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The novelist, playwright and activist behind “The Vagina Monologues” talks about gender apartheid, the dangerous shedding of burqas and the seeds of violence we’ve begun to sow.
By Janelle Brown
Eve Ensler went to Afghanistan and did not ask the women she met
about their vaginas. There were, she says, more pressing issues to
discuss: “Women were being beaten, and were starving, and were living
in orphanages. Going in and saying, ‘So, let’s talk about your
vagina’ — it seemed so glib.”
Instead, Ensler — the acclaimed playwright, novelist and
one-woman dynamo behind “The Vagina Monologues” — has focused her
concern for the women in Afghanistan on the much larger issue of the
nation’s gender apartheid. After visiting Afghanistan a year ago,
Ensler embarked on a quest to raise both awareness of the crisis and
funding for the Afghan feminist activist group RAWA, which
surreptitiously aids the oppressed women under the Taliban. Her
efforts, including a sold-out celebrity fund-raising performance of
“The Vagina Monologues” (this as part of the worldwide anti-violence
benefit “V-Day”), have helped her become one of the Afghan women’s
most vocal advocates.
Ensler has built her career on the relationship between gender
identity and violence against women — as manifested, in part,
through women’s beliefs about their own vaginas. She doesn’t pull her
punches; by her own admission, she’s a radical feminist who makes
people face that which makes them most uncomfortable. Her goal is to
put herself out of business by eradicating worldwide violence toward
women, which she hopes to achieve within 10 years. And yet she faces
this daunting task with a wicked sense of humor, a breathless energy
and an uncanny ability to pull everyone she meets — from Glenn Close
and Hillary Clinton to the waitress in the café where we sip
our coffee — into her orbit.
Not surprisingly, Ensler has strong views about the current
situation in Afghanistan, along with an unorthodox and idealistic
vision of how we might bring an end to the cycle of violence taking
place there.
How did you first become aware of the situation in
Afghanistan?
I’ve been aware of the women in Afghanistan for quite some time.
Probably ever since the Taliban came to be. I’ve always been obsessed
with Afghanistan. I have some very mystical connection to it. There
are places in your soul: Bosnia and Afghanistan are places I feel
like I’ve been to before.
I was going to do a world trip for my new book, “The Good Body” —
a play about women around the world and how they shape, change,
mutilate and hide their bodies in order to fit in with their
particular cultures — and I realized I absolutely had to go to
Afghanistan. Here’s a country where women are essentially
disembodied. Their bodies aren’t a part of the culture at all. It
seemed like the furthest extreme of what I was looking at.
And you went in with the women of RAWA?
We had found RAWA on the Web, and had asked if we could come and
interview them. We met them in a hotel in Pakistan where they
interviewed us to decide if they would take us into their clandestine
world. Then they made the decision to trust us and took us in.
There were these incredible orphanages and schools in Pakistan,
where girls were being brought up as young RAWA women. It was really
incredible — they were being brought up as revolutionaries. There
was one group of orphan girls that I interviewed in a circle; they
all told their stories, and each of them cried and the others would
hold them. It was the most moving thing. Each of them would say that
RAWA saved their lives, RAWA had become their mother. These girls
were their family, their sisters, and they were devoting their lives
to liberating the women of Afghanistan.
I was completely smitten by them. I may not be the most thorough
investigator — that’s why I’m not a journalist. People move me and
they enter me and then I write. It’s funny, because I’ve become
RAWA’s greatest defender: I feel like I’m defending women who are
struggling for their lives!
Why do you use the word “defender”?
There are a lot of people who say all kinds of things about RAWA
— that they are Maoists, they are communists. They are very
militant, they are very pure. They are very radical. And I’m very
drawn to that. People call them uncompromising, and they are right.
But bravo! I feel a kindred spirit.
Do you feel that the crisis in Afghanistan, and the attention
that is being paid to the women’s situation there, has helped your
mission to eradicate the oppression of women? Will this foment
radical change?
I hope so. I think everything remains to be seen right now. The
situation is so volatile in Afghanistan, and so unexamined in the
deepest sense. I am shocked to see how profoundly we have not thought
any of this through — not surprised, but shocked.
What was your reaction when you heard that the Northern
Alliance had marched into Kabul, and women were shedding their
burqas?
I was so confused. It’s exactly how I feel all the time these
days: I feel like we live in a state of total ambiguity. Part of me
was weeping to think of women and men being freed, that men could
shave their beards, listen to music and dance in the street; and then
I also felt utter terror about what was coming down the road.
Do you think the Northern Alliance will behave themselves
because the world’s eyes are on them?
Wouldn’t it be ideal if the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul
and Kandahar and all these different groups lived peacefully? But I
think we’re on the verge of a civil war.
The fact is that we, as a country, have no foreign policy. What’s
our policy? If you don’t have a policy that you believe in, with a
mandate, you are always shifting. Ten years ago we thought the exact
opposite: We supported the Taliban, we created Osama bin Laden, we
built those bunkers! So what do we believe?
To me the most disturbing thing going on right now, second to the
bombing of all the children and women and tortured people of
Afghanistan, is that we haven’t had a discussion about foreign
policy. There’s not a discussion in sight, anywhere, about what we’re
learning from this.
We have, however, had lots of discussions about eradicating
evil from the world.
I have problems with this “evil” thing. Evil is a really
problematic word. I run a writing group in a woman’s prison, and most
of the women are murderers who are called evil people, and they are
not. They have done something terrible, and that’s an absolute fact.
They are complicated, multifaceted, mind-blowing, unusual, original,
disturbing angry people. So is the Taliban. That is my feeling about
the Taliban.
Evil is reductionist. It destroys ambiguity and takes away duality
and complexity; it says that they are dark and we are light, they are
evil and we are good. That’s all a lie. We all have the capacity for
great goodness and love, and we all have the capacity for terrible
deeds. I’ve seen the best people behave terribly in the worst
situations, and the worst people behave well. Who knows why? There
are a lot of things that govern us. But I’m not going to accuse
anyone of evil.
Why aren’t we creating hope and goodness in the world [instead
of eradicating evil]? There’s poverty, inequity and justice: How
are we as a country going to rid the world of these? How are we as a
country going to be bigger than we’ve ever been? [We need to]
expand our generosity, and see ourselves as people who have
responsibilities to those who are poor, or who don’t have education
or access to opportunities. I have heard no word of that.
Instead, [our approach] feels very arbitrary. We have
targets, perhaps; we are bombing, and we are working with a
completely brainless operation [the Northern Alliance]. And
we are banking the future of Afghanistan on this? No — because we
aren’t thinking of the future of Afghanistan. I would not be
surprised if we were to find Osama bin Laden and then get out of
Afghanistan, the way we have time and time and time again. That’s
what made this problem.
The devil’s advocate would say that if we stay in Afghanistan
and take control of what’s going on there, that we are going to be
accused of imperialism.
I don’t think we should stay there, I think there should be some
U.N. force that goes in there as a transitional government and helps
establish women’s rights and democracy. I don’t think it should be a
stability force, as the British are talking about right now, but a
world- and U.N.-supported government.
And what about women in all this? Sixty-five percent of the
population of Afghanistan is female, and not one woman has been
entrusted with ruling. I haven’t seen one woman represented anywhere
in Afghanistan.
If I’ve learned one thing, it would be this: The violation and
desecration of women and the undermining of women is an indication of
everything. It is the primary symptom of a civilization gone awry.
Look at America: We have one of the highest levels of violation of
women of any country.
Where is the next Afghanistan? People said years ago that there
was trouble brewing in Afghanistan, just by looking at women’s
problems there. What other countries do you see on the verge of
boiling over?
I think Afghanistan is everywhere. I hate to say it, but I think
if we do not really address what is going on with women in this
planet — that one out of three women in the world will be raped and
battered — it’s basically gender oppression. Fifty-eight girls under
the age of 14 are raped in South Africa every day. There is not a
country in the world right now where the kind of violation that is
going on to women is not out of control. I’m talking epidemic. I
can’t even talk about it because people can’t tolerate hearing
it.
To me, we are at the end of something, if we do not understand
that patriarchy has done this.
So, what’s your solution?
First of all we have to address what’s going on, that we are
living in a paradigm of escalating violence — based, in my opinion,
on corporate greed and the emerging corporate globalization of the
world. Women are commodities within that structure: They are bodies,
serving or not serving. I think we have to stop and say, “Is this the
paradigm we want to keep living in? Is this the paradigm we want? Do
we want to perish as a people?”
James Gilligan has a great book called “Preventing Violence.” He
basically says that humiliation and shame are at the core of
everything: You humiliate people through relative poverty, through
racism, through child abuse — he goes down the list. The
restructuring of the world will look at the un-shaming and recovery
from humiliation, in all the forms that it takes.
That’s what we should be setting out to think about. Thinking how
we are going to end violence; in my case, violence towards women.
What is violence towards women, the mechanisms of it, the trajectory
of it? And then, what are we going to do to stop it?
Considering who’s in power in the government right now, do you
think this kind of ideology is likely right now?
I don’t think this is going to happen during the Bush
administration. But you never know, sometimes the strangest people
are accidentally leaders.
I have fantasies of an international party, a world party. We
start to see ourselves as a world and come up with a global party. I
have to say that I think it is the future, that nation-states are
over.
I take it that you are opposed to the bombing. Yet it seems to
have rid Afghanistan of the Taliban.
I know in my body, more than I know anything, that violence only
creates violence. And there may be a momentary, apparent victory in
Kabul, but that violence has created in so many other people seeds of
things that will come to be, in our lifetime, as deadly as anything
we’ve seen. Having been a person who was beaten into submission,
quieted, stunned and made mute by terror, I know that there comes a
time when you get people back, because that’s survival. It’s an
organic part of what violence does. So I don’t believe in the
perpetration of it anymore.
I’m not saying I don’t believe in self-defense; if someone comes
after you, I will protect you, but I think that’s very different. Our
terror is better than their terror? I don’t believe that.
Do you have any problems with Islam? Some have accused it of
being a religion that is problematic for women.
Is there a religion that is not sexist?
I believe that the body is gorgeous and sacred and women should
walk the earth in anything they want to wear, any day. If someone is
wearing the veil because it makes them feel sexy, exotic, erotic,
fabulous, empowered, delicious, protected — power to them. If one is
wearing it to shut oneself off, to not exist, to not be present, to
not have a voice, to turn over all their rights, to not be sexual,
not be alive — I have issues with it. That’s the bottom line with
any piece of clothing in the world. It has nothing to do with
veils.
I feel that way about religion, too. If religion liberates us to
the desire of our bodies, makes us feel good about our vaginas and
makes us believe we have love in our hearts — genius! If it makes us
feel bad or guilty or shameful, I can’t get with it.
Do you think that, though this may sound perverse, the recent
tragedies have been good for the world in terms of jump-starting a
dialogue?
I think there’s nothing good ever about thousands of people being
killed — nothing. Nobody deserves it; they weren’t asking for it;
they didn’t sign up for it. I don’t buy that at all. I don’t believe
the way you teach people is by beating them and killing them.
But if those lives were not to be lost in vain, we had better wake
up right now. We have to use that as a calling to our deepest selves
to come up with a way out of this. I actually believe it could be
that. I’ve been lucky: For five years I have been watching this
little seed of an idea, this little idea of a vagina, spread and
spread around the world. The play is in 45 countries right now, and
30 languages. V-Day this year will take place in 600 colleges in 200
cities around the world.
For me, it’s been a great model of what a global party could be
like. I’ve seen how decentralized community-built organizing could
really work. If we could agree with certain basics: That all human
beings are entitled to food, shelter and education, and that could be
a tenet, we could take that and go with that. Ending violence is the
most essential thing, we could work on that. Where do we all come
together?
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Award-winning playwright Eve Ensler has used her play, “The Vagina Monologues,” to raise millions of dollars for non-profit groups
aiming to end violence against women and girls around the world.
Her group V-Day — a charity that fights rape, battery, incest, female-genital mutilation and slavery — receives money through
benefit performances.
Ensler this week announced V-Day San Francisco 2002’s benefit show: On Feb. 12, Ensler, Calista Flockhart, Rosie Perez and other stars will perform the Monologues in the Masonic Auditorium. Proceeds will go directly to local women’s groups.
Adrienne Sanders: Why is your show so popular?
Eve Ensler: Any time you really bust open a taboo, people
get excited.
Q. What surprised you about it?
A. It was really surprising after so many years of feminism
how few women loved their vaginas. It’s taken so many years for
people to calm down and say the word. I mean, anthrax is on a full
page in any given paper and that’s less scary than vagina?
Equally surprising was to see how excited women got once they
began thinking about them.
Q. What do audiences tell you about the show?
A. I’m always surprised when women tell me they’ve never
had an orgasm and they’re never going to fake it again. I’ve had men
come up to me and tell me they wish they had a vagina.
Q. Tell me about V-Day 2002 and the Monologues.
A. The whole thing is going local. We’re bringing V-Day
into small communities everywhere. It’s as varied as Manila and
Romania to Milwaukee…. One of the things we’re trying to create is
self-empowerment so people use the Vagina Monologues to serve their
own ends.
Q. What’s happening in San Francisco?
A. San Francisco is definitely going to be one of the
bigger events. I’ll be performing there and we’ll have a lot of
wonderful actors at the event. San Francisco was so incredibly
supportive of the Vagina Monologues… In the HBO special, I tell
which cities are vagina-friendly zones, vagina-holiday zones. San
Francisco is a vagina world fair zone.
Q. What in your background contributed to your current
work?
A. I’ve always been feminist and I suffered violence early
on. I know how much work I’ve had to do to overcome it and I don’t
want other women to have to do the same.
Q. How did the connection of V-Day with the show come
about?
A. I went around the world to communities and met V
warriors who were really brave to bring the show there. It was so
grass roots then, people would just line up after the show to tell me
how they’d been beaten or raped. And I just started to feel insane.
And I said, “Either I’m going to stop doing the show or we’re going
to figure out a way to end violence against women.”
And the first year we invited all these great actors like Glenn
Close, Susan Sarandon and Whoopie Goldberg and they agreed to come
perform to raise consciousness for V-Day. We raised a few hundred
thousand dollars and that kind of launched V-Day.
Q. How do you find the groups?
A. They find us. V-Day is really about attraction and not
promotion. Suddenly, we’ll get a call from China. This year it will
be performed for 8,000 people in the Phillipines.
Q. How are funds distributed internationally?
A. I go around the world and see the work they do. Right
now, activists in Kosovo took a Monologue piece and they turned it
into a rock song in Albanian. It’s really popular.
We’re opening a safe house in the Masai Valley in Kenya where
girls can run to save their clitoris. We’re in the process of opening
a safe house on Sioux land in South Dakota.
Q. What has been the most difficult part of your work?
A. Emotionally exposing oneself to all the terrible things
that are going on to women around the world. And the struggle to
convince people that violence against women matters. I encounter
resistance everywhere.
Every year at V-Days I ask the women in the audience to stand up
if they’ve ever been raped or beaten. At Madison Square Garden last
year, about 9,000 women stood… Seeing the internalized shame after
you’ve been brutalized is the most disturbing thing.
Q. What are your thoughts on the terrorist bombings?
A. Women are scary because we’re so powerful. We know so
much that we don’t utilize. We feel so much that we discount. We have
solutions to a lot of things we don’t trust.
I do not think most women would have sent bombs in response to the
terrorist bombings.
I think we’re more complex than that. We would have seen a
solution in a much more complex way.
Q. What would you have liked to have seen instead?
A. Well I think something is being revealed to us right now
on the planet. There is a serious situation and I think it’s opened a
huge door. Do we want to keep inventing enemies and see ourselves as
threatened by the world?
One is a very male way of seeing the world. The other is very
female. I would like us to look at the big questions: poverty, how
women are being treated around the world, what’s going on with
Israel. And I don’t see OBL has been caught — it reminds me so much
of Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
Q. What’s up next for you?
A. I’m working on a play called “The Good Body” which is a
piece about how they shape, fix, mutilate, hide their bodies in order
to fit in with their particular culture. And then I’m doing a series
of monologues based on interviews with teenage girls.
The Vagina Monologues is coming to HBO on Valentine’s Day, which
is so exciting.
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By Sandra Ross
Eve Ensler: V is not for violence.
“When I was a radical militant feminist, I wanted to be right more than I wanted to win,” admits award-winning playwright Eve Ensler to the 100-odd college-age women (and a sprinkling of men and university instructors) who are attending an October “V-Day” workshop at Cal State Long Beach. According to the hugely successful author of The Vagina Monologues, a post-September 11 epiphany has caused her to rethink her responses to violence — part of the reason why she is in Long Beach, again teaching people how to produce her play so as to benefit organizations dedicated to ending violence against women.
Now in its fourth year, the V-Day campaign raises awareness about violence against women through near-simultaneous worldwide performances of The Vagina Monologues. On or around Valentine’s Day, Ensler’s play is performed in different cities, with all proceeds donated to organizations working to end rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation and sexual slavery. This year some of the money will be donated to organizations assisting Afghan women.
At Long Beach, Ensler is meeting with participants of the V-Day College Campaign, a part of the larger V-Day movement. Although the purpose of the workshop may appear dictatorial — a playwright issuing instructions on how her play should be produced — Ensler’s message is about self-sufficiency. And who better to explain the hurdles of producing a controversial play than the person who wrote it?
Early productions of Ensler’s 1996 play, which has now run for nearly a year at the Canon Theater in Beverly Hills, were dogged by censorship. When the play was about to open in Albany, New York, the production team was informed that the local Hearst newspaper refused to run ads with the word “vagina” (this despite the fact that Patty Hearst was set to star in the play). At the Long Beach workshop, Ensler discusses potential hurdles to successful college productions, including censorship, uncooperative university administrators, and patrons who faint during the Bosnian-rape-victim monologue.
She goes on to field questions from the audience, and her approach underscores her message of empowerment: She encourages last year’s participants to answer questions posed by new V-Day recruits. In another workshop segment, she leads the participants — a youngish mix, many of whom are wearing spaghetti-strap V-Day tank tops, yoga pants and rave tennis shoes — through a series of highly engaging acting and directing exercises. At the outset, participants are asked to go around the room telling the group why they’re participating in V-Day. One says, “I’m participating in V-Day because I’m tired of frat boys writing ‘Nice Pussy’ on the white board outside my dorm room when I put up a picture of a cat.” Later, participants break into groups of 20 to act out concepts like “angry vagina” as ensemble pieces. In another segment, Ensler demonstrates how to give effective stage directions to actors.
Between exercises, Ensler shares anecdotes, several of which touch on the violence of September 11 and its aftermath. One comes from the child of her stepson, actor Dylan McDermott. Ensler — who, clad entirely in black, resembles a dominatrix more than she does a grandmother — says her 5-year-old granddaughter has spoken of a new tactic for dealing with playground skirmishes: “When the boys act out of control, start kissing.” Ensler, echoing that spirit, tells the workshop participants to meet on-campus hostility with tolerance and understanding — she argues that doors (and minds) will unlock when enemies are greeted with compassion rather than enmity.
For Ensler, the enemy includes the Taliban and other fundamentalists, local and foreign-born, who seek to oppress women. Explaining why some of the V-Day proceeds will be donated to organizations helping Afghan women, Ensler describes being smuggled into Afghanistan to meet with the women of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Not only did Ensler see underground schools where women are taught to read and write, she also visited a clandestine ice cream parlor. For the Long Beach crowd, she pantomimes a woman lifting her burka to eat ice cream, then says, “I don’t want to live in a world where women are not allowed to eat ice cream.”
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“With my height and weight, I never thought I’d see myself in the pages of Glamour,” joked Geraldine Ferraro last night, accepting the honor of being one of Glamour Magazine’s 14 extraordinary Women of the Year. Receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award, Ferraro, who is battling bone marrow cancer, mused that despite the distinction, don’t think she’s “finished just yet” — a touching moment in an evening that evoked both tears and laughter, as well as immense admiration.
Now in its 12th year, the event, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bestowed the orange orbit award, designed by the late Conde Nast editorial director Alex Liberman, upon an array of women making a difference in today’s world: The Vagina Monologues’ Eve Ensler, news reporter Diane Sawyer, Red Cross president Dr. Bernadine Healy, Broadway director Susan Stroman, and actresses Salma Hayek and Debra Messing, to name a few.
And though the celebrities in attendance (Hayek and Messing, as well as Rosie Perez, Molly Shannon, Harry Connick Jr. and Ed Norton) added a bit of star-studded cache, it was women like Liv Arnesen and Ann Bancroft (who bravely crossed a 50-degrees-below-zero Antarctica on foot) on whom the spotlight really shone. Even Hayek, dressed simply in a sleeveless black dress, seemed a bit humbled in accepting the award, stating quietly, “These women make me feel hopeful for humanity.”
One of the most inspirational moments of the evening — and there were many — was when RAWA member Tahmeena Faryal spoke before the audience, concealing her identity with a photograph of RAWA’s founder. A fatwa (or death warrant) has been issued against her group, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, for documenting the Taliban’s brutal treatment of women, as well as working underground to educate girls and coordinate healthcare and income-generating programs. So awe-inspiring was her story that Eve Ensler, also honored for championing women’s civil liberties (her show has raised $5 million to combat violence against women worldwide), dedicated her award to the women of RAWA.
A candle-lit Temple of Dendur served as the reception area, where guests toasted each other. “These women are incredible. It’s an absolute honor to be here among them,” stated an ultra red-headed Debra Messing, elegantly clad in a Chanel strapless lace dress.
By Karin Nelson
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By Kathleen Heil, Columnist
I hate “isms.” They’re dangerous. The moment most people ascribe themselves to a political ideology, reason tends to fly out the window and anger and self-righteousness stroll through the front door.
It’s understandable – for smooth psychological functioning, we tend to define ourselves through our self-schemas and stick to them with the utmost consistency. So if Sally supports socialism (and sells seashells by the seashore systematically for a fixed price set by the government), she is likely to ignore any information that challenges her belief system and will seek out information to validate it.
For this reason, I have made a concerted effort to avoid defining myself through any one belief system and am skeptical of people who do. I feel being “label-less” prevents me from taking a stand on issues I am not educated on because I have no platform to refer to.
Granted, this does not render me unbiased, but I believe it does make a difference in my views. For most people I know, no matter how educated, eventually succumb to the disheartening perils of label attachment.
But this past Saturday, my disdain for labeling was effectively challenged for the first time. I spent an entire afternoon with Eve Ensler, playwright of “The Vagina Monologues.” She led me and more than 50 other college women in a workshop to talk about V-Day and the College Campaign to end violence worldwide.
I admit I walked into the workshop with certain expectations. Though I believe deeply in the need to end violence against women, I don’t label myself specifically as a feminist. So I was ready and prepared for a little bit of anger, a little indoctrination and a little lack of reason from the women who had gathered to fight the cause.
After all, Eve is a poster child for feminist activism. For example, she was recently labeled TIME Magazine’s “Feminist Innovator” and is endlessly working on various causes to help women.
But walking into the room that Saturday, I didn’t see any labels. I didn’t see any anger. I didn’t see any soapboxes, self-righteousness or sermons.
What I saw was a group of women who came from every walk of life and wanted, above all else, to stop the violence. Many of the women, like Eve, were survivors of various awful acts of sexual abuse. But despite the remarkable pain and suffering many of the women had endured, all of us came together from a place of kindness and love. These women, the voices behind V-Day, spent a few hours together being people, not political labels.
It was amazing. Eve, Karen and Shael, the heads of the V-Day movement to end domestic and sexual violence, are not fighting to indoctrinate anyone with “feminist values.” And neither are the women who are leading college productions of The Vagina Monologues all over the world.
In fact, no one is fighting. As Eve told us, on the advice of her granddaughter, “Just kiss everyone!” Sounds simplistic, but in this current time of war and pain, it is more revolutionary than it seems.
The women I worked with last Saturday have forever changed my view on labels and movements. V-Day is so special and so amazing because it does not recruit people to the cause. It invites people, when they are ready, to stop violence against women in a way that genuinely transcends politics and party lines.
This, to me, is an incredible, beautiful rarity that I will always appreciate. In a world where people shout their ideologies rather than sharing them, it is amazing to see activists like Eve Ensler and Karen Obel – women who are bold, dedicated and open minded. It is an example we can all learn from.
So thank you, Eve. You and the other women at the workshop have taught me that you can wear feminism with pride, love and respect. And that’s one label I’m no longer afraid to wear.
Kathleen Heil is a Religious Studies sophomore.
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As a survivor of violent attacks, playwright Eve Ensler has some advice on how to work through the emotions Americans may be feeling.
“The Vagina Monologues” creator, who says her father abused her as a child, says, “It’s an interesting and daunting experience to talk about anti-violence in the middle of so much grief, sorrow and rage.
“In response to the violence that was done to me, I went through all different stages — I acted out, I was mean to people, I became an alcoholic,” Ensler said this week at a fund-raiser held by the nonprofit organization Safe Horizon. “It hurt people and I didn’t get better.
“People need to talk, share ideas,” she said. “We are at a huge turning point in civilization and we need to honor it. I think we all know that’s in front of us right now. It’s going to require every bit of our best feelings and our best thinking.”
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It took awhile for Eve Ensler to adjust to her nickname.
People who saw her one-woman show would “scream things like ‘there’s the vagina lady’ in shoe stores,” Ensler recalled. “And you know at first it freaked me out a little to be identified as the vagina lady everywhere.”
But since bringing “The Vagina Monologues” to the New York stage in the mid-1990s, Ensler has struck a chord with women around the world, seeking to free up repressed feelings about sexuality and negative body images. In the process, the 48-year-old playwright has become something of a celebrity.
But Ensler didn’t always have it so easy. She had to fight to stage “The Vagina Monologues.” Friends and supporters were skeptical.
She recalled, “People were like, ‘Change the title. Are you out of your mind? You can’t talk about vaginas.’ “
Ensler did though.
The feminist activist said she was inspired to write “The Vagina Monologues” after being shocked by how a friend described her body in a discussion on menopause. Drawing on more than 200 interviews, Ensler chronicled how women felt about their intimate anatomy and turned these narratives into “poetry for the theater,” Gloria Steinem wrote in a foreword to the published play.
“Let’s just start with the world ‘vagina,'” the monologues begin. “It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: ‘Hurry, Nurse, bring me the vagina.’ ‘Vagina.’ ‘Vagina.’ Doesn’t matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say. It’s a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word.”
Some parts are humorous such as this early riff on vaginas: “There’s so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them — like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there.”
Others are disturbing, such as a Bosnian refugee recounting the horrors of rape in war.
“Not since the soldiers put a long thick rifle inside me,” the passage reads. “So cold, the steel rod canceling my heart. Don’t know whether they’re going to fire it or shove it through my spinning brain.”
Taking action with V-Day The Obie Award-winning, off-Broadway hit has become an international phenomenon, being staged and published in more than 20 countries, including Turkey and China.
“I wake up in the morning, and I get e-mails from Antarctica, and places like Romania and Zaire, where the play is opening,” Ensler said.
Major stars have taken notice as well. More than 85 actresses, including Glenn Close, Rosie Perez, Jane Fonda, Calista Flockhart, Kate Winslet, Melanie Griffith, Whoopi Goldberg and Susan Sarandon, have performed the monologues.
“Eve is bringing women back, she’s giving us our souls back,” said Close, who has worked with Ensler since the early days of “The Vagina Monologues.”
Sometimes these actresses have been reluctant to tackle the pieces, but Ensler has been persuasive.
“I was like, ‘I can’t do this,’ ” Perez recalled. “And Eve and I met and she goes, ‘Oh yes, you can do it, you have to do it and you will do it. So this is your monologue, you’re going to do it,’ and I go, ‘My god,’ and the monologue that she had given me, I had to do eight different accents in a matter of five minutes.
“And I said, ‘I can’t do this. I’m the girl with the voice, the accent.’ She goes, ‘Right, what’s the problem?’ “
While “The Vagina Monologues” has been a consciousness-raising experience for audiences, it also has inspired Ensler to take action against violence toward women.
“After every show, women lined up afterward to tell me how they’d been beaten or raped. And they felt such a desperate need to tell their stories that I started to feel insane,” Ensler said.
“I felt the way a war photographer feels, that you’re taking photos of these terrible incidents, but you’re not intervening on people’s behalves.
“And I said either I was going to stop doing ‘The Vagina Monologues’ or we would use ‘The Vagina Monologues’ to do something about violence against women.”
The result was V-Day, an annual event on or around Valentine’s Day, in which Ensler and a small staff organize benefit performances of “The Vagina Monologues” to raise money for groups seeking to end rape and fight female genital mutilation and other abuses against women.
V-Day drew crowds this year at Madison Square Garden in New York.
“It was just literally a life-changing experience,” said Cathleen Black, president of Hearst Magazines, a V-Day sponsor and publisher of women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Harper’s Bazaar.
“She’s kind of taken it all out of the closet and kind of put it right on in front of people so that you can say the word vagina. And she can deal with violence, and she can talk about it and tell these stories, the profound stories of what women are really suffering around the world.”
‘I have to write’ Ensler traces her efforts to end violence against women from her traumatic childhood in suburban Scarsdale, New York, as the daughter of a food industry executive and his homemaker wife. She said her father, now dead, abused her physically and sexually as a child.
“I don’t know if I had not been a person who had survived enormous abuse if I’d be committed the way I am committed to this,” Ensler said.
Ensler said that as a teen-ager, and in her 20s, she turned to drinking and drugs to blot out her pain.
Ensler met a bartender named Richard McDermott, who persuaded her to enter rehab and get sober, according to a February 2001 interview with People magazine. They married in 1978, and she later adopted his son, actor Dylan McDermott, star of “The Practice” TV series. (She later divorced Richard McDermott.)
She also began to focus on writing, which she credits as her salvation.
“By writing I created an alternative persona that I could pretend I was,” Ensler said, “and she could hold all this info and feelings and thoughts for the future that I couldn’t hold in me. I had to write. I still feel that way. I have to write. Like it’s the way I keep my sanity.”
Before the success of “The Vagina Monologues,” Ensler had been writing plays based on interviews with people. It’s a technique she continues to use in pieces such as “Necessary Targets,” a political work to be staged in the fall about American women whose lives are changed by their experiences with Bosnian refugees.
Another new work is “The Good Body,” the result of interviews with women from different countries about how they transform their bodies to fit into their cultures. Ensler also is working on a version of the “Monologues” based on discussions with teen-age girls.
“The lives of people, the actual lives, are far more interesting than anything you could invent,” she explained. “Do you know? I mean the stories that I have heard and the stories I continue to hear, who could make these up?
“When I do the interview, I take notes. But it’s more just letting that person come into me so then I can write the character.”
A self-confessed workaholic, Ensler shows no signs of slowing down. Between writing, interviews and fund-raisers, she tries to fit in some time with her longtime partner, Ariel Orr Jordan, a psychotherapist.
Ensler said she longs for the day when she will no longer need to tell her stories.
“I hope there’s a time when ‘The Vagina Monologues’ goes out of business. That’s what I chant for every day,” she said. “That one day we won’t have to be here anymore. There’ll be a day when women literally can put on the shortest skirt and tightest top and feel good and that everyone will look at them with great appreciation and great enjoyment and no one will hassle them or make them feel bad or insecure or threatened.”
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By Lisa Wilton
The Vagina Monologues is more than a play — it’s become a virtual phenomenon.
Big Apple playwright Eve Ensler’s groundbreaking show has boasted a rotating cast of celebrities — which is part of the reason for its spectacular success — since it debuted four years ago.
More importantly, however, it a now globally recognized movement called V-Day.
V-Day’s mission is to eradicate all violence towards women and girls, including rape, incest, sexual slavery and female genital mutilation.
A portion of proceeds from each Vagina Monologues performance — including international ones — sees that anti-violence groups get help in battling these horrific crimes.
“Partnered with The Vagina Monologues, V-Day allows anti-violence organizations access to grant money that they might otherwise not be able to get,” explains Lauren Horn, managing director of V-Day and co-founder of www.feminist.com.
Calgary’s YWCA Family Violence Prevention Centre and Sheriff King Home will benefit from V-Day, thanks to a local production of The Vagina Monologues starting tomorrow night.
Although final figures won’t be released until February, the Sheriff King Home may receive up to $5,000 from the foundation.
V-Day began in 1998 when Ensler joined a group of New York feminists to brainstorm ideas on how to end violence against women.
The actual V-Day date — in which money is distributed to previously earmarked organizations — is Feb. 14. It’s surrounded by a variety of cultural and theatre events, usually culminating in a star-studded benefit performance of Monologues.
Last year, the V-Day foundation raised more than $3 million and staged its biggest fundraiser at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
Dozens of celebrities and performers — including Oprah Winfrey, Gloria Steinem, Glenn Close, Julia Stiles and Edie Falco — turned out to support and perform a special production of The Vagina Monologues.
“Eve’s head is spinning (because of the success),” says Horn.
“She is one of the few anti-violence practitioners who truly believes violence against women can be stopped. But she also knows there’s a lot more work to be done.”
Because so many women are battered and violated each day, Horn says working for the foundation is more than a full-time job.
“You go to bed thinking about it,” she says. “Thinking about how much more we need to do.”
But Horn is encouraged when she hears stories of V-Day-assisted achievements.
One such accomplishment is a safehouse that has been set up in Narok, Kenya, to house girls trying to escape genital mutilation.
“There’s so many beautiful stories out there, so it’s not all bad for us.”
The Vagina Monologues, starring Calgary singer-songwriter Jann Arden, Amy Love and Tracy A. Leigh, begins tomorrow night and runs through Sept. 1, 2001 at the Jack Singer Concert Hall.
Lisa Wilton can be reached at LISA.WILTON@CAL.SUNPUB.COM
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By Joy Pincus
Germans may soon be helping to stop rape by buying their morning broetchen (roll). An innovative plan by two Berlin women calls for bakeries to use paper bags printed with information regarding violence against women such as: “One German women in two suffers from headaches, one in three wears makeup and one in five is raped by her partner” or “The customer in front of you is raped regularly by a close relative.”
“This is an awareness-raising campaign that may appear ordinary and trivial, for it uses an everyday object that everyone buys regularly,” said Silke Pillinger, 28, a coordinator for the European Language Council describing her idea. “…. There is a parallel between the ‘ordinariness’ of the object we use and violence against women, specifically rape. We want to emphasize that most rapes occur in a familiar context.”
She adds, “We wanted people to be confronted [by] the issue of rape without being able to close their eyes. We wanted to provoke them and also shock them in a certain way….We also wanted to focus on rape that happens in the family, because this is where in Germany, as probably all over the world, most of the rapes happen. People would carry the paper bags home with them, [to] the place where rape happens a lot.”
The idea of Pillinger and Karin Heisecke, 28, who works for International Planned Parenthood Foundation, were among three winning entries in an international contest in which contestants were asked to come up with creative ways to stop rape. The contest was sponsored last February by V-Day, a four-year-old worldwide movement sponsoring programs to end violence against women and girls.
V-Day has become a popular phrase in the feminist lexicon. It began with the phenomenal success of the “Vagina Monologues,” an American play based on interviews with women worldwide talking about their experiences with rape, abuse and genital mutilation. In 1998, Playwright Eve Ensler and a group of fellow New York women founded V-Day, best known for its annual gala event focusing on domestic violence that is held on Valentine’s Day and so turns the day’s traditional meaning on its head.
This year’s gala in New York included the contest to stop rape, judged by an international panel of activists dealing with violence against women, who sifted through hundreds of responses from 26 countries. Besides Pillinger and Heisecke, the winners included a 13-year-old student from Kenya and a 50-year-old street theater actress in Brazil. All the winners received up to $25,000 to implement their plan, but each is expected to get local support.
In Germany help will come from Pro Familia, a member organization of International Planned Parenthood Foundation, and hopefully some German political figures.
Pillinger’s biggest concern is over what kind of press the project will receive, since “…rape as an issue is taboo and will not easily be dealt with by the media…People seem to think that this is a problem that doesn’t really exist in Western European or North American countries.”
In Brazil, masculine violence is a natural mode of behavior, said contest winner Regine Bandler. Bandler and Ana Bosch, plan to use their talents and experience in the theatre to reverse that current cultural belief. The women, part of a women’s theatre troupe known as Loucas de Pedra Lilבs (Lunatic Lilacs), propose creating a databank of speeches given by celebrities, experts and ordinary people dealing with the issues of both violence against women and human relationships that could be aired on television and throughout the media.
They also propose creating videos of staged public debates in which people would be invited to express their views on sexual violence and rape. The women are hoping to begin their ambitious project in August and are currently waiting for approval by the Brazilian Ministry of Health, which will help implement their program.
Bandler is a longtime women’s activist. After immigrating to Brazil from Geneva, Switzerland she co-founded Sos Corpo, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to apprising women of their rights to public health care. In seeking for new ways to communicate their message, Sos Corpo members created the Loucas, who are now based in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, Brazil.
“The reception on the streets was so warm that we put the theater on one, two, then four times a year, always with new hot subjects…and also with a lot of brand new fresh Loucas,” Bandler said, referring to the addition of new theatre troupe members. “The importance was not to be able to act well, even though it was very welcome of course, but to… tell our indignation in that non conformist way. Participation of the Loucas was, and still is, an empowerment tool.”
The theater group has in its troupe about 10 women, from very different social and cultural backgrounds and ranging in age from 20 to 50. While the Loucas respond to a range of women’s concerns, “…violence is one of our main issues,” said Bandler. “… It is a question of daily survival. Brazil is a very violent country for historical and cultural reasons. Women have to struggle hard to be considered as persons with equal rights.”
Sexual violence is particularly prevalent in the famed Brazilian music industry,”You can hear such barbarism!” Said Bandler. “Last carnival, the greatest ‘hit’ was about a funk dance which simulated a physical fight between men and women, saying ‘smash of love does not hurt.’ The answer of the feminists was rapid. Last March 8, in all states of Brazil, the word of alert was ‘Smash Does Hurt, and is A CRIME!’”
The Loucas responded by creating a theatre sketch to respond to this trend of violence, which they have incorporated into some of their different performances, including their play about violence: “Chega de Dor!” (Enough Pain).
Since rape prevention ideally begins in youth, Jennifer Jadwero of Kenya has a particularly important plan. Her idea is to form “Youth Against Rape” clubs in primary and secondary schools and universities. These clubs would be extracurricular activities that kids can join, as they would the drama club or a team sport, where they could participate in campaigns to increase public awareness to this issue. The goals would be to both convince boys that being manly does not mean being forceful and disrespectful of women, and to train the girls in both self defense and how to cope themselves if they are raped. Club members would arrange for professional speakers to come speak at their schools.
V-Day is also funding $3,000 each to an additional eight contest finalists for help in implementing their plans for stopping rape. These include Canadian Anne Marie Aikins’ to provide a dating certificate to boys who have completed an anti-rape education program; Mongolian Puntsag Tsetsgee’s to have a bi-weekly national radio program on rape and Costa Rican Rosa Barrantes’ to create a virtual criminological museum on rape through a website or CD-ROM.
Funding for contest winners comes from donations to V-Day, sales of the book form of “Vagina Monologues” (Villard Books, 2000) and benefit performances of the play itself.
Rape is something women have lived with for so long — is it possible to imagine a world where it does not exist? Ensler thinks so.
“It’s happening. All that women and girls have to do is believe it’s happening. That’s the big leap. If we don’t start to believe that violence can end, then it won’t. I truly believe, for example, that if young girls knew their bodies were their own and had a right to their desires and felt supported in their desires, and grew up believing that nobody had a right to touch them or make them do anything that they didn’t feel 100 percent comfortable doing, violence would end,” Ensler said in an interview with “Chick Click” magazine.
The second V-Day contest dedicated to coming up with ideas to stop rape has been announced with an entry deadline of November 30, 2001.
And in a further indication that parts of the world are starting to think creatively about rape, the mayor of Bogota, Colombia declared last March 9th to be “A Night Without Men.” Between the hours of 7:30 and 1:00, men were banned from the city’s streets, required to play the traditional woman’s role of staying at home with the children while their wives roamed the streets in an atmosphere of festivity. Any man out on the streets that night found himself the subject of harassment by the women who were taking advantage of the special occasion. The women-only night was a great success, the city packed with women, unlike the following week’s “men-only” night, in which the general consensus of the city’s men was that the absence of women made the evening pointless.
Mayor Antanas Mockus’ unprecedented and radical move was designed to force men to reassess their attitudes in a traditionally macho society. More importantly, it was also an opportunity to see what would happen to rates of violence and other incidents in a city without men. The results were clear: there was only one murder, down 80% from a typical Friday, and other crime was down by 3 percent. The mayor, who stayed home with his children on that Friday night, feels that men have a lot to learn from women about peaceful attitudes.
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“Yes, we feel good about our vaginas”
By Eve Ensler, Writer of “The Vagina Monologues”
I do not usually respond to reviews or articles, but there was something about Catherine Bennett’s tone (I heard Maureen Lipman say the ‘c’ word).
Take her cynical comment: “The Vagina Monologues…..a global industry, showing in 25 countries with comprehensive backing of websites,chat-rooms, a book,T-shirts, a sort of bien pensant version of Cats.”
Production of the Monologues around North America have raised over £2m for local, national and international groups campaigning to stop violence against women. Productions in the West End are raising money to support groups such as Amnesty, London Rape Crisis Centre, Newham Asian women’s Project, Southall Black Sisters’ Refuge and Women’s Aid. I don’t believe that Cats ever did what pussies are doing.
Catherine Bennett makes the assumption that people who wear Nicole Farhi suits are not “in need of assistance.” What is equalising about violence towards women is that it makes no distinction between class, race or age.
Recent UN statistics show that one in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. When I started performing the Monologues so many women queued up to tell me how they had been beaten or raped. This is what launched the V-Day movement.
Catherine says: “Ensler’s work is intended to heal. How different it would be in Saudi Arabia.” There are clandestine productions scheduled for the Muslim world in the coming year. Thousands of dollars from V-Day have gone to supporting the women who are dying in Afghanistan.
And Catherine asks: “Would a Bosnian rape victim enjoy the show?” The Monologues have been performed in Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Kosovo. There is a V-Peace tour in 2001 with productions all over the Balkans. Thousands of pounds have been raised for the Centre for Women War Victims in Zagreb, a group central to the support of Bosnian rape survivors. V-Day has opened the first rape crisis centre in the Balkans.
Why wouldn’t Catherine Bennett, as a woman in 2001, be thrilled to see women cheering about their vaginas? I can only assume she does not feel good about her own.