Funeral Platter

by Greg Ames

  IS THE VAGINA NECESSARY?

  My work on the vagina is well known, both nationally and internationally. I have been an expert in this field for over seventeen years. At a recent academic conference in Houston, I presented my peer-reviewed article, “Vaginas After Adorno: The Legacy of Pseudo Individualism in a Gendered World.” Then I fielded some fascinating questions from the audience. “How does the vagina affect industry in a post-industrial age?” one curious man wanted to know. “What were the newest innovations, if any, in the vagina field?” asked another man. And most importantly: “Is the vagina really necessary, after all?” I enjoyed being in the presence of these scholars, my peers. They were polite, erudite, elderly, drunk.

  My morning panel started out strong. The first two presenters were enthusiastic and delivered their papers with commendable vigor. After thirty minutes, though, I sensed a slight deflation of energy in the room. Their exuberance soon petered out. How much could you really say about this subject? Yes, you could dress it up this way and that, perhaps let Marx and Freud and Foucault take a few whacks at the vagina, which could land you in sticky territory these days, but at the end of the day we were all just regurgitating the same old facts. Many of my colleagues seemed eager to move on to the buffet luncheon and put the whole question behind us.

  Before I began reading my paper, I looked out at the audience. A few of the older scholars nodded off in the front row. They slumped in their seats and snored like infants. Their gray stubbly chins bounced gently on their chests. I raised my voice to combat the hum, but a new commotion kicked up. Somebody had turned on a portable TV in the back of the room. Heads turned in that direction. Chairs scraped on the floor. The vagina, I’m afraid, was already forgotten.

  Hell, I knew it was a dry topic, but as the morning’s keynote speaker, I had an obligation to arouse and titillate my audience. I spoke in a folksy tone of voice without the aid of notes or a PowerPoint presentation. I opened with a few ribald jokes to help loosen things up. Somebody lowered the volume on the TV. I held everybody’s interest when I talked about the inherently faulty structure of the vagina, how it contained numerous design flaws and could be easily fortified and weatherproofed. This concept intrigued my colleagues.

  “Girders?” a man suggested from the back of the room. He held the TV’s remote control in his hand. “What if we added girders?”

  My first thought was no. Girders were not the answer. That type of sweeping change would require, at the very least, permits, and most likely congressional hearings, and perhaps even an amendment to the Constitution. But I didn’t want him to hit the volume again, so I pretended to take his suggestion under advisement. And as the morning wore on I sat with it, played with it. Nobody had spoken up against him or proposed an alternative. In time his suggestion seemed unassailable to us. By 11:35 a.m. we all agreed that girders could and should be implemented in the vagina. There would be dangers, but we were not concerned about that. One couldn’t make an omelet without cracking a few—

  But then a young surgeon from Tulsa stood up and explained the physiological difficulties. He seemed to know what he was talking about. It demoralized us. We were back at square one with the old-model vagina, the same one women have been lugging around since time immemorial. We were, after all, trying to help them, women, and girls, too. We worked hard at this annual conference to improve their lives, so even though we’d hit a temporary snag, we weren’t prepared to admit defeat.

  “I say we install cameras,” a man from Denver suggested during the spirited Q & A session that followed my talk, “so we can always know what’s all up in there. Especially when we’re not around to monitor them ourselves.”

  We chuckled. This gentleman sounded a bit radical for my taste, but he had a point. Our actual face-to-face interaction with the vagina, compared with the inordinate amount of time we spent in our cars or at the gym, was minimal, bordering on nonexistent. Women could have been doing all kinds of funky things with those vaginas when we weren’t looking. Nevertheless, we understood and fully respected that some folks became nervous about surveillance and nobody, I mean nobody, cared more about civil liberties than scholars like myself, a full professor for over two decades with numerous teaching awards under my belt. Another participant talked about recent innovations in chastity belts, a medieval apparatus now gaining popularity in the BDSM community, but I found the topic distasteful and silenced his voice using the power of my microphone, my amplified voice, and my credentials. Nobody questioned my credentials. The man withdrew into himself, and rightly so. We decided to break for lunch.

  On a personal note, this vagina conference is always a thrill for me. It’s my favorite week of the year. Frankly, it’s invigorating to get out of the classroom and into the real world of a convention center. The vagina conference allows me to catch up with my peers, to familiarize myself with cutting-edge research, and to experience life as it’s really lived off the college campus.

  So we broke for lunch in high spirits, feeling productive, but the smoked brisket, unfortunately, was chewy and bland, and the potatoes were cold. I didn’t want to be branded a malcontent and miss out on next year’s conference in Maui, so I said nothing about the provender, but the man seated next to me angrily filled out a complaint card. When I saw that he intended to sign his own name, I reminded him that the waitstaff took their sweet time refilling our coffee cups. He thanked me and added that condemnation as a footnote.

  Well, now, okay, I suppose I’ve danced around “the incident” long enough. I have to admit I’m trying to put a positive spin on the conference, in case any of my colleagues read this think piece, but a strange thing happened at this year’s conference in Houston, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t touch on it.

  In the Men’s room, just after the subpar brisket lunch and minutes before I returned to kick off the second half of the day’s program, I had a brief but shocking crisis of conscience at the urinal. I questioned my own authority. When all was said and done, what did I really know about the vagina? Although I was a confirmed expert in my field (my numerous publications attest to this, not to mention my Gender Studies degree from Duke), wasn’t it true that I had never known what it was like to own a vagina—that is to say, to tune-up and maintain a vagina on an hour-to-hour basis? I had not grown up with one, had not nurtured it through multiple disappointments, had not celebrated its numerous triumphs. I had never once applied a soothing balm, nor had I sung to my vagina a German lullaby such as “Der Hahn is tot” or “Fingerspiel von der Familie,” as I imagined most women did at night when their vaginas were distressed by the day’s events.