Newstradamus

Eve Ensler

The current fuss over “The Vagina Monologues” being too much for the Arkley Center to handle leads to musings about how the way we regard language in the media versus at a personal level. Remember the euphemisms our parents used about bodily functions and parts: “Wee-wee,” “No. 1 and No. 2", "down there" and the like? My ex-wife once told me that when she was a little girl and needed to have a bowel movement, the protocol was to tell her mother that “Dookie is knocking on the door.”

But even euphemistically, in polite company, I don’t recall a substitute word for vagina, although I’m sure girls had one they used among themselves in private (I know boys did). One just didn't go there. Today, although the words vagina and penis can be heard on television sitcoms every week, not just on "Saturday Night Live," they’re still too icky for some people — at least on a marquee, as letters to the editor in the Times-Standard about the “V-word” indicate.

Note the current vogue for “vajayjay,” the euphemism of choice on “Oprah” or celebrity shows featuring Britney’s latest clothing indiscretion. A New York Times story said the popularity of “vajayjay” reignites the argument forcefully made by Eve Ensler over a decade ago when she created “The Vagina Monologues”: “’What we don’t say becomes a secret, and secrets often create shame and fear and myths.’ Vagina, her widely performed series of monologues declared, is too often an ‘invisible word,’ one ‘that stirs up anxiety, awkwardness, contempt and disgust.’”

I suspect it is this same societal disgust that sustains the tradition in the news media of keeping names of rape victims secret. Rather than a crime of violence, rape is seen as an act of sex in which the victim was somehow a participant, although unwillingly, thus bringing down society's shame upon her. (Elsewhere in the world, this is taken to extremes, as in the recent Saudi Arabia case where the court sentenced a 19-year-old victim of a gang rape to 200 lashes and six months in prison. Her crime: Being in public with a man not related to her before the two were noticed by several men who kidnapped and raped both of them.)

Former Des Moines Register editor Geneva Overholser has observed: “Most people feel that this (secrecy about rape victims) is the humane thing to do. I wonder if it has not prolonged the stigma, and fed the underreporting. Certainly, in the past dozen years, we have made progress in reporting on, and understanding, the crime of rape. I am certain that this is in large part due to the courage of women who were willing to come forward and tell their stories.”