V-Day Blog Archive

The Nation: When in Rome – A Report from the First V-World Summit

By Jennifer Baumgardner

On September 29, while Tony Blair was arguing for Britain to align itself with Bush on war in Iraq, female Labour Party MPs were speaking up for vaginas. In fact, they were doing the first-ever parliamentary performance of Eve Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues. Ensler, who did the unthinkable as an artist by forgoing her royalties on productions of The Vagina Monologues, offering it free to any campus or community as long as it does the play in its entirety and uses the performance as a fundraiser to benefit antiviolence initiatives, has made it her latest unimaginable goal to end violence by 2005.

When people say to her, “You can’t,” she responds, “Why?” like a powerful, precocious 4-year-old, replete with Little LuLu hairstyle and a predilection for hearts and boas. The most recent enterprise of Eve and the women of V-Day (the organizing arm and virtual-as in there’s no office-foundation that came out of The Vagina Monologues’ success) was to call a V-World Summit. On September 20-21 two dozen antiviolence activists from around the world got together in Rome–to share strategies, align their resources and eat gnocchi. The resulting meeting was, like the V-Day phenomenon itself, deeply political while still being fun and girly: Camp David meets Bridal Shower.

After a well-attended press conference presided over by the mayor of Rome, the activists–only three of whom were from the United States, while several had never before left their home country–gathered at a hilltop hotel. The group of women sat in a circle on red cushions, exchanging red or heart-shaped gifts. “Do you know how hard it is to find a red object in Bulgaria after the fall of Communism?” complained Mariana Katzarova, a journalist, as she presented hers.

After Carole Black, the CEO of Lifetime and a major supporter of V-Day, gave everyone sterling heart bracelets from Tiffany, the women went around the room and described their relationship to V-Day. Agnes Pareyio, a round-faced 46-year-old Masai woman, had a story that was typical for this group. For years, she traveled village to village in southwestern Kenya on foot, educating girls about female genital mutilation. Circumcised herself, she urged girls not to get “the cut” and discussed other ways they could mark their transition to adulthood. Her one tool in this mission was a plastic female torso with removable vulva. Pareyio would show a whole vulva, then one without a clitoris (the circumcision ritual in Kenya, recently outlawed but still widespread) and finally a vagina that had been infibulated, which is the removal of labia minora and clitoris and the stitching shut of the vulva, leaving just a tiny hole. (When a girl is married, that pea-sized aperture is expanded to accommodate sex by inserting an animal horn.)

Eve saw Agnes sitting in a field conducting a class two years ago and asked her what V-Day could do to facilitate her work. Agnes said, “If I had a jeep, I could get to many more girls.” So they got her a blue jeep with V-Day printed in white on the top, a satellite phone and, this year, gave her $65,000 for a “safehouse” for girls escaping genital mutilation. A second safehouse might open later this year.

Traditionally, women in Kenya aren’t allowed to own property, so the vision of Agnes zipping around the savannah in her jeep, talking on her cell, is sort of like seeing a giraffe in the White House-or The Vagina Monologues in the halls of the British Parliament.

As each woman explained how V-Day “changed her life” (echoing the response women had to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique forty years ago), the rest of the activists wiped tears from their cheeks or threw their heads back and howled with laughter or wrinkled their brows in sympathy. Occasionally someone talked about violence in her own life of which she had never spoken, and a woman from across the circle (and literally from a different part of the world) would recognize the story as like her own, run over, squat down and hug her.

Like any important feminist meeting, though, it wasn’t all catharsis and bonding. The second day was devoted to developing strategy for eliminating violence, the practical and urgent reason for the summit.

V-Day is misunderstood as merely glitzy entertainment; performances of The Vagina Monologues have been used to marshal millions of dollars and raise consciousness about issues that affect women. These issues are generally under the radar of US politics–such as the Taliban’s treatment of women before 9/11. So when I arrived on day two I expected to see the women contemplating laws or analyzing the Constitution of South Africa. Instead, Eve asked them to imagine a “V-World” and posed these kinds of vague questions: “When there is no more violence, will it change your relationship to your identity? To sex? What frightens you about giving up violence? What makes you violent?” Visiting each breakout group, the women themselves–so fierce the day before–suddenly seemed mired in the most simplistic discussions. “In a world without violence, would we still get to have rough sex, or wouldn’t we want it anymore?” went one pressing debate among European activists.

Hours later, however, when the women began revealing their V-Day plans for the next two years, an important transformation occurred.

Their ideas were visionary. Rossana Abueva and her partner Monique Wilson, who have organized the V-Days in the Philippines and all over Asia, will spearhead a star-studded event in Tokyo in 2004 to shame the Japanese government into finally apologizing to the 200,000 “comfort women” enslaved and raped by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Eve is going, of course, and they plan to fly in celebrities and as many living comfort women from around the world as they can find, making a connection between the old comfort women and the “new comfort women”–girls who are sex-trafficked. Thus far, more than fifty damage suits have been filed against Japan; most have been rejected. If the V-Day event manages to be as big and splashy as Eve hopes, they could succeed in humiliating the government. Wilson and Abueva pointed out that in Japan, being disgraced can have serious consequences. Thus, the hope is that the V-Day shaming will provide more catharsis for the comfort women than have the UN reports and failed court cases.

Meanwhile, the V-Day 2003 that they are planning in Kabul (which is again unimaginable–vaginas and burqas?) will feature Eve, Jane Fonda and any other activist who can get there. The performance will be in a theater in a once-magnificent park in Kabul that is now barren, all of its trees cut down for firewood. Eve wants to bring in women from around the world to plant red flora in the park before the show.

Shabnam Hashmi, from New Delhi, isn’t doing a V-Day, but she requested that activists come to Gujarat, the site in western India of horrific ethnic cleansing of Muslims that has been largely ignored or tolerated by the media and the government. “We’ll come,” said Eve. “When do you need us?”

Watching her in action, it’s hard not to be impressed by Eve and V-Day–yet her grandiosity irks many, feminists included. They worry that she is self-promoting, or that her “Let’s end violence in eight years” plot is naïve. That’s all beside the point, though. The salient question is, “Is V-Day effective in liberating women and ending violence?” The answer to that query is “yes”–and at a time when people tend to dismiss the women’s movement as a thing of the 1970s, V-Day boasts 1,281 events around the world and $14 million raised in the past few years. It grants more money to antiviolence initiatives than the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) does; this year, UNIFEM has dedicated $1 million to be divided among twenty-two countries. (On November 25, the UN-decreed International Day to End Violence Against Women, UNIFEM is bringing together four international activists who have made concrete strides in ending violence against women–and Eve will be on hand, too.)

Meanwhile, the women in that room in Rome had a hand in saving hundreds, if not thousands, of girls from genital mutilation. A 16-year-old Guatemalan girl named Valerie Lopez helped get her sister Marsha out of an abusive relationship-and the two (with their mother) went on to produce a sellout performance of The Vagina Monologues in Guatemala City. Noelle Colome organized a V-Day in San Francisco that raised half a million dollars. V-Day focused on Afghanistan last year and raised $173,000 to benefit Afghan women, in addition to the $120,000 raised so far. And V-Day isn’t simply focusing on women “out there,” ignoring the problems in our own backyard. This year the spotlight is on “Indian Country” — Native American reservations, among the poorest places in the United States. Next month, a V-Day delegation will travel to Egypt, Jordan and the Middle East to talk with female peace activists. V-Day intends to bring media attention to these inspiring but overlooked activists and convey their strategies for peace to policy-makers in the United States.

V-Day has other grand and galling plans: “We are launching the 1 Percent Campaign in February [2003],” announced Eve during the Saturday strategizing session, sitting cross-legged on her cushion. “We are calling for every country with a military budget to donate 1 percent of the budget to ending violence against women.” In the United States, that would be somewhere around $4 billion. “That’s far too much to ask for,” gasped an American woman who lives in Milan and provided the decadent dinners for the group each night. “Well, I started off thinking we should ask for 20 percent,” said Eve, laughing.

The most profound contribution of V-Day, though, might be simply saying the word and performing the piece. It plays differently around the world, but there isn’t a hunk of land anywhere where it’s uncontroversial. Irene Ndaya Martine Nobote from Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, was arrested for staging a production of The Vagina Monologues; other women have had to face injunctions and restraining orders, the scorn of their peers and their own fears. “I wish I could say I was with V-Day from the very beginning,” Jane Fonda said at the summit’s press conference. The woman unafraid of going to Hanoi against her government’s wishes turned down an opportunity to perform The Vagina Monologues because she was terrified of saying “vagina.” All these fearless activists nodded their heads when Fonda admitted that “I was afraid to name my most core part.” Overcoming her fear has meant huge transformations in Fonda’s own life and undying loyalty to V-Day–which means not just her presence in Rome but more than $1 million in donations.

Janet Kiarie of Nairobi, Kenya, had a different click of consciousness. She was enlisted by Agnes Pareyio to host a V-Day last year. She read the monologues aloud with her colleagues in the women’s movement, but they all concluded that there would be too much backlash: “It felt just wrong talking about our vaginas,” Kiarie recalled. “I resigned from helping with V-Day” and, instead, just hosted a meeting for Eve and others traveling from the United States. After the meeting, Kiarie went home and asked her 7-year-old daughter if she knew what “down there” was. Her daughter didn’t know the word for vagina–not in English and not in Kikuyu, her own language. “That’s when I realized I was depriving her of her own sexuality in some way,” said Kiarie, “by being afraid of my own.” If we needed any more evidence that the personal is political, this is it.

[The original article is available at The Nation]

Vagina’s Ensler Knows She’s Made a Difference

By Joshunda Sanders, Chronicle Staff Writer

Playwright in final engagement at Geary

Six years ago, the word “vagina” had a pretty low profile. It’s an awkward and clinical little word and ranks high on a short list of “embarrassing” references to female anatomy. After all, it sounds like a cold or an exotic delicacy.

That’s pretty much how “The Vagina Monologues,” a play based on Eve Ensler’s interviews with 200 women and their relationships to “down there,” was regarded. Soon it became clear that underneath the slick humor and raw pain, “The Vagina Monologues” was less about that word and more of a metaphor for how women regard themselves, their intimacy and their freedom.

Ensler, 49, wrote the play largely in reaction to her personal experience as a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. It was her way of moving the world away from violence against women. How the play won an Obie Award after three months in a small New York theater, inspired a global movement and became the catalyst for men and women worldwide to contemplate that part of the anatomy is still a mystery to her.

“When I first started doing this show,” Ensler says with a thick New York accent, “you couldn’t say the word, and now it’s all over the place. It’s great.” Quite literally, the monologues seem to have been everywhere. They’ve been translated into 28 languages and performed in more than 40 countries. She’s be performing the play as a one-woman show for the last time at the Geary Theater; her final performance is on Aug. 11.

“It just felt like the right time,” Ensler says simply. “I won’t be performing it after that, but the life of the play will get bigger and bigger.”

In some ways, it already has. “The Vagina Monologues” is currently being performed in three cities, each year it’s performed on hundreds of college campuses — and Ensler expects the numbers will continue to grow long after she’s left the stage.

In the meantime, she will continue her international crusade to end violence against women through the V-Day foundation, which she started and has funded with proceeds from the monologues. Ensler refers to most of her work with V-Day as “The movement,” and she embodies and inspires that phrase — the woman never sits still.

The same wry humor and electric energy she lends to her one-woman show follows her offstage. On this afternoon, she’s drinking a cup of cappuccino, complimenting a stranger on her frilly pink dress and wondering whether to change her all-black satin outfit for the benefit she’s speaking at in less than an hour. She does serious work, she is passionate about her purpose, but she’s also an expressive diva who carries a purse with a red and silver “V” on it. (It was a birthday present.)

“I really love women, and I believe if we come into our own power, the human species will go on, and if we don’t, it won’t,” she says. Her passion is infectious, her vision wide and varied as her body of work. Ensler has written 12 plays and is in the process of doing what she seems to do best: more.

She’s writing a book and play called “The Good Body” about the ways women mutilate and tailor their bodies to fit popular images of women in their cultures. She’s adapting “Necessary Targets,” her play about Bosnian women, to film. And she is constantly organizing for her V-Day foundation, which sponsors a national celebration every year around Valentine’s Day.

Perhaps the most important part of her work, though, comes from her ability to hear and convey women’s stories. Ensler was a playwright for more than 20 years before the monologues became popular, writing for the stage because “it’s a place where you can fully be your emotional self, it’s so vulnerable.” She is hungry for the narratives of women’s lives, wherever she can find them. But it’s still a bit of an adjustment for her to have strangers telling her their life stories.

“You never get used to it,” Ensler says. “Everyone’s life is so important, all of their stories are so unique.”

Ensler’s foundation raised $8 million last year, organized a meeting with dozens of Afghan women and built a safe haven for women seeking asylum from the threat of female genital mutilation in Kenya. Those changes have made all the difference to Ensler; they are part of the reason she’s continued performing the play from Jerusalem to San Francisco (which she refers to as the “Vagina World Fair Zone”).

“I’ve always felt so deeply for women,” Ensler says. “Seeing how much they do in silence, how unrecognized they are. When I was little, I just couldn’t understand why they weren’t running the world.”

As the somewhat accidental spokesperson for a word usually reserved for the gynecologist’s office, Ensler has also found personal liberation through her work. As her performances of “The Vagina Monologues” come to an end, it’s clear that her responsibility to increasing the visibility of the feminine mystique has only just begun.

“I was a hippie girl, I thought I’d die before 30,” she says, shaking her head. “But I finally came into the work I was meant to do. I found the love of my life, I have money to give away and I feel I have a purpose.”

Eve Ensler’s Speech to The Commonwealth Club Available Online

On February 11, 2002, Eve Ensler spoke at the Commonwealth Club of California on the condition of women in Afghanistan, and the implications for women around the world.

You can read or listen to the speech online at The Commonwealth Club website.

Hedging or Edging?

An attractive man pulls up in a convertible to ask me where he can find The
Vagina Monologues. I have to tell him that I’m still looking as I wander
towards the closest building at Caesar’s Palace, venue of South Africa’s
first V-day event, musing that the bizarre interchange is probably one of
the more meaningful I’ve had on the topic of women’s sexuality.

Germaine Greer may mock Eve Ensler’s enactment of women’s ‘search’ for their
vaginas (which perhaps are easier to find than the car keys), but to nitpick
this play in her article “Paying lip service”, she often has to force a
surprisingly literal reading on her audience. And anyway, hasn’t the grande
dame herself had a few false starts after turning on the ignition?

I’m beginning to think critics like Greer simply feel upstaged by a woman
who has managed to popularize feminist issues in a way that few would have
dreamed possible, whose fund-raising campaign to end violence against women
has been so successful world-wide that the Harvard Business School requested
its use as a case study. I recently had the opportunity to ask Ensler about
her friends, foes and future visions.

Among your supporters you have both feminists and “women who don’t define
themselves”. Why has “feminism” become such a dirty word do you think? I
think it’s because everyone has bought into the pathology of patriarchy that
has tried to stigmatise and cannibalise feminism. For me personally,
feminism is about desire. I think that if you know your desire and you have
a vision of your desire, you can fulfill your desire within this lifetime. I
don’t think it’s more complex than that. If you’re a person who has been
battered, abused or raped, you don’t have that desire, you don’t even have
enough esteem to desire.

Greer says that you’re making points about women’s attitudes to their bodies
that feminists made 30 years ago, that this is all ‘old hat’ . Why is that a
criticism? I mean to imply that feminism is outdated means that we’re all
liberated and there’s no more violence and as far as I can tell that hasn’t
happened yet.

What about the area of women taking responsibility for their ambivalence,
their aggressive impulses towards one another? Are you ever critical of
women? I think women need to take responsibility for how deeply we’ve been
trained to put one another down, but to be honest, I’m never really critical
of women, not publicly. I don’t believe in the press reality, the way you
approached this interview by finding my critics, for example .

Dialogue, balance, I think? I’ve been reading out lines from the critics,
including the Camille Paglia. Instead I say, Well, in a way I feel obliged
to raise them because I feel I am too supportive of your cause. But just
look at that, just examine that as a journalist, what does it mean to be too
supportive of someone’s cause?

Well, people don’t believe you otherwise, you have to be a bit nasty . What
is that about? And why do we all keep feeding into that, it makes me crazy.
The woman who wrote this piece [pointing to Susan Dominus in the New York
Times Magazine] was sent back to “get more edge” and she bought into it.

But are you so different from a journalist? I often have to find the angle
that will get me the space to say what I want to say . But take that as a
metaphor! That’s what’s killing women: “I’ve got to find the angle to allow
myself to come through”. Once women do that they give up their big power …

But haven’t you done this too? The celebrities, the sexual angle . No I have
not done it, I have said exactly what I wanted to say in the way I have
wanted to say it. I have not angled myself and I believe that’s why The
Vagina Monologues is having this impact.

It feels so refreshing to be chided in this way, like a blessing in fact.
That I should even find myself trying to ‘peddle’ women’s rights through a
defensive or protective ‘edge’ an utter absurdity.

On the night of SA’s first V-day event I watch people throw their heads back
with laughter, wave their arms in the air, and ululate to music performances
so inspiring I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It’s a vision taking shape, something Ensler describes as “the really
empowering thing – when you realise the community is attracting the
community and you don’t need outside names”. And while feminists like Greer
have in the past provoked what is probably justifiable anger, this
self-professed ‘radical’ seems to work more with joy – in the most unlikely
places.”

Harlem Reclaims the ‘V’ Word

The womb is the beginning of life. As Webster’s says “a place where something is generated.” So it is only fitting that Eve Ensler’s revolutionary play, “the Vagina Monologues,” would come to Harlem — the soul of African-American culture — and breathe new life into an already powerful work of performance art. [more]

Eve Ensler Interviewed Live from Afghanistan on Democracy Now

To hear an audio replay of this radio interview with Eve Ensler, following this link to Democracy Now.

‘Vagina’ Playwright Tours Kabul

By Beth Lewandowski

WASHINGTON (CNN) — “Vagina Monologues” playwright Eve Ensler is taking her message of women’s solidarity to Kabul, Afghanistan, this weekend in honour of Friday’s International Women’s Day.

Ensler will participate in roundtable talks with 30 Afghan women leaders on Saturday and Sunday.

The meeting is a follow-up to the Afghan Women’s Summit held in Brussels in December 2001, when several dozen delegates met with officials from the European Union, the United Nations and the U.S. State Department.

“From Kosovo to Kabul, women are often the targets of war, but in order for peace to be restored, they must be the centre of the solution,” Ensler told CNN recently.

“We are focusing on bringing the stories of these women to the world. These stories must be told if we are going to stop this from happening again.”

Ensler also will be delivering satellite phone systems with solar chargers and free airtime to the women so they can communicate with each other and their advocates in the West.

She also might be sharing some of her works with the women, according to her press staff — including perhaps some of the newest monologues she wrote in honour of V-Day 2002, Ensler’s worldwide campaign to end violence against women.

V-Day has grown from a Valentine’s Day benefit performance of “The Vagina Monologues” in New York in 1998 to more than 800 events taking place around the world this year between January 24 and April 20.

One V-Day 2002 event at the Folk Theatre in Manila was attended by a sold-out crowd of 8,500.

To date, Ensler has raised more than $7 million to benefit grassroots organizations working to stop rape, incest, female genital mutilation and sexual slavery of women and girls.

This year’s funds will go to safe house projects for rape victims in Kenya and the Native American Sioux reservation in South Dakota.

Ensler previously visited Kabul about 18 months ago while researching a new play.

While “The Vagina Monologues” may seem an improbable launching pad for a social and political movement like V-Day, Ensler — who is the first to admit that just saying the “V” word can cause enormous controversy — believes the world is ready.

“Women are really hungry to tell their stories and to really say what’s going on, and for the most part they don’t have a lot of opportunities to do that,” she told CNN backstage at a recent performance of “The Vagina Monologues” at the National Theater in Washington.

“I think when they are given an opportunity, it’s a wellspring. Things just open up and it comes pouring out.”

Ensler will be in London for a star-filled benefit performance of “The Vagina Monologues” on April 5 at the Royal Albert Hall.

Marie Claire: COVER STORY

Marie Claire features V-Day and Claire Danes as its March cover story!
You can also check out Marie Claire’s online campaign to end violence here.

A Playwright’s Global Dialogue on Domestic Violence

By Lisa Keys

To say that playwright and activist Eve Ensler has a unique way of looking at the world would be an understatement.

“I used to see the world in terms of races, classes, cities and countries,” said Ensler, dressed, as she nearly always is, in all-black clothes with fire-engine red lipstick. “Now I see it as having vaginas and not having vaginas; vagina-friendly or not vagina-friendly.”

From Ensler’s perspective — which, today, is from a box above Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom — the world has been “vagina-friendly” indeed. Her award-winning play, “The Vagina Monologues” — created from interviews with dozens of women about their most intimate organ — has enjoyed a wildly successful, star-studded, six-year run off-Broadway.

Perhaps even more remarkable, however, is the global success of the charity that grew out of the play: “V-Day,” which raises money and awareness to combat domestic violence. Since the first celebrity-laden V-Day benefit in 1998, the organization has raised $14 million, $7 million in 2002 alone. Ensler allows any group to perform “Monologues,” eschewing royalties as long as the profits are donated to domestic violence groups. This year, more than 1,000 V-Day performances will be held around the world, more than half of them on American college campuses.

Nevertheless, Ensler, 49, didn’t have global charity in mind when she wrote “Monologues” in 1996. “I had surviving as a downtown playwright in mind,” she quipped as she enjoyed a breakfast of yogurt and cherries.

“The journey has been surprising,” she said. “In a way, the vagina is mysterious; this whole process has been similar. The same way the vagina unfolds on its own, my job keeps unfolding on its own.”

That’s typical Ensler, who has been called the “Best Feminist in America” by Time magazine but deflects praise to someone — or something — other than herself.

To her critics, Ensler has been called grandiose, dogmatic, naive. “People might think it’s naive to think you can end violence,” she responds. “So what. I believe it’s possible to end the violence, the raping, the mutilation, the beating. I’m going to hold that vision.”

In her mission to end domestic violence, Ensler has traveled everywhere from Croatia to Sudan to the Lakota reservations in the Plains states. This fall, she organized a “V-World Summit” in Rome, meeting with activists from across the globe. Most recently, along with Jane Fonda, Ensler visited Israel and, among other events, met with activists in the Israeli and Palestinian peace camps. “Women on both sides have an incredible hunger for peace,” Ensler said.

This year, V-Day performances will be held in Jerusalem, East Jerusalem and Ramallah. While Israel has held V-Days during the last few years — in Hebrew and in English — this year marks the first time that the production will be translated into Arabic. Is there a leap from promoting domestic violence awareness to promoting peace in the Middle East? “It’s hard to advocate the dropping of bombs if you’re advocating to end violence against women,” Ensler said. “If you’re against violence, you’re against violence.”

Closer to home, the UJA-Federation of New York will host a V-Day benefit at Town Hall in Manhattan on February 12. The performance will feature, among others, Broadway producer Daryl Roth, writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Ensler herself. The event will benefit FEGS-Long Island Family Violence Program, the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services Family Violence Center, Jerusalem Shelter for Battered Women and the New Start Loan Fund of the Women’s Executive Circle.

“Domestic violence is an issue for all women,” said Andrea Barchas, executive director for women’s philanthropy at UJA-Federation of New York. “It cuts across religious beliefs, age, income levels. People recognize this is really a problem in the Jewish community, for all communities.”

“I’m very pleased that UJA is doing a production,” said Ensler, who herself is involved with the federation. “Sometimes we don’t like to look at domestic violence in the Jewish community. We think, ‘It doesn’t happen to us.'”

According to statistics provided by the federation, 15-20% of Jewish households experience domestic violence — something that Ensler knows from firsthand experience. Growing up in Scarsdale, N.Y., Ensler said she was abused and beaten by her Jewish father, who was an executive at a food company.

“Through writing, I was able to survive,” Ensler said. “It saved me.”

Like many things about Ensler, her Jewish identity, she said, “is complicated.” Although raised Unitarian, “my whole cultural experience was Jewish,” she said. “I always identified deeply with Judaism. I felt Jewish, but I wasn’t. When I really understood that I was Jewish, I became a Buddhist.”

Nonetheless, she said, “my thinking, my social activism, my humor, are all rooted in my Judaism and my Jewishness.”

Ensler lives in Manhattan with her longtime partner, Israeli-born psychotherapist Ariel Jordan. When she is not traveling on behalf of V-Day, she enjoys spending time with her son, actor Dylan McDermott — whom, seven years her junior, she adopted 25 years ago, when she was married to his father — his wife, Shiva Rose, and her granddaughter, Colette, 5.

Looking ahead, Ensler is in the process of creating a new series of monologues, “The Good Body,” based on interviews with women around the world about the ways they alter their bodies to be considered beautiful. She is also launching what she calls the “One Percent Campaign,” urging that 1% of the military budget be set aside to end domestic violence. “We now have a Department of Homeland Security,” she said. “Why not protect women in their own homes?”

“I’m here until the violence stops,” Ensler said. “In 10 years, we’re going to end violence. Before, I gave it five years — now I’m giving it five more.”

Her meeting with a reporter is cut short as a few dozen people gather for a planning meeting for a V-Day Benefit at the ballroom February 13, where actresses Marisa Tomei and Claire Danes will take part.

Ensler motions to the long conference tables, arranged in the shape of a giant “U.”

“Why are we sitting like that?” she asks her publicist.

Perhaps a “V” shape would have been more appropriate.

A Modern V-Day Miracle

By Cindy Richards

T-shirt that reads: “If RAPE is Sexual then KILLING with a KNIFE
is just COOKING.”

A “Dating Certificate” that boys can earn by attending a
three-part anti-rape program, one for boys in
kindergarten-through-third grade, the second for fourth-to
sixth-graders and the third for seventh-through-ninth- graders.

A poster that hangs in tavern bathrooms and proclaims: “Vodka is
Not a Lubricant.”

Each of those ideas, along with scores of others, was submitted in
last year’s International Stop Rape Contest. Friday is the deadline
for this year’s contest, an annual event sponsored by V-Day, an
international organization founded by Eve Ensler, the monologist who
made vagina a household word. Winning ideas will get up to $25,000 in
funding to implement their ideas.

Ensler, whose popular “Vagina Monologues” leaves its audiences in
tears–sometimes from laughter, sometimes from shock, sometimes from
horror–uses a portion of the proceeds from ticket prices to fund
V-Day. The organization has raised some $7 million in just five short
years.

“It’s been a vagina miracle,” said the playwright-activist. “When
something is necessary, there is a certain kind of energy that isn’t
like anything else. This has an urgency and mysterious quality that I
find amazing.”

The outpouring of money, time and ideas is, indeed, amazing,
considering the staggering statistics. Worldwide, one in three women
has been raped or sexually abused, according to a United Nations
report. In America, one in six women has been the victim of a sexual
assault or attempted sexual assault, according to the Centers for
Disease Control. Put another way, the Justice Department says that a
woman is raped every 90 seconds somewhere in America. Half of those
female victims will be under 18; one in six will be under age 12.

Despite the overwhelming statistics that would suggest victory is
impossible, V-Day has grown exponentially, from an underground
feminist event to a mainstream media one. Benefit performances of the
“Vagina Monologues” are being scheduled around the world in
connection with Valentine’s Day 2002 (the V in V-Day stands for
several things, organizers say, including Victory over Violence,
Valentine’s and, of course, Vagina).

Already, Ensler said, the show is set to be performed at more than
600 college campuses and in nearly 200 cities around the
world–Iceland signed up on Monday–with all the proceeds going to a
local violence prevention or anti-rape program. In Chicago, 13
campuses, from Northwestern University to Joliet Junior College, have
signed on to the grass roots effort so far.

Beyond the performance of Ensler’s moving monologues is the
worldwide effort to fund and showcase ideas for stopping rape.

The international Stop Rape contest is open only to women and
girls, but a second contest started this year allows both male and
female college students to submit ideas for stemming violence against
women. The college Stop Rape contest offers winners up to $5,000 to
implement their ideas. Deadline for entries in the college contest is
Dec. 15.

Entries have been slow in coming in the wake of Sept. 11, Ensler
said. But there may be an even bigger reason that there aren’t more
ideas forthcoming.

“One of the greatest hurdles we have to overcome is that people
don’t think it’s possible,” Ensler said. “They can’t even imagine a
world without rape.”

That’s one reason the Stop Rape idea submitted last year by
28-year-old Silke Pilliger of Germany is one of Ensler’s favorites.
Pilliger suggested printing anti-rape slogans on bread wrappers. One
of her slogans tells bread buyers: “One German woman in two suffers
from headaches, one in three has problems backing into a parking
space and one in five is raped by her partner,”

“I love it because it’s so basic,” she said. “You get your bread
in the morning and it says ‘Have you raped your wife today?’ You get
that [rape] is ordinary. We have to make it extraordinary.”