"The Flood"

“The Flood” is about a woman who had a negative experience on a date and then stopped interacting with her vagina. The same silliness about personifying vaginas is found.

In the introduction, the author laments how one person she interviewed was seventy-two and had never looked at her vagina. She had also never had an orgasm nor touched herself except while cleaning. Being a man, I obviously don’t know what it is like to have a vagina nor do have never seen my own. I asked a woman about why she thought Ensler would mourn the fact this woman never looked at hers. She said that while there are plenty of reasons to look at one’s vagina, it is never necessary. She thinks that Ensler believes that the vagina is so crucial to a woman’s identity that without investigating it, a person is not truly a woman. Obviously, a woman needs to know she is a woman and come to terms with this. This is part of psychosexual development. However, does a woman need to see her vagina to be a woman? Blind men do not see their penises. Are they lesser men for it? No. Only a person who misunderstands what it means to be a person would be so obsessed with genitalia to think this. As for only touching herself while cleaning, this seems to be correct behavior. Women who masturbate are not liberated but enslaved. Men, too, should not touch themselves in the way that Ensler suggests.

As for the remark about an orgasm, if she were married, this would be sad indeed. She would be missing out on some part of her marriage. On the other hand, since she is not married in this scene, this shouldn’t be so shocking. One does not have to have had an orgasm, to have had sexual experience, to be a fully integrated person. The single, chaste life is completely human. Only people obsessed with pleasure, in a Freudian sense, would say otherwise.

In between each scene there are facts about vaginas. The first one comes after the scene “The Flood.” There is nothing wrong with the fact as it is presented.