This year, a newly invented holiday, "V-Day," is being celebrated on 154 college campuses. Intended to replace Valentine's Day, the "V" stands for "vagina," or perhaps "violence" or "victory," apparently inspired by Eve Ensler's one-woman show, The Vagina Monologues. "The shape we call a heart," Gloria Steinem explained, "resembles the vulva far more than the organ that shares its name.... It was reduced from power to romance by centuries of male dominance."

[Ed.: Part of The Vagina Monologues features a sympathetic depiction of an adult woman getting a thirteen-year-old girl drunk and having sex with her. Afterwards, the girl says gratefully, "I'll never need to rely on a man." In an unpublished review of a campus production for the Georgetown University Hoya, Robert Swope noted that if a man "had gotten her liquored up and then had sex with her, rational people... would consider that rape." The reason Swope's review was unpublished, by the way, was that he was fired for writing it, and all of his previous articles were deleted from the paper's Web archive as if he had never worked there. Similarly, the Monologues were later modified to remove any reference to the rape, and V-day organizers even threatened legal action against anyone who staged the original version, ostensibly to ensure an accurate rendering of Ensler's work.]

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