The following commentary is slated to appear in the February 12, 2009 issue of The Cowl, Providence College's student newspaper. Consequently, it is addressed to the student body of Providence College, so please bear this in mind while reading. It also requires some background. From 2002-2005, Providence College students performed Eve Ensler's controversial work The Vagina Monologues on campus without support from the administration led by college president Rev. Philip A. Smith, O.P. In 2006, however, new president Rev. Brian J. Shanley, O.P. made national headlines by banning the play's annual performance on campus, citing elements "inimical to the teaching of the Church." This year, for the fourth time, students will perform the Monologues at an off-campus location, a fact about which they are still bitter.
If one searches for the phrase “vagina monologues” on The Cowl’s website, the slow but steady server soon sends back no fewer than sixty-seven articles which touch upon this topic. The sheer volume of verbiage devoted to vaginas over the years in these pages is overwhelming. Those currently at odds—some whining, others gloating—may be surprised to note that their arguments have been appearing annually in The Cowl since 2002. Every year, those on both sides of the issue resolve to address the real problems: sexual assault and violence against women. Every year, individuals pledge to stop bickering and “further the dialogue” about these issues. And every year, February rolls around and we’re back in the trenches.
Ultimately, we can all agree about two realities in this controversy: 1) Violence against women happens, it happens here at Providence College, and this is an awful state of affairs that we must address; and 2) The Vagina Monologues will not be performed on campus during Rev. Brian Shanley, O.P.’s tenure in office. The common ground, however, ends there. The Vagina Monologues debate serves as a proxy for—and a huge distraction from—the far more important discussion of the root causes of sexual violence.
We are allowing ourselves to argue about a conclusion from two completely different sets of premises, and this cannot continue. Simply dismissing premises borne out by revealed truth and millennia of experience, the majority of the “Mono-maniacs” who support Eve Ensler’s vision preach dogmatism far more ossified than Church doctrine and infinitely more pernicious than any perceived clerical impingement of free speech: the morality of consent. For many of these people, there are no inherently good or bad acts, there are only willed and unwilled actions. Faced with an obvious and undeniably vile atrocity like rape, these persons rationalize their natural moral opposition to it: rape is an immediate and brutal act of contravening another person’s will. This is how many of our campus nihilists, who reject claims to moral truth in virtually every other sphere up to and including the sexual, can be genuinely and fervently passionate about the cause of ending rape and violence against women. When God goes out the window, His attributes are transferred to the next available object that seems sacred and worthy of reverence: the human will. Many of the leaders in The Vagina Monologues and Women Will are not just volunteerists, they are voluntarists as well.
These groups have done a tremendous job changing the popular perception of sexual assault on this campus. While most people tend to think of rape in terms of the scary stranger leaping from the bushes with a knife, events such as S.A.V.E. week have taught us that the vast majority of rape victims know their attacker, one in three assailants are intoxicated, and that for college students like us, most sexual assaults take place in the context of a hookup or similar sexual situation. We have been taught well that consent to one act does not by any means give carte blanche for everything else.
The trouble is, the public perception of sexual assault is starting to sound more and more similar to the undergraduate perception of “consensual sex.” When alcohol gets thrown into the mix, the lines get blurry, and the golden calf of consent becomes increasingly less lustrous. Saying that a young lady should be able to socialize and walk about the campus at night without being sexually assaulted is absolutely and importantly true. Saying that a girl ought to be able to get blackout drunk, put on a four-inch skirt and five-inch heels, and spend the single-digit hours of the morning tottering up and down Eaton Street and its environs without any fear of the untoward advances of similarly sloppy young males is also true, but raises the question of whether going after efficient causes is the only way to combat sexual assault.
By no means am I suggesting that drunk girls dressed in a certain way who end up getting raped “have it coming to them”—not in the slightest. I am also aware that Ensler’s greatest hit contains a monologue, “My Short Skirt,” which addresses this very issue. But the real “truth nobody wants to talk about” is this: the society that creates over 250,000 victims of sexual assault every year is inextricably, undeniably, and irredeemably bound up with the ethic of sexual license and promiscuity. To abhor the former while affirming the latter is not only non-Christian, it is nonsensical. All too many males on this campus enjoy the female vagina exactly the way its eponymous Monologues have been ever since 2006: late at night, off campus, and against the teachings of the Catholic Church. We must fight tirelessly against the violation of women in all its forms, but this fight is futile and meaningless without a commitment to sexual self-restraint. We must create—each of us, carrying out the sacred duty of stewardship of our bodies—a culture of modesty, of chastity, and of true love, which affirms the fundamentally sacramental nature of sex by saving it for a time when it can be enjoyed in all its fullness.
No comments:
Post a Comment