"If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?"
So asks one performer in Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues - the popular play that is part of a global movement to stop violence against women and girls, now in its tenth year running at Penn.
The name of that global movement is "V-Day," where "V" stands for "Victory," "Valentine" and "Vagina." Through the efforts of college and community organizers across the world, the campaign raises awareness and funds for women's anti-violence groups ranging in scale from the local to the global. At the same time, it aims to celebrate and empower all women.
This year, Penn is one of 844 college campuses registered with the V-Day movement.
Penn's local beneficiary is Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR), a nonprofit organization that provides services to survivors of sexual violence, and the only rape crisis center in Philadelphia.
In addition to community organizations, V-Day chapters also raise funds for the worldwide "spotlight campaign." The 2009 spotlight is dedicated to women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where hundreds of thousands have been raped since 1996, according to the V-Day Web site.
According to College senior Jessica Gartner, who is directing the show at Penn, women in the DRC "are practically considered an endangered species."
"They're raping women so violently that their reproductive systems are being destroyed," she said, adding that the "spotlight monologue" and the 2009 V-Day campaign "focus on how certain aspects of American culture are relevant to the violence and conflict in the Congo."
Last year, Penn's V-Day chapter raised over $36,000 and sold out two showings of the play to attract over 1,500 people, according to the Web site. This year, Penn coordinators are hoping to raise $38,000, with 90 percent of the proceeds going to WOAR, and the remaining 10 percent going to the women and girls in the DRC.
As for attendance, it has become nothing less than the expectation that this year's performances will sell out. Going to see The Vagina Monologues at Penn has become "something like a right of passage," said Penn Women's Center Director Felicity Paxton, noting that many sororities and fraternities mandate that their pledge classes attend.
"It's like you go to Homecoming and you go to The Vagina Monologues," she said.
At its most basic level, The Vagina Monologues raises money and awareness with the goal of ending sexual violence against women.
But according to V-Day leaders at Penn, the play is more complex than just a fundraising or educational campaign.
One of the key motives behind the show, according to the director and producer at Penn, is to help women feel comfortable talking about a taboo subject: vaginas.
"Look at men, they play the 'penis game' all the time, and nobody says anything," Gartner said. "Women are afraid to talk about vaginas."
To that end, the play tries to lead by example. Though they represent a wide array of issues and perspectives, each monologue somehow relates to the vagina and freely employs the word.
Beyond normalizing the word "vagina," the play also attempts to "change the meaning of it" and words associated with it, said College senior Rachel Garber, who is the producer of the play at Penn.
The surest route to ending the violence against women, Garber said, is to promote "the celebratory nature of vagina."
"It's not about mourning the violence; it's about stopping the violence, and celebrating [women]," she said, adding that men need to be part of the effort as well as women.
She pointed to one monologue, "Reclaiming Cunt," which argues that "not only is ['cunt'] the word - but it's the perfect word - to describe what we have between our legs," Garber said.
And to change the connotations of the words is to change the story of women, Gartner said. One of the overarching themes of the play, she said, is that "your vagina is you."
"If you attach negative images to 'vagina,' you're attaching negative images to yourself," she said.
"When you hear the word 'penis,' there are a lot of things associated with that word, and phallic symbols are associated with power," Gartner added. "So it's a matter of bringing images of power and celebration to those [female] words rather than weakness and victimization."
Indeed, for all its dark focus on violence and rape, The Vagina Monologues is also replete with instances of celebration and humor.
In "The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy," a woman who devotes her career to giving women pleasure is joined by a trio of vocal orgasm demonstrators.
Paxton said two fundamental motivations behind the show are "to improve women's status in general" and to "improve women's relationships with their own bodies, which could mean anything from the extreme personalized experience that a woman has with her own body, to the way women's bodies are deployed or employed or abused in war," she said.
Gartner said she has witnessed several examples in which the show "personally empowered [cast members] to take steps in their own lives to stop sexual harassment or any type of violence against women."
"I've seen it bring women out of their shells," she added, referring to a process at work both on and off the stage.
