Summary Of Natalie Cohen's Lions Den

Natalie Cohen presented exerpts from her play I Believe in Red Lipstick at the English and Linguistics Senior Seminar on December 1, 2017. Cohen, who presented the play as a staged reading, explores the ideas and experiences of femininity in a series of scenes—vignettes which paint portraits of women's passions and struggles. The scenes she chose to preform varied in their approaches. The second scene titled “Lions Den” is a performance by a ring-leader, played by Kitty Corem, presenting women for sale in an auction. Each women she advertises is an archetype of constructed sexuality, a single mother, a business woman, and a dominatrix. In her monologues, she appeals to the fetishization of certain qualities in the women: their strength and fortitude and their sexual needs.
In the scene she shows that the society sexual objectifies strong female characteristics: power, strength, and authority. Furthermore, she illustrates how men will interpret a woman's strength as a sign of sexual cravings. Patriarchal thinking is so ubiquitous that even subversions of the norm are subject to objectification. The scenario is made more repellent by the framing of an auction, implying a media system collecting or mass-producing these women as a commodity. The women are sold, even as the ring-leader discusses their worth to society; the single mother to her children, the business women to her job, the dominatrix to her clients: their worth itself being packaged and