fat from a dead human is that there's less risk of an allergic reaction...
...Ensler is an attractive woman who sits up on stage in a revealing black nightgown talking dirty and moaning fake orgasms...
...And it's not as if the show, in theory, should leave a person unmoved...
...You might even say a feminist cult of the body has You can almost hear the clackety-clack of their Prada heels beating down the avenues, the snap of their plastic surgeons' latex gloves...
...As you look at the intently talking women in it, you become aware of all the work and self-discipline that has gone into their appearance...
...The leather lady next to me is rocking back and forth in glee...
...Camille Paglia shoots off in all directions, a fireworks display of sexual heterodoxy...
...But looking around the audience, I can see that at least in one regard, Ms...
...They are out kickboxing, running, weight-lifting...
...What are you going to do...
...Those taut arms don't happen by themselves...
...Ensler sketches it as being...
...One wants to project an image of power and strength...
...Candace Bushnell chronicles her life in Sex In the City...
...And over time, it is the ideology of achievement and self-improvement that ends up coloring whatever else you believe...
...All around the country, men are dialing those 900 numbers and paying several bucks a minute for this kind of performance...
...On the one hand, it's great, this cult of the body...
...They are to be found mostly in Manhattan, Santa Monica, and wherever else concierges are thick on the ground...
...She talks about the "Civilization of vaginas...
...The Vagina Monologues is an occasion for sophisticated women to get together, laugh at some naughty things, and have a rollicking good time by taking part in a collective and exuberantly tasteless parody of lust...
...She brings it into the realm of ambition...
...The hands on my watch drag and drag...
...There are now many different procedures on offer at the face factory...
...This Valentine's Day it's going to be performed on college campuses across the country—a sort of anti-Valentine on the joys of anti-romantic feminist lust...
...In fact, sometimes they seem to talk of little besides sex...
...Being a feminist is at the core of your identity, and so you try to keep up with the cutting edge...
...The crowd goes wild...
...Behind me, the women with the matching wind-tunnel facelifts are joyously stretching their new masks to the point where there's a real possibility that the staples in the backs of their heads will pop and I'll find myself sitting in a puddle of liberated jowls...
...Bob...
...Aging in women is a process of becoming obscene sexually," Susan Sontag wrote in 1972, "for the flabby bosom, wrinkled neck, spotted hands, thinning white hair, waistless torso and veined legs of an old woman are felt to be obscene...
...The latest innovation is autolo-gous materials such as Isologen and Autologen, which are harvested from the person's own body, usually from a tummy tuck...
...It's like sitting in a bucket of live fish, bodies flopping all around...
...Women in the '50s vacuumed," Maureen Dowd wrote recently...
...Ensler's play does touch reality...
...women's soccer team ripping off her shirt and displaying her rippling abs and her sports bra...
...Bovine collagen (from cows) is popular, as is Dermalogen, skin from cadavers...
...The most important symbol of womanhood in the past few years was the shot of Brandi Chastain of the triumphant U.S...
...Women are strong and muscular...
...But this isn't real...
...Hillary Clinton has embraced Eve Ensler, inviting her to the White House for chats and appearing with her at political events...
...The Vagina Monologues has been staged from Jerusalem to Johannesburg to Oklahoma City...
...Women are proud of their physical selves...
...Ideologically, the show is no more daring than a Helen Reddy reunion tour...
...Ensler's relentlessness stupefying...
...This audience, and thousands of similar audiences around the world, regard Eve Ensler, as the New York Times put it, as the "Messiah...
...And along comes a fresh generation of women like Eve Ensler gloriously proud of their bodies...
...If you're an American hippie, you're a hippie and a striver...
...Our Hoovers have turned on us...
...Galaxies of movie stars have performed it: Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Winona Ryder, Swoosie Kurtz...
...And this same achievement ethos has colored feminism...
...And the achievement ethos means that one has to perpetually flex one's will power for the sake of self-improvement...
...This is escapist art, not realist art...
...You are your vagina," Ms...
...Ensler told the Times, and in the New York version of the play, she does a little campaigning for the first lady, exulting, "We've got a c— running for Senate...
...Everything can be worked on and improved...
...But they definitely make up a prominent and powerful tranche of society...
...Very few find the zipless sex described here wonderful, as Ms...
...Of course, the women in the photograph represent only a slice of womankind, and only a portion of the postfeminist professional class...
...I am even bored by one of the inspirational high points of the show, a statutory rape monologue about a 13-year-old girl who is seduced by a 25-year-old woman and initiated into the full joys of womanhood...
...Take control...
...Distinguished historian Amanda Foreman (author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire) poses on her author tour in a see-through halter top, reclining seductively on a leather couch...
...Eve Ensler has already performed many of the most popular vignettes from her one-woman play—the gynecological exam bit, the lesbian prostitute bit, the feminist onanism workshop bit...
...developed...
...You can get a mini-eyelift or a chin tuck or the full rip and staple...
...Comedian Sandra Bernhard performs one sexual riff after another...
...Many of these women were probably cutting-edge feminists when the movement was at its peak...
...We have surgeons...
...I am bored by the lists of what vaginas would say if they could talk ("Feed me . . . Brave choice . . . Enter at your own risk...
...Most of the taboos Ms...
...I confess I was first drawn to this play by a photograph that appeared in the New York Times last December, reprinted nearby...
...Now imagine you are one of them...
...But now flabby skin is the sign of a worse sort of corruption...
...The early facelifts produced that skeletal skin-over-the-skull look, so now there are a range of fat graftings and "facial fillers" that can be injected to puff up cheeks and other spots...
...But I just can't get off the dime...
...You can almost hear the urgings of their personal trainers, the grunts on their stair machines, the clatter of plates bearing the itsy-bitsy salads that pass for lunch, the clackety-clack of their Prada heels beating down the avenues, the snap of their plastic surgeons' latex gloves...
...Eve Ensler sits up there on stage making her vagina public...
...You struggled through the ordeals of those early days—marches, self-doubts, divorces...
...In other words, if you are an American, you are likely to be a striver...
...There was a lot of writing in those days analyzing the role witches played in traditional fairy tales, how the post-childbearing woman was seen as a terrifying and evil menace...
...Ensler's taxonomy of female moans (a kind of Encyclopaedia Britannica version of that scene in When Harry Met Sally...
...Ensler's 13-year-old says...
...Age is no constraint these days...
...Ensler's characters are...
...Women in the '00s are vacuumed...
...Beauty has been converted from a romantic lure to a power symbol...
...That's show biz, but even in academia being a feminist often means writing about desire, Queer Theory, or the high-toned erotica that now takes up so much shelf space at Barnes & Noble...
...Are you going to watch this latest chapter in the feminist saga from the geriatric sidelines...
...Cindi Lauper sings of female masturbation...
...Everything can be a sign of achievement and mastery...
...At least 10 percent of this audience is male (although as a group maybe not at the upper end of the testosterone bell curve...
...It's a small price to pay to take control of your life and spirit...
...You are not working out...
...I read, in a sense, to redeem the slut in me, the part that feels (as it does, perhaps, in many other women) vulnerable no matter how many external signs of respectability I acquire," Wolf writes...
...They are marked by an awesome and innovative work ethic...
...My clitoris is me," one of her characters declares...
...The health clubs do phenomenal business...
...He was wearing a button that said "Vagina Friendly" and a nametag that read "Vagina David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...I seem to be the only one in this crowd who doesn't think that if you say the word "vagina" 5,000 times in the space of an hour, it gets funnier each time...
...Courtney Love formed a rock group called Hole...
...And when I handed the ticket taker my ticket, he gave me a big smile and greeting...
...Ensler, like a high-consciousness Joan Rivers, goes for laughs, and the women around me only begin showing exhaustion during maybe the last half-hour...
...I am bored by Ms...
...It's one of those newspaper shots that seem to capture a whole social class—its aspirations and traumas...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 20
