| hoosier |
05-03-2005 10:23 PM |
Vagina Day vs Penis Day at Roger Wms. Univ.
Big Manhood on Campus
Writing in National Review Online, Christina Hoff Sommers reports on some hilarious campus goings-on:
College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters [of] Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate "V-Day" (short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. ._._. The costume of the P-Day "mascot" -- a friendly looking "penis" named Testaclese, has been confiscated and is under lock and key in the office of the assistant dean of student affairs, John King._._._.
The campus conservatives artfully (in the college sense of "artful") mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the school with flyers that said, "My penis is majestic" and "My penis is hilarious." The caption on one handout read, "My Penis is studious." It showed Testaclese reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone's Hard America, Soft America.
"Testaclese" tipped the scales when he approached the university Provost, Edward J. Kavanagh, outside the student union. Apparently taking him/it for a giant mushroom, Provost Kavanagh cheerfully greeted him. But when Testaclese presented him with an honorary award as a campus "Penis Warrior," the stunned official realized that it was no mushroom. After this incident, which was recorded on videotape, the promoters of P-Day were ordered to cease circulating their flyers and to keep Testaclese off campus grounds. Mindful of how school officers had never once protested any of the antics of Vagina warriors, the P-warriors did not comply. The Testaclese costume was then confiscated and formal charges followed.
"Unhappily," Sommers writes, "P-Day may be the only effective means of countering V-Day with all its c-fests, graphic lollipops, intrusive questionnaires, outsized effigies of vaginas and its thematic anti-male play."
Unhappily? C'mon, Christina, lighten up! By one estimate 73% of all scholarly and extracurricular activity on American college campuses is ridiculous. The only effective way to combat it is through ridicule. The Roger Williams administration is so threatened by P-Day precisely because it illustrates so vividly that the emperor has no clothes.
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