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Today, of course, is the feast of St. Valentine, the winged baby-man of lore who enjoyed machine-gunning young lovers. Or something like that.

Some of us celebrate the day with greeting cards, flowers and chocolates. Others... don't. (And I'm not just talking about the Saudis.)

But today is also V-Day: A dreary, humorless, utterly unromantic "holiday" born somewhere in Manhattan a decade ago and foisted upon colleges and universities around the world with the modest aim of upending patriarchy, liberating women's sexuality and eradicating violence and rape. Lovely.

Today tens of thousands of young women, and a good number of young men, will march dutifully to theaters and auditoriums across this great land to hear a performance of The Vagina Monologues, a dreary, humorless, utterly unromantic play by Eve Ensler.

A V-Day wouldn't be V-Day without a lot of verbiage about why it's important, and a lot more verbiage about why it isn't. Ensler explains what 10 years of V-Days have accomplished:

In the past ten years there have been so many victories: women speaking the word where it was never uttered, women standing up against local and national governments, religious forces, parents, husbands, friends, university administrators, college presidents, the voice inside them that judges and censors. College students across the world have made V-Day a radical annual event (it's been noted that there are two things on every college campus: a Starbucks and a V-Day), women reclaiming their bodies, telling the stories of their own violations, desires, victories, shame, adventures. Women finding their power, their voice, their leadership ability by becoming accidental activists, women finding each other, women standing up for women in other parts of the world, women releasing memories that have numbed their bodies and depleted their energy, women standing on stage, on edge, in reds and pinks, with New York accents, southern accents, African accents, Indian accents and British accents; speaking, screaming, whispering, laughing and moaning.

Impressive. But don't take Ensler's word for it.

"Eve is bringing women back, she's giving us our souls back," Glenn Close told Time magazine in 2001. Very impressive, indeed!

So what's wrong with that? Apart from insufferable, narcissistic, self-congratulatory rhetoric, one could make the case that V-Day is pretty bad for young women. As I am neither young nor a woman, I'm not prepared to make that case. So I'll let Jenna Ashley Robinson do it for me. Ms. Robinson argues that "V-Day’s outrageous tactics make a mockery of the serious issues facing women around the world. Armed with the knowledge that 'sex sells,' V-Day raises money -- but not respect -- for women’s issues."

What's more, Robinson is no fan of the Vagina Monologues. "Instead of embracing the play as 'emancipating,'" she writes, "feminists should be horrified over this sexual objectification of women. The play strips away any modesty, mystery, or dignity from sexual acts, just as it severs the connection between emotional and physical love. The Vagina Monologues represents sexual objectification -- of women, by women."

By the way, Robinson isn't the first to notice the troubling premise of the play. Yet the criticism has left Ensler baffled: "I am trying for the life of me [to understand] how anybody can protest what V-Day is," she says. "I have no idea why we have a conservative element in this country that doesn't believe in sex." Sure, that's what it is. Conservatives don't believe in sex. Nope. Not at all.

Now, it seems to me one can believe that sex is good and rape, molestation and genocide are evil without being obliged to suffer the pretentious hectoring of Eve Ensler and her V-Day sisters. But reasonable people may differ.

Happy Valentine's Day.