BEYOND PARODY.

Intersectionality rots your brain, earlier this year.

In the fifteen years or so that Cold Spring Shops has been covering the academic crack-up, Eve Ensler's talkative cooch has gone from an approved way to take the fun out of Valentine's Day (whilst cocking a snook at the Catholic Church) to a microaggression to excessive cisnormativity (a neologism unknown at the time the Shops opened.)

The beat goes on.

“The Vagina Monologues” is simply not “in line” with the values of both [Eastern Michigan's Women's Resource Center] and the Department of Diversity and Community Involvement, which include “celebrating the diverse representations of women on campus” and “supporting and empowering minoritized [c.q.] students and challenging systems and structures that perpetuate inequities.”

The decision was expected following conversations with students and feedback from a “Not all women have vaginas” workshop the prior academic year.

Gosh, wasn't the whole reconstruction of St. Valentine's Day as V-Day a way of challenging systems and structures of courtship that perpetuated inequities in the first place?

Better that the oppressive structures of hearts and flowers not be deconstructed in order that crossers ought not have their distinctive anatomies minoritized?

No, I am NOT making that up, either.

Other colleges have simply created vagina-optional knockoffs to pacify students who considered the original noninclusive, including Fordham, University of California-Berkeley, Middlebury College (Ensler’s alma mater) and trans-accepting women’s college Mount Holyoke.

Plymouth State University in Massachusetts, in contrast, kept the vaginas but hosted the production in a church last year.

As if Eastern Michigan doesn't have more important things to worry about, like keeping the doors open? Competing with Oberlin and Middlebury and Mount Holyoke for the most easily aggravated gender studies students doesn't sound like a winning strategy.

I'll give J. H. Kunstler the acidulous final word.  "[T]o suggest that there was anything to these divisions of sexual space amounts to another punishable offense, but that is probably the least of the dreary consequences in this contest."