At Notre Dame, our illusions of being a “family,” parietals and rules against pre-marital intercourse seem to erase from our consciousness issues of sexuality.
There follow more and varied commentaries on vaginas, which are “supposed to be loose and wide” and stimulated with a “French tickler” in soft underwear. That, the narrator says, would result in women “coming all day long, coming in the supermarket, coming on the subway.” By way of counterpoint, there’s a narrator who assails an unidentified “army of people thinking up ways to torture my poor-ass vagina, to undermine my pussy” even though it’s “supposed to smell like pussy” and “doesn’t need to be cleaned up.” The proper celebratory attitude is shown by one narrator whose only lines consist of a sort of cheerleading pivoting on the word “cunt.” Thus, “C, C, Ca, Ca, cavern, cackle, cute, come, closed” and so on. And on.
These then, are the sort of slatternly roles played and shockingly crude lines that were spoken by young Notre Dame on a Notre Dame stage each V-Day. There are, to be sure, some passages relating to violence against women, which is hailed by apologists as the play’s main theme. To be specific, we note the following: 13 lines about a 16th century witchcraft trial; 14 lines about 19th century surgical procedures to halt womens’ masturbation (with one 20th century case); nine lines about a punch in the groin of a girl by a 10-year old; 15 lines about a rape of a girl by her father’s friend; and ten lines about the ending of the “tradition of genital cutting” in some places in Africa and the faking of the practice by one of the “chief ‘cutters’” — for a total of 151 lines in this 124 page play. To be sure, some pages are not full; and we might have missed some pertinent pages inadvertently. Still, the general proportions are clear and striking. Erase the passages celebrating homosexual, heterosexual, and autoerotic sex and the female sexual organ and there is no play left.