Oswego’s Women’s Health Center put on their version of the award winning play “The Vagina Monologues,” on April 12, in the Hewitt Union Ballroom.

The play is a collaboration of V-Day founder Eve Ensler’s interviews with over 200 women about vaginas.

According to the official V-Day website, V-Day is a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls around the world. The activist movement has brought attention to the violence of women and girls that happens everyday, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation and sex slavery.

A group of Oswego women, both students and faculty of Oswego State, each took a monologue and performed in front of the small audience that attended. The performance discussed topics many women think but do not actually say. As the audience watched some monologues may have caught them off guard with the blunt and raw humor. The words and phrases that the actresses were saying were comical and sometimes uncomfortable, definitely making blushing audience members cringe. However, it made many people realize how true these monologues were, and how women are made to believe that these topics are only things they secretly think about and do not express with other women.

Among the comedy, there were also serious vagina monologues, the ones we know occur but are sometimes afraid to talk about. Rape was one of these monologues and the audience was silent, realizing that, all laughing aside, there are serious issues affecting women. Throughout the play, the women audience, looked back and forth at each other laughing and nodding with approval as they agreed with whispers and facial expressions that this was the raw truth of women and of vaginas. After watching such a profound play, the room had an overwhelming feeling of strength and courage between women and a new sense of a vagina community.

As a whole, the play was inspirational and well put together. Although the actresses read the monologues off a sheet of paper instead of having the monologues memorized, it was not at all distracting. Each woman gave her own attitude and personality to the monologue. Toward the end of the performance there was supposed to be a video that would play, coming off the V-Day website but, due to technical difficulties, it was unable to be played. Again this was not a distraction, because the actresses and venue had given the audience such a relaxed feeling. At the end of the performance, the women who recited the monologues each stood up and said why they were standing up for this cause. One woman emotionally explained that she should not have to be alone in dealing with the sexual abuse she has faced, while another said that she wants to teach her sons to respect women.

“The Vagina Monologues” was a moving play that will forever have an impact on how women will see this issue, pushing them even more to stand up for women around the world.