Giving You Some Lip

The yoni is sacred in Hindu mythology. In Sanskrit, the word may refer to a vagina, a temple, a divine passage, or the seat of all creation. In India, offerings are left before deep clefts in rock, and temple doors are explicitly endowed. Real female sexuality is, of course, something quite different. Any woman walking through an Indian marketplace is fair game for a debasing brush-up, and a woman holding a man's hand in public is regarded as a whore. While authors, artists, and architects openly celebrate the sexual feminine, desi (South Asian) women are expressly warned to remain silent. Then along came Yoni Ki Baat.

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Inspired by Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Yoni Ki Baat started with an open call for candid experience. The response was surprising, even to the desi feminists in organizing group the South Asian Sisters. Tales of rape, incest, pleasure, passion, discovery, and amusement filled their, uh, inboxes, broke taboos, and sold out halls. Now, in its fifth year, Yoni Ki Baat celebrates with an assemblage of its best monologues — everything from an Indian woman's adventures in S&M to a 10-year old's befuddling foray into the world of feminine hygiene products. Unlike at last week's El Rio show, men are welcome tonight as long as they can handle Pakistani and Bangladeshi women pronouncing the word "pussy."
Sat., March 15, 5:30 p.m., 2008