The Vagina Monologues The V-Day Edition | Page 9

mother's
apartment. I had a comic book collection. My mother said, “You mustn't lift your box of comic books.”
 My girlfriends told me you hemorrhage every month. My mother was in and out of mental hospitals.
She couldn't take me coming of age. “Dear Miss Carling, Please excuse my daughter from basketball.
She has just matured.”
 At camp they told me not to take a bath with my period. They wiped me down with antiseptic.
Scared people would smell it. Scared they'd say I smelled like fish. Throwing up, couldn't eat. I got
hungry. Sometimes it's very red. I like the drops that drop into the toilet. Like paint. Sometimes it's
brown and it disturbs me. I was twelve. My mother slapped me and brought me a red cotton shirt. My
father went out for a bottle of sangria.
 Over the course of my interviews I met nine women who had had their first orgasms in the exact same
place. They were women in their late thirties and early forties. They had all participated, at different times,
in one of the groups run by a brave and extraordinary woman, Betty Dodson. For twenty-five years
Betty has been helping women locate, love, and masturbate their vaginas. She has run groups, has
worked privately with individual women. She has helped thousands of women reclaim their center. This
piece is for her.
 
THE VAGINA WORKSHOP
[A slight English accent]
 
My vagina is a shell, a round pink tender shell, opening and closing, closing and opening. My vagina is
a flower, an eccentric tulip, the center acute and deep, the scent delicate, the petals gentle but sturdy. I
did not always know this. I learned this in the vagina workshop. I learned this from a woman who runs
the vagina workshop, a woman who believes in vaginas, who really sees vaginas, who helps women see
their own vaginas by seeing other women's vaginas. In the first session the woman who runs the vagina
workshop asked us to draw a picture of our own “unique, beautiful, fabulous vagina.” That's what she
called it. She wanted to know what our own unique, beautiful, fabulous vagina looked like to us. One
woman who was pregnant drew a big red mouth screaming with coins spilling out. Another very skinny
woman drew a big serving plate with a kind ofDevonshirepattern on it. I drew a huge black dot with little
squiggly lines around it. The black dot was equal to a black hole in space, and the squiggly lines were
meant to be people or things or just your basic atoms that got lost there. I had always thought of my
vagina as an anatomical vacuum randomly sucking up particles and objects from the surrounding
environment. I had always perceived my vagina as an independent entity, spinning like a star in its own
galaxy, eventually burning up on its own gaseous energy or exploding and splitting into thousands of other
smaller vaginas, all of them then spinning in their own galaxies. I did not think of my vagina in practical or
biological terms. I did not, for example, see it as a part of my body, something between my legs, attached
to me.
 In the workshop we were asked to look at our vaginas with hand mirrors. Then, after careful
examination, we were to verbally report to the group what we saw. I must tell you that up until this point
everything I knew about my vagina was based on hearsay or invention. I had never really seen the thing.
It had never occurred to me to look at it. My vagina existed for me on some abstract plane. It seemed so
reductive and awkward to look at it, getting down there the way we did in the workshop, on our shiny
blue mats, with our hand mirrors. It reminded me of how the early astronomers must have felt with their

primitive telescopes. I found it quite unsettling at first, my vagina. Like the first time you see a fish cut
open and you discover this other bloody complex world inside, right under the skin. It was so raw, so
red, so fresh. And the thing that surprised me most was all the layers. Layers inside layers, opening into
more layers. My vagina amazed me. I couldn't speak when it came my turn in the workshop. I was
speechless. I had awakened to what the woman who ran the workshop called “vaginal wonder.” I just
wanted to lie there on my mat, my legs spread, examining my vagina forever. It was better than theGrand
Canyon, ancient and full of grace. It had the innocence and freshness of a proper English garden. It was
funny, very funny. It made me laugh. It could hide and seek, open and close. It was a mouth. It was the
morning. Then, the woman who ran the workshop asked how many women in the workshop had had
orgasms. Two women tentatively raised their hands. I didn't raise my hand, but I had had orgasms. I
didn't raise my hand because they were accidental orgasms. They