For me, the thought of Valentine’s Day conjures up an image of cut-out pink and purple paper hearts and sappy greeting cards, or maybe chocolates, if I’m feeling lucky. Valentine’s Day, if you’re attached, is generally understood to be a day for love and romance (out of sincerity or obligation or desperation); and, if you’re single, lonely, angst-filled hours of eating pints of ice cream while watching Sex and the City reruns (men and women both, but for different reasons). Until last week, however, this silly girl (and presumably most of the campus, as well) did not associate Valentine’s Day with vaginas.

On February 15 and 16, Dartmouth’s Center for Women and Gender Studies presented the sixth annual production of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues.” In spite of several (very deeply) voiced concerns that - for some reason - Valentine’s Day at Dartmouth has become “like, all feminized and shit,” lesbian femi-nazi man-haters are not actually trying to take over the school. The performance program explains that Dartmouth College has joined the worldwide V-Day Campaign, which sponsors performances of the monologues around the world for the purpose of ending violence against women. Among other facts listed about the V-Day Mission, the program lists that “V-Day is a day: We [involved in the Campaign] proclaim Valentine’s Day as V-Day, to celebrate women, vagina-friendly men, and to end violence against women and girls.”

Perhaps an organized response against violence towards women is indeed on the feminist agenda, but Dartmouth College is not the only place in the world being affected by this so-called feminist craze. The object of a worldwide campaign is not to torment solely the good old boys of Dartmouth, as manly, overly-macho, and totally deserving of it as they may be.

As the narrator explains about the word “vagina” in the opening monologue, it “doesn’t matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say. It’s a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word.” The reason for this awkward unsexiness, she stipulates, has just as much to do with the phonetic gracelessness of the word itself as it does with our societal attitudes about vaginas. Vaginas are taboo, and the mere thought of them makes us uncomfortable. Nonetheless, Ensler’s monologues, a mixture of fact and fiction inspired by the interviews she conducted with women throughout the world, posit that women were not so averse to the subject as they might seem. In these interviews, Ensler asked women to discuss their vaginas, and, according to her observations, “Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one’s asked them before.”

Don’t worry, though. Just because my editors pretty much give me free reign on this article doesn’t mean that I’m going to talk to you about my own vagina. In spite of having both read the monologues and witnessed their performance, I do not quite feel liberated enough for that level of sharing with an anonymous mass audience. If anything, the monologues, although beautifully written and expertly performed, left me feeling less than liberated.

Don’t get me wrong. The intended purpose — to end violence against women by unifying women in their collective acceptance of and love for their own vaginas — is a noble one that I fully support. Ensler’s monologues, however, place so much importance on the vagina itself that they end up conveying the message that a woman is her vagina.

For example, in the monologue titled “The Vagina Workshop,” a woman discusses attending a seminar during which she and the other attendees search for their clitorises so that they may have total control over whenever they reach orgasm and do not rely on a partner to sufficiently (or insufficiently) stimulate them. The woman explains that she fears that she lost her clitoris, and the workshop instructor reassures her that her clitoris was not something that she could lose because “[it] was me, the essence of me. It was the doorbell to my house and the house itself. I didn’t have to find it. I had to be it. Be my clitoris.”

In the monologue “Because He Liked to Look At It,” a woman tells the story of a man who would not have sex with her without first looking at her vagina. When she asked him why he couldn’t just “dive right in,” he explained, “It’s who you are. I need to look.” Think of how you’d feel if a man told you that you were nothing but a vagina, or, gents, how many points that type of pillow talk would score you in real life.

Also, in the monologue “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy,” the speaker immediately states, “I love vaginas. I love women. I do not see them as separate things.”

While Ensler presents these monologues for the purpose of portraying healthy, accepting attitudes about vaginas, I find their message disturbing. Certainly it is good to love vaginas, but (and I honestly never thought I’d have to theoretically explain this to someone as liberated and feminist as Ensler) there is more to a woman than her vagina. It seems contradictory that in an effort to reduce violence against women, Ensler’s work further perpetuates the dangerous concept that the most important part of a woman is her vagina. This is “liberation” to such an extreme that females are now capable of reducing themselves to sexual, baby-popping objects. We don’t need men to objectify us anymore. We, women, can do that ourselves!

I personally enjoyed viewing “The Vagina Monologues,” but I feel that if I actually took to heart every “empowering” philosophy Ensler endorses, even I could not respect myself the next morning.