The Vagina Monologues

My mum and I went to see The Vagina Monologues in Oxford tonight.  I absolutely loved it.

It was funny, it was graphic.  It was sad, it was thought provoking. It was happy, it was insightful.  It was educational, it was freeing.  Empowering actually might be a better word than freeing, but I'll leave that in too.

It was great.

I think Mum enjoyed it too although she did say it was more graphic than she'd expected.  It was pretty much what I expected although for some reason I had thought that the woman in it would share some of their own personal stories.  But maybe that's something that happens more when they have one off guest stars.

The questions which were asked in the interviews which form the monologues include what would your vagina wear? and what would it say if it could talk?  They took it in turns to read out one sentence answers to those questions.

One of the answers was "M&S" and the older cast member who sort of reminded me of Zoe Wannamaker went 

"This is not just a vagina, this is an M&S vagina."

At one point they were talking about reclaiming words which is something I really believe in but had never thought about in that context.  They had us all yelling out "CUNT!!" which was fun.

They also told us some facts and had us yelling out certain parts of one of them with them (the bits I bolded).  They also said if we wanted to repeat that at any point to yell "clit fact!" and they'd do it again.  And, later in the show, someone did.

"The clitoris has 8000 nerve endings in it which is more than any other part of the male or female body including the finger tips, the lips and the tongue.  It also has twice, that's twice, count them, twice the number of nerve endings as the penis."

As someone sat near me put it after that bit "women rock."