"Conservative Women Fight Back"

(Cross-posted at The American Street)

I have a meager appetite indeed for the opinions of the people I've come to think of as The Loveless Ones. The farther I can stay from the issue of their cramped and crabbed and tightly clenched minds, the saner my brain and calmer my liver. I'm not saying I hide from discourse inimical to my prejudices; it's just that sometimes people say and do things that are so ugly and uncharitable and ice-hearted and spiteful that unless I look away sharply and hold my breath and count to ten I will melt to an enraged little grease spot. I'm reminded of Homer Simpson's retort at the gun shop: "Seven-day waiting period? But I'm angry now!"

Today's Washington Post Style Section features a piece on one Monique Stuart, a 24-year-old who appears to have carved a niche for herself in conservative circles and scored a gig at the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute as the Official In-House Scourge of The Vagina Monologues.

Stuart appears to be even more monumentally stupid than even this job title suggests. "The play," she asserts, "defines women as their sexual organs," leaving little doubt about the acuity of her literary judgment and the accuracy of her interpretive skills. (She attended Roger Williams U.: Perhaps someone from the English Dept. might like to step forward and Take Responsibility...) She does claim to have seen the play, apparently several months after having formed an implacable onus against it on the word of conservative author Christina Hoff Sommers, although I'm utterly flummoxed how anyone who has seen or read it can possibly come to her conclusion.

Perhaps the funniest mental image engendered by the article is this one:

During winter break of her senior year, she retyped "The Vagina Monologues," replacing every use of the word "vagina" with "penis," and called the result "The Penis Monologues."

As she is a stripling of tender years, her senior year in college can only be a couple bends back in the rearview mirror, which leads me to wonder even more about her mother wit: it took approximately three minutes this morning to find an online copy of the play (probably a copyright violation), and search-and-replace "vagina" with "penis." Given the technology available even in the dark days of 2003, retyping the entire play seems quixotic to the point of numbskullery.

But this is the kind of dedication and intellectual application that earns one a place of honor at the ineffable (and unpronounceable) Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute.

Here's a typical result of the crude search-and-replace method for devaginating The Vagina Monologues:

Women love to talk about their penises, they do. They really do. Mainly because no one's ever asked them before.

Golly yes, that is an eye-opener, isn't it? My word.

The point being, replacing "vagina" with "penis" yields a result that is sophomoric Dadaism -- unless you reedit the entire play and replace every female character with a man.

Michelle Malkin linked approvingly to the Post article this morning with the one-liner: "Conservative women fight back." (No link, sorry. You can find it yourself.)