V for Vendetta (conservatives bashing "The Vagina Monologues" on campus)

Free Cupid! The plea was repeated today on fliers spread around the campuses of the University of Missouri-Columbia, Arizona State, and a handful of other colleges across the country. The image? A cherub shackled to a ball and chain, head hung low, weeping. The culprit? The Vagina Monologues.

"The V-Day movement is about taking away Valentine's Day, the one day a year used to celebrate every form of love, in the name of stopping domestic violence," Amber Hanneken, president of the University of Missouri campus Republican group, told the student newspaper.

As if! To Hanneken, talking about violence against women on Valentine's Day is a total buzz kill. Today is a day that's supposed to be about Hallmark, diamonds, and the Whitman's Sampler. How can true romance flourish if you're raising awareness of domestic and dating violence while bluntly discussing your ladyparts?

Hanneken is part of a counter-campaign, run by the conservative group the Independent Women's Forum, to "Take Back the Date." The program, whose title mocks anti-violence "Take Back the Night" marches, implores student to reject the vulgarity of the "v-word" and initiate a return to a more chivalrous era.

The Vagina Monologues have always provoked controversy. When Eve Ensler first performed the play off-off-Broadway more than a decade ago, The New York Times didn't want to accept ads for the show. (The paper later reversed its position after it was pointed out that it had published a review of the play that said, "Sex just doesn't get funnier, or more poignant.") In 1998, a celebrity-studded Valentine's Day fundraising performance was the first V-Day, which later became an official organization dedicated to ending violence against women. This year the play will be performed on hundreds of college campuses across the country, where, especially on Catholic campuses, it will be met with protests.



http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12458

I mean, wasn't she starring in a production of that before?