V-Day is upon us and as Kathryn Lopez notes it’s not Valentine’s Day that we’re talking about, it is the event that the creator of the well-known play The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler, has initiated as a rallying day for violence against women by syndicating the rights to her play around the world for local performances and combine it with a fundraiser which over the past seven years has generated some $25 million.

Irene and I attended one last Saturday and are now part of the army of contributors to this good and worthy cause as we picked up a nice painting at the concurrent silent auction. It was a nice evening and good performance, but we raised our eyebrows a little bit when the program noted that part of the proceeds of the evening would be dedicated to women in Iraq who were suffering since the start of the “US occupation”, but we didn’t worry about it too much although it was indeed a warning sign of things to come. The performance of the evening – by a group of actresses who held individual monologues - reached that point when three women on stage related their harrowing experiences, one in Islamabad, one in Baghdad and one in Kabul. Since the overriding theme was violence against women I could see why disfigurement by acid in Pakistan was part of it as did the violent abuse of women in Taliban Afghanistan, but a woman disfigured by American bombs seemed an odd appearance in this grouping of abuse stories. Indeed, Ensler started to play politics in a disingenuous way which was confirmed at the conclusion of the scene when the narrator pointed out that no one had been brought to trial for violating the women in the scene: no one for throwing acid, no one for the random abuse and one country in particular had managed to evade a court appearance to account for its actions.

The logical step is of course to ask Ensler if she would consider adjusting the next version of the Vagina Monologues to reflect the phenomenal contributions that invading Iraq and Afghanistan have made to the position of women in these countries. But that of course would be politicizing the message…

NOTE: Female suicide bombers would also be an interesting topic for inclusion in the next release, I am sure that it would fall within the parameters of abused women but we would have to check this with Eve first of course.