February 14 means different things to a lot of different people.
To many, it is Valentine's Day, the designated day of a saint on which lovers express their feelings through the spending of copious amounts of money.
To others, weary of this tradition and its polarizing nature, it is "Single Awareness Day," which is precisely what it sounds like.
On a more serious note, however, it is "V-Day," the brainchild of Eve Ensler, an American playwright and author.
The "V" in V-Day stands for vagina, as in the body part, play and in-your-face display currently up on the second floor of the Millennium Student Center.
Why do we need a V-Day? Why the display or the play?
Ensler, and anybody who is familiar with her and her movement, would gladly explain, stifling the snickers and embarrassed faces that are the reaction of so many who know nothing about V-Day, save the blatant public image.
The "Vagina Monologues" is a book and a play performed every year around Valentine's Day weekend. The play is meant to accomplish two main things, one practical and one socio-psychological.
The practical goal is unquestionably admirable and worthwhile: to raise money and awareness for the issue of violence against women and girls. This means that all funds both from the performance of the play and from the booths set up around campuses go directly to organizations involved with the issue of violence against women.
The socio-psychological goal of the movement is somewhat more controversial.
This goal is to reclaim words like "vagina" that Ensler believes have become dirty words over the generations, and need to be cherished and respected.
It is also about getting women to understand and accept their bodies and to break a cycle of women being taught to hate their vaginas.
These are some of the reasons why, for one week a year, anyone in the MSC (students, faculty and visitors alike) will be confronted with a ten-foot vagina and implored to take photos inside it or to purchase "vagina pops," which are lollipops shaped in a specific anatomical manner.
These V-Day festivities have, to say the least, been greeted with mixed feelings on college campuses across America.
While some groups feel that they are an indispensable voice of equality, others find V-Day offensive and overdone.
Numerous universities, many of them Catholic institutions, have canceled productions of "The Vagina Monologues."
In 2007, Saint Louis University made the decision not to endorse a production of "The Vagina Monologues," claiming that it was becoming redundant.
The most controversial scene in the play, "The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could," originally featured a 13-year-old girl being raped by a man and traumatized, only to redeem her sexuality when a 24-year-old woman uses alcohol to seduce and commit statutory rape with the girl. This is seen as a positive healing event.
The scene was amended by Ensler to make the girl 16 and remove a line in which she says, "If it was rape, then it was good rape."
On campus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the usual V-Day display has been somewhat toned down as well, due to a flurry of complaints in past years.
In the past at the MSC booth, the lollipops handed out were called "pussy pops," a name whose prominent display in such a public area incurred a fiery response.
This year they are simply "vagina pops."
Also, this past week, when a reception was held in the MSC for the Anheuser-Busch donation of $2.5 million to the University's College of Business Administration, University Events contacted the office of Student Life requesting that the display be covered or removed while the reception was being held.
The display was covered up for the morning.
Bigger than the specific details of the play are its effects. Since its inception, it has raised $50 million for anti-violence organizations around the world.
Ensler has tirelessly campaigned for women in areas ranging from Bosnia to Afghanistan, fighting what she feels are the cultural, social and political reasons rape and other acts of violence continue to affect women.
Whether the tactics chosen to spread this message are the most effective is up to each individual to judge.
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