My Vagina Monologue

So, for the Vagina Monologues this year, we've been given the task of writing our own monologue. Here is mine. Though this may seem impersonal, this atrocity has been own my mind for quite a few months. It has moved me to consume less and only buy from second hand shops. My heart has been consumed by this problem, and I'm not really sure how to fix it.

We use clothing to show the world ourselves. Dressing however you wish has been the mark of individuality. It’s the rebellion to dress codes, uniforms, even communism. It is been deemed art, an expression of our inner soul. Weeks in New York, Streets in California, stations on TV have been devoted to help you express yourself. Dressing fashionably, wearing tee shirts and jean, the inner hippy style—all are expressions of who you are.

Who am I?

I am complicit in slavery, an accomplice in the exploitation of women, and so are you.

Just as the style of clothing we wear is an expression, so is every garment we put on ourselves. The artful fashions we so desire, our individuality, are stitches of exploitation of an overworked, underpaid woman all over our body.

Don’t care for high fashion?

Don’t worry; your five dollar tee-shirt from a discount store is stitched from the same sweat, blood and labor of this woman. How else do you think a shirt gets that cheap?

We enjoy our cheap clothes; we aren’t the ones paying. She is.

She’s paying with her hope for a better life, only to be an indentured servant in a job that she can never leave. Her bed is housed in a factory, her meals are prepared by a factory, and her healthcare is administered by her master, her job—if you can even call it that.

Is a job a place you can never leave? Hers is a place that has barbed wire, keeping her in, not unwanted visitors out. She breathes in particles that ruin her lungs because she can never go home; her home is her work.

No choices, no way out.

Her body becomes her only bargaining tool for a promotion—not only her labor, and time, but where her boss rapes and sexually assaults her under the false promise of better pay and a way out—this never happens. She is a slave to her meager wages, wages she cannot live on, wages that kill her physically and emotionally.

She makes it possible for us to have a $5 tee shirt, for us to have individuality, for us to have fashion week, and style.

She must be worth less than us, less than me, less than you.

She never has individuality, or fashion week, and forgot about style. Her individuality is checked at the guarded factory door, washed away by the toxic chemicals to make your cardigan, and capris, and torn away from her by the fiber particles that make their way into her lungs.

Yes, every stitch in our clothes is made by the woman on the hard cement factory floor who is exploited, raped, and victim to our self expression and individuality. Our clothes are our proud display that we are complicit in her slavery for our fashion.