In response to the article ”Your Body is a Wonderland’ and You Deserve Respect,’ The cast and crew of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ wanted to clear up some points. First of all, the point of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ is to raise awareness about violence against women, and to help out the local Bowling Green community. Each girl in the production, each crewmember, each musician, each person behind-the-scenes, and each person who has helped in some way has chosen to be apart of this production because of this. Yes, the monologues require you to be of a certain maturity level, and if you feel you may not be mature enough to handle the situations happening on stage, then maybe you need to reevaluate how you view yourself, as a woman, as a man, or simply as a member of this community. Perhaps you’ve lost sight of the fact that a few of the monologues are about rape, violence, and abuse, or maybe you didn’t know that, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, every two minutes a woman is being raped somewhere in America. Maybe you should consider going to vday.org or rainn.org and looking at their ‘Get the Facts’ or ‘Get Info’ sections to help you grasp how serious issues as such are. You cannot, by any means, relate these monologues to something as simple as a male/female relationship. These monologues are not about boyfriends and girlfriends and falling in love. They’re about the sudden realization that you are a woman. They’re about empowerment, about life, about horrors, about passion, about fear, and about issues concerning the vagina, which no matter how many times they are brought to society’s attention, are simply shrugged aside. Those who sponsor ‘The Vagina Monologues’ include The Cocoon shelter; a safe place for battered women to flee to when there’s nowhere else to go and is located here, in Bowling Green, Ohio and Silent Witness, an organization that’s mission statement states their goal is to ‘Promote peace, healing and responsibility in adult relationships in order to eliminate domestic murders in the United States by the year 2010.’ We hope that you, the reader, will not be influenced by one narrow-minded opinion, and we promise you that this production will not disappoint. –Alexandria D’Ettore Saber, Junior