The Vagina Monologues: A Synopsis of the Book

In the book “Vagina Monlouges”, author Eve Ensler goes around to many different kinds of women and asks them about their vaginas. She interviews old women, young women, married women, single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African American women, Hispanic women, Asian American women, Native American women, Caucasian women, and Jewish women. Each chapter or section in the book is someone else’s different story or experience. Before each chapter, Ensler adds a little snippet about her own thought on the topic. It is almost a preview to what the next section is about. Some of the topics that are talked about in this book are masturbation, rape or sexual abuse, how different cultures act towards the female body, and how women feel about their own vaginas. There are many stories from women in this book that help one learn more about diversity. There was one specific section of the book called, “ I was twelve. My mother slapped me.” This was a pretty short section that described many girls experience when they got their periods for the first time. It was very interesting reading about different girls parents, family, and friends reactions to getting their first periods. In another section, a 72-year-old woman had never seen her vagina her story describes the interview she had with Eve and how Eve was able to get the lady to open up and talk about why she had never wanted anything to do with her vagina. I feel that the intended audience is really for anyone older than around age 16. Some material in the book might be more appropriate to someone who is older or at least sexually active. Also, I think this book is for the more liberal person. There is a lot of material that a super conservative person probably would be offended by. For example, there are accounts of lesbians having sex and if someone was very religious or ultra conservative, they may not want to read about that. Also, there are stories of women masturbating and once again, religious people may not approve of that. I think that men can read this book if they wanted to. They obviously may not be able to relate to a lot of the topics mentioned, but if they have a women partner, then it could give them some incite on what they go through. I think the perfect age for someone to read this book would be college age. This to me is when people’s sexuality and who they are as a person is truly being discovered and they would feel the most comfortable reading this book. They do not have to worry about their parents or a spouse or partner questioning about why they are reading this book. This book is based off of personal interviews and peoples experiences. I think this book is relatively credible because there are many different women interviews and each woman has their own opinions about the topics brought up in the book. If it were only one women writing her opinions down, it would not really be credited but given that there is over 200 interviewed, I feel that you can trust what Eve Ensler writes in her book. In order to make this book more credible, Ensler could have added maybe a doctor’s take on vaginas. That way, there could be more of a professional opinion used. This book 100% definitely relates to topics we talked about in class. Topics such as sex, love, rape, and masturbation are used to make this book. This class is called Human Sexuality and by incorporating all those topics together is what helps make this class. I really liked how in this book it was a very casual feel. It was not written in a very professional way. This book was very easily understood because it was basically a conversation the whole time. You could actually envision the women who were speaking. Something that helped was that at the beginning of each section, under the title, the women’s ethnicity and where she’s from and possibly a specific accent was listed. This helped add a more personal effect to the story. There really was not information that I actually learned about but there are things in this book that almost opened my eyes. It showed me that many women have the same thoughts and experiences that I have in which I thought I was alone. For example, one woman talked about how she hated tampons because they were so dry. I HATE when a tampon is too dry, it hurts so bad. Something I did learn however, was the African ceremony of circumcision. I had heard of female circumcision before, but I didn’t really no what that entailed. Overall, this was a very good book and I would definitely recommend this book to basically anyone.