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Minnesota State student Teresa Parker read "A teenage girl's guide to surviving sex slavery," the newest addition to this year's Vagina Monologues, performed Friday and Saturday in Ostrander Auditorium.
Parker, who has read during each of the past four years' production of the monologues at Minnesota State, says it has always been an amazing experience for her.
"It's incredibly empowering," said Parker, who has also worked with the Women's Center at MSU for more than four years. "All of the women involved in the program here are so great, and we've all been touched by the issues in [the Vagina Monologues]. We want to help raise awareness about a lot of these subjects that aren't so well known or talked about."
The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play created and written by Eve Ensler, a playwright and feminist activist from New York City. The play features various anecdote-driven monologues which all relate in some way to the vagina, whether it be through sex, birth, masturbation, menstruation, rape or the "evil tools" used by gynecologists.
Since 1996, when the first show was performed by Ensler as an off-off Broadway production, The Vagina Monologues has become a Broadway staple, having been translated into 45 languages in more than 100 countries. Ensler adds one new monologue each year, with "A little girl's guide to surviving sex slavery" being the most recent.
The monologue is a moving piece about a fifteen year old girl from Congo who is abducted and turned into a sex slave by military peacekeepers, and is the basis for having 10 percent of this years' ticket sales going to women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"More than 500,000 women and girls have been sexually abused there," said Lauren Pilnick, the sexual violence education coordinator at the Women's Center and co-producer of last weekend's event. "And many of them were victims of the people who were supposed to be protecting them. We want to reach as many people as possible with [The Vagina Monologues] every year, because all of these issues are important."
Since the mid-1990s, the Congo has been involved in an extensive civil war which has taken the lives of almost 6 million people: a number which makes it the world's deadliest military conflict since World War II. The war has forced the displacement of more than 3.5 million civilians, and has brought along with it disturbing rates of kidnapping and sex crimes in the region.
According to a 2008 report by human rights group Amnesty International, the country has seen an average of 50,000 women reporting each year since 1998 that they were raped or sexually abused; many of them by peacekeeping forces in the region who were on missions to protect the civilians.
This has led to a practice known as "sex slavery," in which women and girls are kidnapped to be used repeatedly as sexual slaves for the entire group of captors.
"It's really terrible stuff," said Pilnick. "This year's spotlight monologue is especially important because of the injustices done there. I'm glad to be involved in a movement working to end violence against women."
Parker, too, took solace in knowing her performance helped raise awareness to the women of Congo.
"I [was] really honored to have the chance to read this year's monologue," Parker said. "We've all been touched by this violence in some way. It's really heart wrenching and empowering at the same time."
Saturday's performance of The Vagina Monologues, which filled more than half the seats in Ostrander, left attendees feeling the same way.
"It definitely opens your eyes," said Alan Journer, a junior at MSU who saw the play for the first time. "There are some funny [monologues] and some not-so funny ones, but they all made you think, even for a guy."
People who had seen it before were also impressed with the performance.
"I've probably seen this play about ten times," said Kayla Hathaway, a 2006 psychology graduate from MSU. "I think it gets better every time. The girls this year were very good, they got their parts down really well. My favorite [monologue] has been 'Because he liked to look at it' for awhile now and this year was no different."
The Women's Center at MSU hosts productions of The Vagina Monologues each year, usually around February or early March.
Matt Sauer is a Reporter staff writer
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