When Robert Swope, a senior at Georgetown University, submitted his regular column to the school newspaper last week criticizing the campus production of The Vagina Monologues, the editors of the Hoya were swift in rejecting it. Why? They thought the columnist's repeated attacks on the Women's Center (which sponsored the show last year) "hurt the newspaper's credibility." Swope says that since October, he has written only twice on women's issues, which may have been two times too many. He complained he was being censored, which led to his getting fired and the article being killed.
THE SCRAPBOOK has obtained the unpublished piece, which was certainly impolitic, since it provided verbatim quotes from the play, including the part in which an adult woman gets a 13-year-old girl drunk and has her way with her. When it's all over, the grateful girl says, "I'll never need to rely on a man." (For more on The Vagina Monologues, see David Brooks's "Our Bodies, Our Surgeons," in the Feb. 7 WEEKLY STANDARD.)
Swope finds it incongruous that the nation's oldest Catholic university is staging a play in which audiences cheer a lesbian seduction. He makes the obvious point that if a man "had gotten her liquored-up and then had sex with her, rational people . . . would consider that rape."
Georgetown was last in the news when the leaders of the Jesuit institution were resisting a student movement to restore crucifixes to the classroom. Celebrations of lesbian rape are apparently another matter. And for some reason, says a bemused Swope, administrators still pretend to be baffled when conservative students complain that the school is losing its Catholic identity.