Service Learning Log 1

1.  ACTIVISM:

This week I volunteered with Victim services for their free showing of Vagina Monologues.  The show was a great success.  They reached maximum capacity and had to have extra seats brought in! It was great to get a real idea of Victim Services is doing on campus, and the impact they are making with students. The pitfall would be a lack of organization. Myself and some other volunteers included were unsure of what exactly we should be doing. It made me nervous not knowing exactly what my role was.  It was good though to make some connections with people who are very involved in victim Services and to get their opinion on our project.

 2. REFLECTION:

The activism I did this week related to the chapter we are reading in numerous ways. The Vagina Monologues addresses many of the issues women face today. Some more humorous like the way media portrays women.  A good example of the societal pressures pushed upon women through the media, was a monologue about hair. A woman in this monologue discusses how waxing, shaving, lazar , etc, all seem so unnecessary. She even compared her bare vagina to a vagina of a child. It does make you stop and think about why this is the norm, and why women must go to such a silly extreme to feel they are clean and beautiful.  They also talk about the violence issues facing Black women. They touched on how African American women were used as producers of slaves during that era. Their bodies were not respected by any means. Which is also described in our book,  “During slavery times, the rape of black women in the United States was legal and commonplace.”( Kirk, Okazawa-Rey, 263) It continues to talk about how the bodies of African American women were seen as less valued than the bodies of white women. Both the Vagina Monologues and our book continue that this is not an issue that was dealt with in history, but is a very real and still occurring issue today. “The average sentence given to the rapist of a black woman was two years…to the rapist of a Latina…five years and…to the rapist of white women…ten years.” (Kirk, Okazawa-Rey, 264). These statistics are staggers and highlight a real injustice in our society.

By Victim Services bringing this show to campus for free, they were able to educate around 300 students, about issues facing women today. They conversations that the show started are not able to be calculated, but no doubt made an effect on the audience attending, and anyone whom they choose to share their new information with.  The women and men who attended this show were undoubtedly filled with a new sense of pride and outrage of many problems with in society today. I know I felt empowered by the show and I am sure many others did as well.

3. RECIPROCITY:

I know that I gained much more than I put in for helping with the Vagina Monologues. I was able to learn from women who had been through such hard times, and faced many hardships head on. I think from a feminist perspective, the empowering of women is extremely important, and this show definitely strives to do that.