Enduring play moves into the #MeToo generation
Last Thursday, women from 12 countries took the audience by storm in a perceptive, inspiring, and hilarious performance of The Vagina Monologues. The diverse members of Bangkok Rising, a volunteer organisation whose main cause is to raise awareness of the need for gender equality and an end to gender-based violence, rendered tangible the reality of womanhood in a context of oppression, abuse, and also self-discovery. In a powerful conclusion, they turned their attention to the appalling state of gender-based violence today, more than 20 years after the play’s premiere.
Written by American playwright Eve Ensler in 1996, The Vagina Monologues addresses women’s real-life experiences with their own sexuality and body image, and the extent to which those encounters often occur in a space of social repression, inhibition, condemnation and violence. It is based on the author’s interviews with women from all over the world and has been translated into 49 languages and performed in over 140 countries. Over the last six years, Bangkok Rising have put on an annual performances of the play. The proceeds of this year’s event went to a Baan Phak Phing (House of Refuge) in Chiang Rai, which provides shelter and counselling to girls below the age of 18 that have been sexually abused or forced into child prostitution and, through education, prepares them to take their place in society. Directed by Hannah Meltzer from the UK and organised by Chiedza M Skyum from Zimbabwe, this latest interpretation hardly missed a beat and added a level of sensitive relatability to the anonymous characters that was in no way inferior to professional productions, portraying a most diverse set of introspection and experiences that ranged from the mundane to the profound and from harrowing to empowering. It is the lighthearted relatability and the liberating element of speaking proudly and intimately to what society has for too long frowned upon that cemented the original play’s success. And it was this emphasis on lighthearted liberation, too, that was the most palpable and charming strength of Bangkok Rising’s performance.
In one particularly moving act which probably best encapsulates the spirit of the play, an American (Tori Rogers) shared the story of the character’s “coochi snorcher”, as her mother conservatively would call her vagina, and of her and her coochi snorcher’s journey from shame to rape to greater shame to cathartic sexual self-discovery. In this story, as in the play overall, the vagina, as the physical representation of all the ways in which the patriarchy both reduces the complexity of the female experience and insults the value of girls and women around the world, was then the ironic means of reclaiming the narrative of female sexuality, of autonomous self-discovery, of nonconformity in the face of chauvinism. For the evening’s “vagina warriors” of Bangkok Rising, the path to emancipation and true equality was catalysed through the hilariously defiant recapturing of language and physicality.
At the end, it was Eve Ensler’s own addition to the original play that left the spectator with the realisation that, as inspiring and empathy-creating this process may be, it may ultimately be insufficient. In an amendment written for the 20th anniversary of the play’s premiere, titled “I’m over it”, Ensler, aided by the emotional charisma of the cast, reminded the spectator that sexism, sexual harassment and gender-based violence continues to thrive around the world; and that that is a state of affairs that deserves our deepest “being-over-with’.
This is as true of Thailand as it is of virtually any male-dominated society. For instance, of the thousands of rape cases that are brought to the police every year, only a minuscule fraction go to court. It is likely that the estimated number of unknown cases is easily several times higher. In fact, rape is seen as something that can only “really” occur between strangers, when the opposite is the case. A recent UN study found that in nine of 10 rape cases reviewed, victims knew the perpetrators and the incident occurred in a private space. And a 2017 survey conducted by the Women and Men Progressive Movement Foundation revealed that 42.2% of female respondents stated that they had previously been forced into sexual acts with their husbands or boyfriends. An unsurprisingly similarly high number of male respondents said that they viewed their wives as their property.
In Thailand, #MeToo has not trended so far. And while Bangkok Rising’s performance was deeply moving, it was equally clear that it would not change anything about that. The natural limitations of any single show aside, almost the entire audience was foreign and female. Without lessening the performance itself, that gave it a preaching-to-the-choir character, which can be hard to avoid with any event that does not force people to attend it.
The intent and achieved effect of these Vagina Monologues was one of self-empowerment, of raising awareness in a cosmopolitan space, of inspiring women to be proud and defiant and of reminding men to be allies. Thailand’s patriarchy will be discarded somewhere down the line by a critical mass of Thai women and men who have come to the realisation that they, too, are “over it”.