Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses rape, sexual assault, and domestic and systemic violence against women.

The Vagina Monologues is a specific response to the violence of patriarchal systems and the misogynistic cultures they breed. Patriarchy is a system in which men hold most, or all, of the power because the system views women as secondary. The violence women suffer at the hands of their husbands, partners, strangers, and governments or militaries is a direct consequence of such systems because misogynistic beliefs objectify and dehumanize women. One tool of that system that The Vagina Monologues rebels against is the erasure or censorship of language, like banning the word “vagina” because of its seemingly shameful or overtly sexual connotation. Feminism refers to the resistance and dismantling of such patriarchal systems.

Feminism in the United States is often described using the wave metaphor, which suggests four separate waves of feminism. The first wave describes the fight for women’s right to vote in the early 19th century. The second wave describes the fight for broader gender equality in the 1960s and 1970s. When V performed the original production of The Vagina Monologues in 1996, the United States was in its third wave of feminism, a movement marked by fighting for the liberation of feminine sexual identity, the recognition of gender identity as a social construct, and women taking back their bodies through performance (like The Vagina Monologues).