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By Katreen Hardt
The first time I came across Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina
Monologues” was in a bookstore in New York City’s East
Village sometime in 1998. I was on the lookout for a new
play for me and my colleague, Sigi, an enormously talented
and hardworking redhead who runs the Theater Combinale in
Lübeck, Germany. I remember thinking what a great title; it
certainly got my attention anyway. But after picking up the
book, a thin, vermilion-colored paperback, and leafing
through a few of the monologues, I decided to put it back on
the shelf. A little too feministic for my tastes, I thought.
I am woman, yes, and I am in favor of women’s rights, but I
am not a feminist. I do not belong to that generation of
women who, in the 1970’s, pressed for ratification of an
Equal Rights Amendment. The book was a throwback to that
time, I thought, a ’90’s dramatization of “Our Bodies,
Ourselves.” Suffice it to say I was having difficulty
imagining it staged.
The following summer I spent in Iowa City, Iowa. Though I
was there to write, I spent a considerable amount of my time
flipping through books at Prairie Lights, the local
bookstore, secretly comparing the works of other young
female writers whose first novels were, unlike mine, already
finished and on display. It was here that, for the second
time, I came across Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues.”
And again I remember thinking what a great title. I picked
it up-why, I don’t really know; I was already familiar with
the book-and began to read. I still considered it feministic
yet the majority of the monologues, from an actor’s
standpoint, were simply too good to ignore. I bought two
copies-one for myself and one for Sigi. She didn’t like it
(a play in which the word vagina appears 132 times might be
considered scandalous to the average American, but not a
German); she, too, was skeptical. “How is this interesting?”
She asked me the first time we spoke on the phone regarding
the production. It was an honest question that I did not
have the answer to. But we both agreed that there were some
good female monologues (a rarity in the theater) included
among the collection. And so it was because of these
characters, and their personal vagina stories, that the two
of us decided to pursue the rights.
For the record, this was before Eve Ensler was performing
her one-woman show at the Westside Theater, an Off-Broadway
venue in midtown Manhattan, to sold-out crowds six nights a
week. And it was before “The Vagina Monologues” was being
performed by three well-known TV or movie actresses all
sharing the stage together before being rotated and replaced
by three other well-known TV or movie actresses in theaters
across the United States and Canada. And it was long before
the recently defunct kozmo.com was selling the book on its
website with free delivery in under an hour. It was a sheer
coincidence that while we were trying to find out who in
Germany even owned the rights, Ms. Ensler was getting ready
to re-open her show at the 249-seat aforementioned location.
(“The Vagina Monologues” originally premiered in 1996 at
Here, a Soho theater, where it ran for nearly three months
and won an Obie.)
What struck me the most upon seeing the show, or, more
importantly, upon hearing the words spoken aloud, was Ms.
Ensler’s delivery; she has incredible knack for timing. I
hadn’t realized how funny, how entertaining, how poignant,
how poetic “The Vagina Monologues” could be. Nor had I
realized how important this piece of theater was: There are
bad things happening to vaginas everywhere and it’s about
damn time we do something about it. Included in the show
were also two monologues, and a certain happy vagina fact,
that were not included in the book.
Taking “The Vagina Monologues” to Germany
In January 2000, S. Fischer Verlag, the German publishing
house, gave us the performance rights, albeit over the
phone. A contract, they said, would be drawn up and sent out
shortly along with a copy of the translation which, to our
surprise, already existed. They mentioned that there had not
been a lot of interest in the show (they had been sitting on
the rights for nearly two years) although there was a
theater in Southern Germany currently performing the piece
on a monthly basis. We opted for a September premiere,
wanting to open our 2000/2001 season with it, determined to
be the first theater in Northern Germany to come out with
the production. That changed, however, when we were
informed-not but a week later-by the very same publishing
house that there was another theater, a bigger theater, a
state-run theater in Hamburg, a mere 60 kilometers south of
Lübeck, suddenly expressing an interest in the show as well.
And that they, too, wanted to open their 2000/20001 season
with the female-genitalia-friendly production. And that
they, too, wanted to be the first theater in Northern
Germany to do so. Thus, we were told, because the theater in
Hamburg, whose name was kept confidential, could accommodate
more people on any given night than we could, were granted
the privilege of opening first. (It should be noted that
most theaters in Germany are 100% state supported; the
Theater Combinale is a private theater, founded by four
actors 20 years ago, and is only partially funded by the
government.) They chose October. So we chose November.
November 3rd to be exact.
I received my copy of “Die Vagina Monologe” (pronounced dee
VAH-geena mo-no-lo-ge) in the mail on Valentine’s Day. I
took this as a positive sign. In the eyes of Ms. Ensler,
Valentine’s Day is also known as V-Day and it is an annual
event, started four years ago, to call attention to violence
against women. To my disappointment, however, it turned out
to be a rather incomplete translation-only some of the
monologues had been translated and not one of the
introductions-making it a bit thin in terms of content, not
to mention coherency. Missing were also the two additional
monologues, and the happy vagina fact, that I’d first heard,
and first become aware of, the night I attended Ms. Ensler’s
performance-material that was not only very comical, but
extremely vital to the overall structure of the play. As
without it, the show was destined to become exactly the type
of show I wanted to avoid-both as actress and audience
member. That show being a bunch of pissed-off feminists
sitting around insinuating that men are the ones to blame
for any problems or issues, be them mental or physical, that
they might have with their vaginas with a bit of trivia i.e.
responses from the 200 women Ms. Ensler interviewed when
asked the question “If your vagina got dressed, what would
it wear?” thrown in for good measure. I made it my mission
to obtain this new, additional material. Not only was it
important in terms of character balance, but it was the
stuff that would ultimately set us apart from the state-run
theater in Hamburg and, for that matter, all those other
“Vagina” productions soon to be cropping up all over
Germany.
One of the many advantages of having “The Vagina Monologues”
running in New York during this time was that it made it a
whole lot easier for me to figure out who it was I had to
get in touch with for an updated copy of the script. Through
Ensler’s “people,” I was also given permission to translate
this new material: “Because He Liked To Look At It,” a
woman’s tale of how, after having a good experience with a
man, she comes to love her vagina, “My Angry Vagina,” a
lament about feminine hygiene products, gynecological exams
and thong underwear (a monologue originally written by Ms.
Ensler for Whoopie Goldberg) and “Who Needs a Handgun?” an
amusing quote from the book “Woman: An Intimate Geography”
by Natalie Angier. (In the meantime, of course, this
material is available to anyone in the newly revised “The
Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition.”)
In June I flew to Germany for the first time to begin work
on the production. We hired a director, a meticulous and
warmhearted woman by the name of Stephanie, and, together,
over the course of the next four weeks, the three of us
translated, adapted, re-wrote and re-worked some of the
material in the script that had, in our opinion, been poorly
translated. Many of the euphemisms for the word vagina, for
example, were meaningless to a Teutonic audience. Ulrich
Stock, a book critic for Die Zeit, wrote in his review,
“Waterkant? Excuse me, please? Is this supposed to be a
translation of water cunt?” It wasn’t until our first
read-through that we realized, what with only two actresses
taking turns reciting the lines, our “Monologues” were
unwittingly taking on the predictable characteristics of
dialogue. Hence the hiring of our third actress, a beautiful
young woman called Nina.
The Problem with the “V-word”
We started rehearsals in late September; in October we began
promoting the show, hanging posters in shop windows,
distributing the theater’s program around town, calling up
radio and television stations. Being that we were in Germany
(and not in prude America) we expected few, if any,
problems. I reminded my colleague of some of the obstacles
Eve Ensler had faced with her production. How there had been
complaints, for instance, regarding the banner hanging in
front of the Westside Theater in New York. (I think it was
the size of the word vagina, rather than the word itself,
that people found offensive.) How one television station had
tried to produce a show about “The Vagina Monologues”
without using the word vagina. And how at some theaters,
where Ms. Ensler performed on tour, recorded voices on
box-office answering machines said only “Monologues” or “V.
Monologues.” My colleague, Sigi, at the Theater Combinale
assured me that such censorship wouldn’t happen in
Germany-not in the year 2000. To her complete and utter
disbelief, however, it did.
No sooner were the posters-with the play’s title, author,
and director’s name written inside the form of an upside
down triangle-hanging in front windows of numerous shops
throughout Lübeck, did they disappear. NDR, a regional
television station which has covered many Theater Combinale
productions in the past, warned us, “with that title you can
forget about appearing on television.” Even ticket sales
were unusually slow for the theater-only the premiere was
sold-out. Die Lübecker Nachrichten, the town’s local
newspaper, wrote an article about us entitled, “Das Problem
mit dem V-Wort” (The Problem with the V-Word) sighting above
issues. Magazines like Stern and Focus soon picked-up on the
story and suddenly we were national news. All because of a
word. A word apparently so powerful that the mere mention of
it is enough to create controversy in two distinct countries
on either side of the Atlantic. It goes without saying that
we looked forward to our premiere with a small sense of
trepidation.
But good news travels quickly. Immediately following the
opening we were bombarded with phone calls; the theater’s
answering machine was filled to capacity the next day with
messages from people in search of tickets. And despite the
fact that our outgoing message articulated perfectly the
play’s title, would-be audience members, suddenly faced with
the dilemma of having to SAY the word vagina, nervously
giggled and stuttered their way through inquires often
requesting tickets for such shows as “The Vaginal
Monologues,” “The Monologue Piece” or, simply, “That Show
Next Thursday.” Even before the reviews were out, it was
clear that “The Vagina Monologues” at the Theater Combinale
was a hit. And what a hit at that.
All of a sudden audiences, who would have otherwise left the
theater following a performance, were sticking around to
eagerly discuss the play over a glass of wine. Both men and
women rejoiced over the “leichtigkeit”-the ease by which the
monologues were presented. Wives, who had brought along
their husbands, secretly thanked us for saving them “certain
discussions” at home. (While other, older women insisted
that they ought to be able to keep a few secrets for
themselves.) A group of younger women, spurred on by “My
Angry Vagina” shared amid roars of laughter their most
intimate gynecologist stories. On a more serious note,
conversations could be overheard on the subject of female
genital mutilation and the atrocities inflicted upon the
rape camp victims of Bosnia. Whatever the subject matter, at
the heart of it all, was the vagina. People were talking
about the vagina. And better yet, people were using the word
vagina as if it were the most natural thing in the world;
the sense of disgust or shame or guilt usually associated
with the word had disappeared.
In March 2001 we were invited to perform in Nürnberg as a
part of their International Women’s Day Festival; it was to
be a private performance for women only. We had been aware,
even before our arrival, of the problems they had been
having with publicity. A poster-with a drawing of an orchid
that looked suspiciously like a vagina-had been banned by
the city and they were concerned about whether or not anyone
would even show up for the performance. In the end, six
hundred women cheered and applauded us as we walked on to
that stage that night. It was a rock star experience if ever
I’ve had one.
With so much support for “The Vagina Monologues” (the show
is still running Off-Broadway and now in Los Angeles as well
as other theaters all over the world), the time has come for
women to start speaking openly about their experiences. By
sharing our own stories we can help heal a past full of
negative attitudes and violence against the most sacred part
of the female body. There is a personal vagina story inside
every single one of us. And the theater is in need of more
good female monologues.
Author/actor Katreen Hardt has been acting with the Theater
Combinale, a German theater company, for more than 10 years.
Her involvement with Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,”
from her pursuit of the German performance rights in 1999 to
touring with the successful production in 2001, has been by
far the most rewarding. Katreen has appeared in two Hal
Hartley movies: “Henry Fool” and “The Book of Life.” She
lives in New York where she is at work on her first novel.
Katreen Hardt is also the author of the story which ran on
this site last month, “I was Gwenyth Paltrow’s Body Double.”
To see the original article, please click here
http://www.wigmag.com/bigwigs/vaginamonolog_5_21_2001.html.
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By John Peter
Eve Ensler’s one-woman show returns as glorious as before: warm, open, exciting, enchantingly funny, hilariously enchanting – and I choose my words carefully. Ensler’s monologues are based on interviews with women of
different ages and nationalities; they are free and uninhibited, but this is not, repeat not, a salacious show. It has the kind of erotic intelligence that goes with a mature, open emotional life. It shows you how dirty the
phrase “adult entertainment” really is. It is not preachy, it never condescends, it is not sanctimonious. It reminds you that “moral” can, in the wrong hands, be a dirty word. It is about being a sexual being who can afford to be demanding and proud. When Ensler talks about gang-raped Bosnian women, she is talking about an assault on their pride. Sex is both your identity and your happiness, and Ensler celebrates it like a laughing priestess.
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Playwright uses art, philanthropy to fight violence
against women
By Nicole Lewis
When Eve Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues, a play that focuses on female sexuality, she never guessed that five years later it would have helped to raise more than $5-million for charities and invigorate the fight to end violence against women.
In the play, which features stories gleaned from
interviews with 200 women, Ms. Ensler sits barefoot on stage wearing a clingy black dress and scarlet lipstick. She recites a list of names for female genitalia that makes audiences laugh, fills them with wonder as she describes the birth of her grandchild, and brings them to tears by telling of a gang rape in Bosnia.
Ms. Ensler’s combination of humor and grief, and her way
of talking directly to her audiences as if she were a best friend confiding intimate secrets, turned the play into an off-Broadway hit that has been translated into 25 languages and continues to be performed in New York by revolving three-women casts as well as around the country.
Her approach also has prompted women to linger after her performances to tell Ms. Ensler about their own tales of struggle and abuse. The mounting number of stories inspired Ms. Ensler, a longtime feminist and activist on a wide range of causes, to start V-Day, a charity that fights rape, battery, incest, and female-genital mutilation.
The charity has grown along with the show’s popularity. V-Day — the “V” stands for victory, valentine, and vagina — receives money through benefit performances and a $10 allotment from every ticket that is sold for commercial performances. V-Day has given the money to scores of charities, mostly grass-roots groups, in the United States and abroad.
“My goal, and V-Day’s, is to make violence against women the foremost thing on people’s minds,” says Ms. Ensler, 47, who contributes 5 percent of the play’s royalties to charity, about $40,000 so far. “It was very clear there was a way to use the play to not only raise consciousness but raise a lot of money.”
‘Power of an Artist’
Charity officials say Ms. Ensler’s art and activism have helped them breathe new life into their efforts to end violence against women.
“The power of an artist is to bring people together, and part of that is reaching people in a way that people like us can’t,” says Jessica Neuwirth, president of the board of Equality Now, a New York-based charity that receives money from V-Day to discourage violence against women worldwide by documenting and publicizing incidents of domestic abuse, infanticide, rape, and other acts that harm women. Many people who come to see The Vagina Monologues would never attend a conference organized by a nonprofit organization, Ms. Neuwirth says. The play, she says, “has a much broader reach.”
Ms. Ensler extends the play’s influence by encouraging colleges and community theaters to produce The Vagina Monologues around Valentine’s Day, a time when V-Day works especially hard to raise awareness and bring in revenue.
V-Day has attracted the attention of such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Glenn Close, Brooke Shields, and Jane Fonda, who were among 75 women who performed The Vagina Monologues in February at a sold-out gala benefit at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The event helped to raise $2.3-million for V-Day.
Ms. Fonda, who donated $1-million of that amount, says
she hopes her gift will inspire other big donations to Ms. Ensler’s charity.
“Eve thinks big,” Ms. Fonda said in a written statement.
“She inspires others to do likewise. She is building an international movement without an organization in the traditional sense. No bureaucracy, no hierarchy, but a lot of love and humor.”
A Victim of Abuse
Ms. Ensler says she never dreamed during her youth that
she would draw such accolades. Growing up in Scarsdale, N.Y., she says she was sexually abused by her father until age 10 and beaten by him after that. In her 20’s, she battled problems of alcohol and drugs, as well as depression. She credits her survival to the help of friends, and to her desire to help others.
“My life was really terrible,” she says, adding: “You either shut down and say, ‘I’m going to pack it in,’ or you say, ‘I’m going to do something about it.’ I had a fantasy I would change things for other people so it wouldn’t be like that for them.”
Ms. Ensler says she is mystified as to why The Vagina Monologues and not her other plays, on such themes as nuclear disarmament and homelessness, has moved so many people. Whatever the reason, though, she says she wants to use the play to raise as much money and awareness as possible while it is so popular.
“There’s a window open right now,” she says, “and one feels this huge desire to seize it.”
Starting From Scratch
For Ms. Ensler, seizing the opportunity to help women meant starting a charity from scratch. After a few brainstorming sessions with friends in her New York City apartment, she started V-Day as part of the Tides Center, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco.
Soon, Ms. Ensler began to study how other philanthropists gave away money. Among her role models was the actress Joanne Woodward, one of her early artistic mentors.
Ms. Woodward and her husband, the actor Paul Newman, have given charities $115-million in proceeds from Mr. Newman’s natural-foods company. Ms. Ensler was particularly impressed with the lack of bureaucracy at the company: Mr. Newman personally reviews grant proposals and selects recipients.
“They didn’t make people beg,” she says of Ms. Woodward and Mr. Newman, who have donated money to V-Day. “They investigated, they checked things out, and then they
trusted people.”
Searching for Causes
Ms. Ensler’s unorthodox views on philanthropy extend to the way she describes V-Day. She shuns the word charity, saying it connotes weakness instead of strength. She prefers to call V-Day a “movement,” with her play a catalyst to raise money and awareness. And she never refers to grants to describe the funds her organization dispenses; she prefers to talk about awards, which she says has more of a tone of celebration — and less of dependency.
Charities can’t apply to receive money from V-Day. To find charities to support, Ms. Ensler relies largely on her instincts, her connections with nonprofit groups forged over years of activism and volunteer work, and the advice of V-Day staff members.
Often she is able to combine her playwriting with her search for worthy beneficiaries. Before traveling to Afghanistan to conduct interviews for a new play she is writing about how women force themselves to conform to their culture’s images of female beauty and behavior, the charity’s executive director, Willa Shalit, conducted research online and discovered The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.
Ms. Ensler visited the group’s orphanages, as well as classrooms where it taught women to read. The literacy program is very risky for the charity to operate because the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist group that controls Afghanistan, does not permit women to learn how to read. Ms. Ensler, hardly one to be deterred by controversy, arranged for V-Day to give $240,000 to the charity.
V-Day puts few strings on the money it awards, but it won’t allow its money to be used to conduct research. Instead the fund prefers financing services or advocacy, especially creative new ideas to deter violence against women.
The charity recently helped to sponsor a Stop-Rape Contest, in which 11 international coordinators found individuals and organizations with ideas about how best to prevent rape in their communities, and three winners were chosen from Brazil, Kenya, and Germany. V-Day pledged to support the projects, which included starting antirape clubs in schools, printing antirape slogans on bread and pastry wrappings, and using street-theater performances to get people talking about violence against women.
Equality Now ran the contest, which was part of the Gathering to End Violence Against Women, a meeting of international activists in February. Several foundations helped sponsor the contest and the meeting: The Ford Foundation gave $200,000, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation contributed $35,000, and the Ms. Foundation for Women gave $5,000.
Extending Its Reach
Beyond her international visits, Ms. Ensler is pursuing other efforts to make V-Day more visible. The charity started a Web site in January, where visitors can donate electronically, sign up for an e-mail newsletter, find information about charities that help women in violent situations, and share stories of abuse.
The group’s growing reach is beginning to make fund
raising somewhat easier. Four companies that cater largely to women contributed about $500,000 total to the February Madison Square Garden fund-raising benefit. In 1998, the first year V-Day held a gala performance, no company was willing to support it. Participating in the February event were Hearst Magazines, the Liz Claiborne clothing company, the Web site Women.com, and Lifetime Television. Several other companies also made smaller donations.
V-Day has accomplished this growth without a central office or a telephone, expenses the group does not want to incur as it wants to keep administrative costs low. It operates largely via e-mail from the homes of Ms. Ensler and five staff members. But the charity hopes to trim its overhead cost further by spinning off from the Tides Center, which takes 6 percent of V-Day’s revenue in exchange for providing basic administrative needs.
Still, the charity realizes that to expand its financing of good works it must expand its pool of donors. Ms. Fondais by far the largest single donor to the charity, having provided nearly one-fifth of the amount the group has raised in its lifetime.
The bulk of its money is now raised from the ticket
surcharge– so far $1.8-million has been raised in $10 increments — and the annual gala.
To encourage more donations from individuals, Ms. Shalit, the group’s executive director, set up two special funds that pledge to channel contributions directly to charities that help women; V-Day pays all the handling charges so that 100 percent of a donor’s gift will finance good works.
The Zeba Fund supports humanitarian aid for women in Afghanistan, and the Agnes Fund supports Tasaru Ntomonok (Safe Motherhood), a group in Kenya that works to stop female genital mutilation. Those funds have been popular because they give donors the chance to say exactly how their money
will be used, says Ms. Shalit, who adds that 60 percent of the money that individuals contribute to V-Day are tagged by donors for these two funds. “People like to know their money is not buying paper clips,” she says.
Campus Groups
Beyond raising its own money, V-Day helps numerous nonprofit organizations attract revenue.
V-Day encourages student groups to produce The Vagina Monologues as benefit performances in February. The money raised from those productions stays in cities and towns where the institutions are located and does not pass through V-Day. The productions give students, who decide where the money will be donated, the opportunity to learn about philanthropy, art, and activism. Last year 229 colleges performed the play and donated more than $580,000.
Ms. Ensler says the students’ participation is her favorite part of V-Day. “It’s a completely hands-on experience,” says Ms. Ensler. “They are raising money through it, and consciousness, and they are spreading the V-Day message
on college campuses everywhere.”
Charities around the country also have the opportunity to use the opening-night performance of the show in their city as a benefit for donors and to attract new members, as long as V-Day approves the request.
The Greater Boston National Organization for Women chapter recently netted $30,000 after a performance of The Vagina Monologues, which V-Day matched. As a result, the group secured nearly all of its annual budget in one night.
In Boston, as she does in many cities where the play is produced, Ms. Ensler made herself available to encourage charities that help women to collaborate more closely. On her one day off during the two-week Boston engagement, Ms.Ensler, wearing black leather pants and a black turtleneck, appeared as the main attraction at a lunch the chapter held for top donors, local academics, community activists, and officials from other local antiviolence charities to get acquainted.
“Our mission is to unify groups and remind people that they are in collaboration and cooperation as opposed to competition,” she says. “I want to know in every community who is doing the work, so eventually we’ll have a worldwide network.”
Pursuing New Projects
While Ms. Ensler continues to promote The Vagina Monologues, she plans to start work on a new play this fall, to be called The Good Body. She also plans to write a series of monologues for middle- and high-school students, about eating disorders, sex trafficking, dating, cliques, and other issues.
Home Box Office, the cable-television network, filmed a documentary of Ms. Ensler interviewing women for and performing The Vagina Monologues. When it airs next year Ms. Ensler hopes to organize discussions called the Vagina Dialogues, where women will watch the film together and then talk about it.
Ms. Ensler, who says her favorite thing is meeting new people, shows no sign of slowing down. Although she visited 32 countries last year to perform The Vagina Monologues, speak about V-Day, and interview women for her new work, Ms. Ensler says she feels exhilarated, not exhausted.
“Things overwhelm you when you don’t want to be doing them,” she says. “For me, my desire to see women growing up not recovering and surviving, but thriving and creating, is at the core of everything that I do.” V-DAY
HISTORY: The playwright and activist Eve Ensler started V-Day, a nonprofit organization, in 1998 following the success of The Vagina Monologues, her play about female sexuality.
PURPOSE AND AREAS OF SUPPORT: V-Day mainly supports grass-roots national and international charities working to prevent rape, other physical violence against women, incest, and female genital mutilation.
ASSETS: $894,000. Ms. Ensler donates 5 percent of her royalties from the play to the charity, about $40,000 so far. In addition, $10 of the cost of every ticket sold to a commercial production of The Vagina Monologues goes to V-Day.
KEY OFFICIALS: Eve Ensler, creative director; Willa
Shalit, executive director.
ADDRESS: 20 Owl Creek, Santa Fe, N.M. 87505.
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By Tai Shadrick
TOWSON, Md., Mar 28, 2001 (The Towerlight, U-WIRE via COMTEX) — When Towson University senior theater major Genevieve Grant decided to direct “The Vagina Monologues” this spring, she knew it would gain widespread attention.
“When you say the word ‘vagina’ people pay attention whether they want to or not,” Grant said. “It’s like a car crash.”
“The Vagina Monologues,” written by Eve Ensler, is a compilation of dialogues from over 200 interviews with real women of all races, ages and backgrounds. Ensler wrote “The Vagina Monologues” because she felt it was impossible to talk about women without talking about their vaginas.
“Ensler noticed that there are names that we don’t say very well, like vagina, and that’s attached to how we feel about them,” said Grant.
For students who are not familiar with the production, the idea of creating a play about vaginas may seem far-fetched and ridiculous, if not simply controversial.
“We’re on the stage talking about vaginas, hoping that the people in the audience will want to talk about vaginas,” said senior theatre major Anna Marie Sell. “The point of the show is to engage dialogue. If it’s not such a secret subject then it’s a lot harder for it to be misused.”
With derogatory words for vagina appearing in everyday language, Sell believes it’s important to educate both men and women about the importance of being able to talk freely and honestly about women’s sexuality.
“It’s not a bad thing that women have vaginas,” said Sell. “It’s not any better that women have vaginas than men have penises, but we don’t talk about women’s body parts as often.”
Although “The Vagina Monologues” has won critical appraise and featured some of Hollywood’s most talented stars including Calista Flockhart, Susan Sarandon and Rosie Perez, Grant is aware that many people may still rather
ignore the word “vagina” than embrace it.
“It’s like your leg,” Grant said. “What if you didn’t know you had a leg? What if you didn’t know what to do with it? What if you were scared by the fact that you had it? How ridiculous is that?”
Featuring such descriptive scenes as “If your vagina could talk, what would it say?” Grant is expecting the controversial play to turn more than a few heads.
“‘Frank’ is the perfect word to describe the play,” Grant said. “But the first step to healing is talking about it.”
Grant feels a major component to making “The Vagina Monologues” effective is sheer simplicity.
“One of the key things to this play is to keep it low tech,” Grant said. “It’s really important when you’re doing a show about bringing yourself back to your body that you don’t get all involved with the technical fancy stuff.”
The play’s small cast is also a testimony that “The Vagina Monologues” relies heavily on the unique performances of the individual actresses rather than cluttered ensemble of many elaborately staged productions.
“There are seven women in the cast and they each get one good strong monologue,” Grant said. “Part of what I wanted to do was showcase the talent around here. This department has a lot of women, but they don’t do a lot of plays that allow women to really show off.”
Due to the dramatic and emotional nature of “The Vagina Monologues,” however, Grant is confident that the theme of the play will speak for itself. “I don’t have to teach anybody anything,” Grant said. “People will learn because it’s something intimate to be shared. We’re not doing a whole bunch of intricate dramatic stuff; we just trust the word when we put it out there.”
Although Grant is hopeful that “The Vagina Monologues” will touch many hearts, she is aware that not everyone will agree with the ideas supported by the play. “I’m not trying to convert anyone. I’m just trying to really get people
talking,” Grant said. “Even if they don’t agree with me I want to get them talking. I love it when people walk out of a theatre arguing with each other.”
Whether the audience is celebrating the play’s uniqueness or bashing its straightforwardness, Grant hopes people will leave with at least one thing in common.
“I’d love people to walk away with a good sense of being
alive, being excited, and a little bit in awe of what women are and how fabulous they are.”
To find the original article,
click here.
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By Terry Bryne
Eve Ensler begins cautiously.
Eve Ensler relates ‘The Vagina Monologues’ at the Wilbur
Theater.
Dressed in a simple, form-fitting black dress with
spaghetti straps,
her hair in a girlish pageboy and her feet bare, Ensler
looks both
vulnerable and wise. Sitting in a red chair in the center
of the
Wilbur Theatre stage, behind a single microphone, clutching
a stack
of index cards, it’s hard to know whether she’ll deliver a
lecture
on anatomy or a strident call to arms against men.
“I’ll bet you were worried,” she says. “I was worried,
too.”
Within minutes Ensler has the audience chuckling over their
Own trepidation, but, like the more than 200 women she
interviewed for “The Vagina Monologues,” once she gets going, you can’t
stop her.
But you won’t want to, so touching and powerful are her
stories of women’s lives and their relationships with their most
intimate body part.
There’s the elderly woman who dreams of dining with Burt
Reynolds, but hasn’t gone “down there” since 1954.
There’s the woman who has to go to a Vagina Workshop to
explore her own anatomy; another who learns to love herself through her
relationship with a man who loves to look at her vagina; a
young Bosnian woman who’s been the victim of rape; even one about
the birth of Ensler’s own grandchild.
The stories are mostly funny, sometimes frightening, but
they all become a celebration of women’s sexuality and strength.
In between the stories are amusing lists of names people
across the country have given their body part to avoid saying its true
name, and a list of responses to simple questions Ensler asked
her subjects about their feelings and experiences.
Two of the best monologues provide a balance of humor and
horror.
One tells the story of a girl who is sexually abused as a
child but through the love of a woman, learns to love her “coochie
snorcher.”
The other is the tale of a tax attorney who abandons that
career to
become a sex worker, and becomes a connoisseur of moans.
Ensler’s recounting of the woman’s list of moans, acting
out each one in turn, is worth the price of admission alone.
Ensler’s monologues take on lives of their own, and
although Ensler has more experience as a playwright than an actress, her
performance is engaging and astonishing at once.
It’s as if these women inhabit her for the few minutes that
she tells their tale.
The switch is most apparent when she stops to check her
index cards and introduce the next monologue.
Her unpretentious demeanor turns the performance into more
of a conversation among friends, making her calls for audience
participation (don’t worry, there’s only one) a natural
extension of the dialogue.
She also intersperses the monologues with “vagina facts,”
most of which are terrifying.
One fact, however, Ensler allows the audience to call out
for at any time later in the performance (you’ll have to see the show
for that one).
Director Joe Mantello only takes credit for “supervising”
The production, but his eye for detail is clear.
Loy Arcenas’s set design of a series of silk and lacy
scarf-like panels, combined with Beverly Emmons’ red-hued lighting,
provide the perfect punctuation for Ensler’s performance.
By the end of the evening, Ensler’s sly humor will win over
even the shyest audience member.
Director Joe Mantello only takes credit for “supervising”
The production, but his eye for detail is clear.
Loy Arcenas’s set design of a series of silk and lacy
scarf-like panels, combined with Beverly Emmons’ red-hued lighting,
provide the perfect punctuation for Ensler’s performance.
By the end of the evening, Ensler’s sly humor will win over
even the shyest audience member.
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Females flock to ‘Vagina,’ but other half finds
illumination, too
By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff
They were there.
The Brave. The Few. The men in the audience at ”The Vagina
Monologues.”
According to Wilbur Theatre doorman David Gaboriault, five
passed through his turnstile at Thursday night’s performance. But there were more – a clutch of unsuspecting husbands, several lone males surrounded by circles
of female friends, a pair of giddy performance-art fans,
and a random smattering of the just plain curious.
In fact, there’s nothing in Eve Ensler’s one-woman show
that would even remotely offend men. Surprise them, perhaps. Amuse them, for sure. Teach them something huge and unforgettable – well, it’s hard to imagine anyone, male or female, who didn’t walk out of the theater feeling a little smarter and a lot bolder.
Take, for instance, Ensler’s paean to a certain crude slang
for female genitalia. Equal parts avant-garde art and stand-up comedy, the performance inspired a cross-gender, cross-generational chant to reclaim the word. It won’t soon be forgotten.
”The woman on the other side of me was, like, my
grandmother’s age, and she was screaming,” enthused 30-year-old Peter Parisi of Milton.
”I loved that part!”
As it turns out, the experience was a positive one, almost
across the board, for the testosterone set, and often in ways they never imagined.
”I expected to be a voyeur,” said 39-year-old Derek
Younger of Boston, who attended by himself. ”I expected to feel like a fly on the wall that maybe shouldn’t be there. But I got inside, and it turned out to be one of the most fun, fascinating, multifaceted things I’ve seen in a long time. It helps you understand women, but it makes you think more about you, too. It’s a really important lesson, that you have to understand your body.”
Those lessons aren’t age-specific, either. ”It was very
interesting to have the things I knew explained in a different way,”said Don Manzelli of Woburn, a dapper gentleman of 72, who was invited by a
female friend. ”I did indeed get a new perspective.”
Only a couple of brave souls confessed to feeling
embarrassed.
Jonathan Williams, 29, of Somerville, had no idea what he
was about to see before he and his girlfriend walked in. ”It was embarrassing, but in a good way,” he said. ”You know, the kind of embarrassment you know you ought to get over eventually. The stuff about the clitoris was really interesting.”
Mark Disler of Melrose, who’s 32, found the language a bit
shocking, but enlightening. ”I learned, I don’t know … different ways of …explaining … the organ, I guess. The different … yeah. I understand women a little bit better now.”
Getting men through the door of the theater hasn’t been
easy, according to David Stone, the show’s producer. Especially in places like Detroit and Stamford, Conn., where the radio stations won’t run ads for the show, claiming the title is pornographic. Of course, when
Brooke Shields starred in a New York production, men turned
out in droves. And women have always brought dates as a sort of litmus test for sensitivity, Stone says.
But as time goes on, and word gets out that ”The Vagina
Monologues”isn’t a girls-only male-bashing session, men are feeling
more
comfortable attending.
”I certainly don’t have a vagina,” notes Stone. ”And as
a gay man, I haven’t had much to do with one in a long time. But to me, it’s about shame and secrets. It’s about being comfortable with your body and your sexuality. It’s about humanity. And if men can’t relate to that, how interesting can they be?”
Odds are that Om Bhatia was the only man in attendance with
his teenage daughter, who had read the text of ”The Vagina
Monologues”for a college course and encouraged her parents to see the show with her. The 50-year-old Northborough resident wasn’t the slightest bit squeamish about sitting beside his 19-year-old daughter during an aural rendering of several dozen different orgasms, he said.
”I think you see everything on television these days,” he
said,”and also we are very open like that, very liberated. We want to make sure she does the right thing, rather than hiding from us. I would definitely recommend it to other men. And the women should go if there is something like a penis monologues.”
Awareness comes in many forms, as Ensler would surely
agree, and sometimes when you least expect it. Parisi – who attended with six female friends – found the show fascinating but says he learned the most from the reaction of the women around him.
”I realized that this is something we really don’t talk
about a lot. And that I guess it was important for this to happen,” he said.
Little did Parisi know that he had another lesson coming –
one he recounted with the gleaming countenance of one who has just solved a great mystery. ”At one point, I got up to go to the bathroom and was told that the men’s room had been turned into a women’s room,” he said. ”I had to wait in a long line for a single stall. And I thought `Oh, god! This is what being a woman is like!”’
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By Maureen Dezell, Globe Staff
Eve Ensler interviewed 200 women for “The Vagina Monologues.”
“If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?”
“Red high-tops and a Mets cap worn backward.”
“If it could speak, what would it say?”
“It would say words that begin with `V’ and `T’ – `turtle’ and `violin’ are examples.”
“What’s so special about your vagina?”
“Somewhere deep inside it I know it has a really smart brain.”
NEW YORK – This exchange from an interview conducted with a 6-year-old girl is Eve Ensler’s favorite passage in “The Vagina Monologues,” her Obie Award-winning, taboo-shaking play about the female body part that dares not speak its name.
Provocative and whimsical, poignant and amusing, Ensler’s one-woman performance piece, a paean to the joys of female sexuality, opens this week at the Wilbur Theatre. It comes to Boston not just as a stage production but as a phenomenon. “The Vagina Monologues” has toured the world, and is currently playing to packed houses in six North American cities.
Championed by high-profile actresses (Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg, Meryl Streep), musicians (Alanis Morissette) and public figures (including Donna Hanover, estranged wife of New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani), “The Vagina Monologues” has also given voice and resonance to V-Day Vision, a grass-roots effort and clarion call in the burgeoning international movement to end violence against women.
A radical in red lipstick and cowboy boots, Ensler is a playwright and lifelong activist who seeks to fundamentally change the secrecy and shame that surrounds women’s bodies. She is a survivor of parental abuse herself. She exudes warmth, wit, and singular sense of verve.
“Let’s just start with the word vagina,” she says at the outset of “Vagina Monologues.”
“It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: `Hurry, nurse, bring me the vagina.’ Vagina. Vagina. It’s a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. If you use it during sex, in an attempt to be politically correct, you kill the act right there.”
Ensler says she was a playwright with “exhibitionist tendencies” when she began collecting material for “The Vagina Monologues.” She doesn’t remember writing the piece. “It started when I had a conversation with an older woman – a feminist – who was going through menopause and who had contemptuous things to say about her vagina,” she recalled. “I started asking other friends about it, and I found they had all sorts of things to say and were really open and willing to talk.”
Contrary to the claims of cranky columnists and commentators, the piece – which ended up drawing on interviews with 200 women – is not politically correct. PC performers don’t wear black dresses with spaghetti straps, giggle, and simulate joyous orgasms onstage. Ensler does.
Nor is she a male-basher, as the small but generally enthusiastic presence of men in many of her audiences attests.
“I don’t hate men. Au contraire,” she said recently over lunch at a Union Square cafe. Her French, like her English, is inflected with an unmistakable New York accent.
“I have never been a male-basher. Ever. I’m not interested. I think most men would like to be tender, would love to be able to have space for their feelings, would love to be good lovers. I don’t think men want to end up proving their vitality and strength by beating up women!”
People query her about male bashing in much the same way they ask warily: “Are you a feminist?” “And I say, `Well, yeah, but here’s what I mean by feminism: that women are entitled to their desires; that they should know their desires; that they should fulfill their desires.’ That, to me, is what feminism is.”
Now 47, Ensler came of age when the sexual revolution was in full swing, during the nascent days of what was then called “women’s liberation” – a movement she considers a qualified success.
“The problem with feminism is that somehow it’s translated into the world as something for a very limited number of people, as opposed to something that’s very broad,” she explained. “Let’s look at how many women are working. Let’s look at how many women are Supreme Court justices. I mean, we can’t even begin to chart how different our lives are. I feel entitled, and I feel that I should have a job and I will have a job. I feel that my dreams are possible.
“I also think there are pieces that didn’t happen,” she added. “Sexuality didn’t happen. People were scared to be sexy [in the late 1960s and early 1970s], because what the patriarchy had done with sexiness was so demeaning. Women were so focused then on being taken seriously and changing the world and thinking about equal pay and child care and all that there was a way in which people didn’t get that sex was part of that.
“So sex didn’t get integrated. It got political – and humorless. And it got over-there-ized. It was like: We’ll deal with that later.”
Ensler grew up in the wealthy New York City suburb of Scarsdale, in a home where love and security were in short supply. She says her father, who is now dead, abused her sexually until she was 10 years old, then continued to beat and harass her physically. She doesn’t like to dwell on her childhood, except to say that feeling good about her self and her body – and sharing that sense by leading a crusade that spreads the good word about women’s sexuality – has helped heal her wounds.
“One of the advantages of growing up in a violent situation, where the person you love the most is your perpetrator, is that you have both the capacity to despise that person and to empathize with why they’re doing it to you,” she said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Because if you do not figure out why they’re doing it to you, if you do not get to the heart of why the person who loves you would be hurting you like this, you go mad.
“I have never been in a situation where I didn’t completely empathize with people – people I disagree with politically, people who may have done horrendous things. All you can do is do something to make life better, and try to understand why people become that, and try to change the roots of those things.”
It took Ensler many years to achieve her current sanguine state.
As an undergraduate at Middlebury College, she was a militant, outspoken champion of feminist causes. At the same time, she held herself in extremely low regard. After graduating in 1975, she drifted around the country and in and out of relationships with men who beat or otherwise abused her. She drank, she drugged, and then she drank and drugged some more.
In 1977, she met Richard “Mac” McDermott, then a 34-year-old bartender, in a New York City watering hole. After they began dating, he persuaded her to go into rehab. She did, and then she helped him get sober. They married in 1978.
Ensler legally adopted McDermott’s son, Mark, when she was 27 and he was 19. “From the moment I met him, I completely, utterly identified and connected with him,” she said. She encouraged Mark McDermott to get into acting, a field in which he flourished.
When he registered with the Screen Actors Guild, her stepson took the name Dylan McDermott because Ensler, who had recently suffered a miscarriage, had planned to name her baby Dylan.
Now a co-star of ABC’s “The Practice,” Dylan McDermott has remained close to Ensler, who split up with his father in 1988. She now lives with Israeli-born psychotherapist and artist Ariel Orr Jordan.
Ensler was with Dylan McDermott and his wife, Shiva, for the birth of their daughter. Her poem about watching a vagina turn into a birth canal – “an archaeological tunnel, a sacred vessel, a Venetian canal, a deep well with a tiny child stuck inside waiting to be rescued” – is one of the most moving segments of “The Vagina Monologues.”
Ensler has recently returned from Bulgaria, where she performed “The Vagina Monologues.” She has staged the show throughout Europe, in Israel, South Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkey.
On Feb. 10 – V-Day 2001 – a “Vagina Monologues”-inspired and funded series of films, workshops, and rallies took place simultaneously on 250 college campuses in the United States and in cities in Brazil, Canada, France, and Spain. A gathering at Madison Square Garden featured music by Melissa Etheridge, an anthem written by Morissette, and a performance of the monologues by such high-wattage figures as Close, Streep, Jane Fonda, and Calista Flockhart. It drew a crowd of 18,000.
“We sold out the Garden. We sold out Madison Square Garden!” said Ensler with delight. “It was women, it was girls, it was diplomats. It was human rights workers, it was politicians, it was teachers, it was celebrities, it was women of color. It was so radical in its diversity!
“We raised enough money that we’re giving away $2 million [to fight worldwide violence against women] this year. It’s huge. And what’s really exciting is that I think that we’re really beginning to have an impact. I can’t tell you how crucial I think it is that we stop the violation of women on the planet.”
She paused, smiled, and shrugged. “Who knew?” she said. “I mean, who knew vaginas would become my life?”
This story originally ran in the Entertainment section on page M1 of the Boston Globe on Sunday 3/18/2001.
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by Terry Byrne
Eve Ensler is just back from Bulgaria.
“Bulgaria,” she says from her home in New York. “Can you
believe it? There I was with thousands of activists from Bosnia and Croatia and all over eastern Europe, chanting `vagina’ in their own
languages.”
“Vagina” is one of those words that elicit embarrassed
looks and averted eyes. It has long been considered a “dirty” word,
and one both men and women should avoid. But Ensler, through her
play “The Vagina Monologues,” which opens at the Wilbur Theatre on
Tuesday, has turned the word into a rallying cry.
“I just don’t get that attitude that `vagina’ is a dirty
word,” says Ensler. “Rape and plutonium and acid rain are dirty words,
and yet they’re on the front page every day.”
Ensler’s surprise at people’s attitudes toward their
anatomy led her to begin asking women what they thought of their genitals.
The series of monologues that make up the play were culled from
200 interviews with all sorts of women, young and old, shy and
bold from all around the world.
“But,” Ensler confesses, “I honestly don’t remember writing
the monologues. I don’t feel that writer thing of `Oh yeah, I
chose that word there.’ Putting it together was such an utter joy.”
The play that emerged is a frank and sometimes funny
exploration of something that has been considered taboo. “Let’s start with
the word `vagina,’ ” Ensler says in the play. “It sounds like an
infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: Hurry, nurse, bring me
the vagina!”
Much more than an anatomy lesson, “The Vagina Monologues”
asks why this organ of pleasure should create so much shame and
bemoans the fact that women lose their self-esteem and confidence when
they’re taught to deny their desires. Besides listening to how
women feel about their most intimate body part, the play includes
horrifying tales of sexual abuse, touching accounts of older women
who’ve never ventured “down there,” shocking vagina “facts” and the
often
hilarious names people have come up with for their
genitals.
But when Ensler was ready to produce the play she found a
serious
amount of resistance. “Oh, they wanted me to change the
title, and
tone it down,” she says.
When she did find a theater to produce it, she found it
difficult to give the piece up to other actresses. “These women had
given me their stories and I was so protective of them. Still, I’m a
playwright, not a performer,” says Ensler, whose other works include
“The Depot,” “Ladies,” “Necessary Targets” and the upcoming
“The Good Body.”
“So my desire to do it was a huge surprise to me. But I
don’t feel like I’m performing it. I’m allowing those women to tell
their
stories. I’m visiting with them for a while.”
The production earned an Obie award in 1997 and led to a
National tour. “I traveled to so many cities and so many women came
up to me and told me they’d been raped or hurt, I was overwhelmed,”
Ensler says. “I thought, `I either have to stop doing this play or
do something to help.’ “
The result was V-Day, an effort to end violence against
Women celebrated on Valentine’s Day. In 1998, stars including
Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon and Calista Flockhart
performed Ensler’s play in a benefit for grassroots organizations
working to stop violence against women.
The event has since expanded, and this year 13 cities
around the world and 150 colleges celebrated V-Day. The celebrity
interest in “The Vagina Monologues” also has led to a casting
arrangement in New York where three high-profile actresses perform the play
for a limited time.
“Everything that’s happened with this play has been a huge
shock to me,” says Ensler. “In some ways it’s always been beyond me.
I think the only effort I made was to create a balance in the play
Between love and sex and violence. It’s the balance we have to find
in our everyday lives in an incredibly violent world.”
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By LUCY KOMISAR, © Earth Times News Service
Eighteen thousand people, most of them women, jammed Madison Square Garden in New York February 11th for a mammoth benefit performance of “The Vagina Monologues” to raise money for programs to end violence against women. UN statistics say that one of every three women in the world will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.
This was a women’s event, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and World Bank President James Wolfensohn, attesting to its international importance, sat in the audience unobtrusively, their presence unnoted by the emcee. The script was serious and comic, joyous and sad.
The program honored women representing two of the most extreme examples of violence against women: female genital mutilation, which afflicts 130 million women, largely in Africa, and the subjugation of Afghani women by the Taliban.
Kenyans Beatrice Torome, Agnes Parevio, and Soraya Mire spoke of their efforts to end female genital mutilation. When Beatrice Torome turned 13, she decided she would not have her clitoris cut off and ran away from home. She said, “My decision inspired my sister to do the same. I hope what I do helps to make it easier for others.” Now she is an activist in the anti-FGM movement.
Agnes Parevio recalled the horrors of undergoing “circumcision” as a child and said that the reason for genital mutilation is men’s “fear of women’s sexuality.” Soroya Mire walked through rural Kenya to oppose genital mutilation until V-Day gave her money to buy a jeep. Now, she drives that territory, teaching people about their bodies and promoting an alternative rite of passage with feasting, dance and song.
Soroya, a 23-year-old leader of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (www.rawa.org) spoke of the horrors of that country where women are whipped even for wearing the wrong color socks. Oprah Winfrey asked the audience to “imagine” they were shrouded in burqas, barely able to breath, forced to live behind cloth grids that afforded no peripheral vision.
Actresses Claire Danes and Julia Stiles played two sides of a young Bosnian woman who’d been raped with broomsticks, bottles and rifle butts. Before, she was a carefree joyous teenager and after, a distraught, sorrowful shell.
The men who enforce clitoridectomy and burqas would have had screaming fits if they had seen the excerpts from “The Vagina Monologue,” a theatrical show which has run in New York for several years and is being staged in cities and college campuses in the U.S. and elsewhere. It is a clever, comic affirmation of women’s sexuality.
The title encompasses the first message, a rejection of the notion that women’s sexual organ is obscene or unclean, that even the word “vagina” is unmentionable. Eve Ensler, who wrote the show, joked, “It sounds like an infection. It never sounds like a word you want to say. If you use it during sex, ‘Darling would you stroke my vagina?” you kill the act right there!”
The word figures in the show almost as a litany, repeated over and over so that it loses its ability to shock or shame. The famous women in the cast – most of them actresses, including Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, Glen Close, and Gloria Steinem, march onstage and one-by-one shout out the slang words: “pussycat, twat, powder box, pookie, koochie snoocher, nappy dugout, muffin.”
Ensler, a New Yorker of 47 who from age 5 to 10 was sexually abused and beaten by her middle-class father, wrote the skits after talking to over 200 women about their vaginas.
Some of the monologues are bitter-sweet comedy. Three actresses (Carol Kane, Julie Kavner and Ricki Lake) play an old woman talking for the first time in her life about her vagina. She’d gotten “wet” as a young girl when a boy kissed her. He made her feel so embarrassed, that she avoided ever getting sexually excited again.
She calls it “down there” and says, “I haven’t been down there since 1953. It’s a cellar, damp, clammy. You don’t want to go down there. Down there you can hear the pipes. Things get caught there. Little animals. Sometimes, you have to plug up the leaks.” The audience shrieked with laughter.
The performers glorified women’s enjoyment of sex. Answering the question, “If the vagina could talk, what would it say?” they passed around the microphone to declare: “Slow down,” “Is that you?” “Feed me,” “I want,” “Start again,” “No, over there,” “Lick me,” “Think again,” “Don’t stop,” “Remember me?” “Don’t give up,” “Yes, there!”
There was a comic riff on orgasmic moans: the Janice Joplin moan; the WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) moan – silence; the Jewish moan: no, no, no; the Southern moan; the Zen moan: the diva moan – ending on a high note, and finally, the triple orgasmic moan – ending and starting again three times.
The skits included comic complaints about indignities done to vaginas. Comedian Rosie Perez declared, “My vagina doesn’t need to be cleaned up, it smells good already!” They women made fun of gynecological exams: “Why the scary paper dress?” asked Rosie. “Why the Nazi steel stirrups,” declared Meera Syal. “And thong underwear,” declared Rosie. “What maniac thought that up!”
They provided some useful statistics. “The clitoris has 8000 nerve endings, twice the number in the penis.” The audience cheered. “In some American states (Arkansas, Alabama, Kansas, Texas, Ohio) it is illegal to sell vibrators, but legal to sell guns. We have yet to hear of a mass murder committed with a vibrator!” “Texas!” (George Bush’s home state) was reiterated to a chorus of boos.
Actresses Kathleen Chalfont, Swoozie Kurtz and Mary Alice talked about a famous workshop where women were encouraged to use mirrors to look at their own vaginas. Chalfont declared, “It was better than the Grand Canyon!” (Men were encouraged to look and appreciate, too.)
Actress Glenn Close brought down the house with her rendition of “Reclaiming Cunt,” in which she repeats the word again and again. “I call it cunt. I’ve reclaimed it. I really like it. Cunt. Just listen to it: cunt,” she drops to knees, raising her arm and shouting in triumph.
Finally, there was appreciation of the vagina’s role in birth. Jane Fonda, who donated $1 million to the campaign, performed a poetically moving monologue Ensler wrote to describe the birth of her grandchild, which she describes arriving through a passage that’s “like a Venetian canal.”
Among the beneficiaries of the V-Day Fund, fattened by $2 million in ticket sales, will be the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan; Tasaru Ntomonok of Kenya which works against female genital mutilation; the Center for Women War Victims in Zagreb; the international Gathering to End Violence Against Women; Planned Parenthood of North America, which has added the issue to its agenda; Equality Now; and Women in Need (NYC) which helps homeless women recover from violence.
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Originally published in:
The Gazette, Medina County, Ohio
By Craig Williams from The Gazette (in Medina County, Ohio)
February 15, 2001
Another V-Day has come and gone. It’s a day many of us men spend thinking about women — maybe learning something new about them.
Here’s what I discovered about women this V-day:
In Jordan, Morocco and Syria, women who commit adultery can be (quite legally) killed by their husbands. I learned that, in Pakistan, three out of four women in jail are there because they have been raped — Again, because THEY have been raped. Unless these women can produce four male witnesses who actually saw the penetration, their rapists go unpunished.
Shall I go on?
In parts of India, girls as young as 10 are sold into prostitution, sometimes by their families. Each week in Bangladesh three to five women suffer acid attacks. That is to say men throw acid (the kind that’s readily available in car batteries) into women’s faces or onto their bodies, grotesquely disfiguring them.
Why? Because they were slow serving dinner or maybe they rejected the attacker’s marriage proposal.
You’ve heard of this locally, as you have heard of “honor killings,” in which men murder female relatives, in the name of family honor, for suspected sexual activity (this includes being the victim of rape) outside of marriage. These men are considered heroes in their communities.
In parts of Africa, the Middle East and Malaysia, young women are subjected routinely to genital mutilation. They are forcibly restrained while, for instance, their entire clitoris and some or all of their labia are cut away. Sometimes their genitals are then sewn shut with catgut or fastened closed with thorns, leaving a small (too small) hole for the passage of urine and menses.
Why? So they’ll be faithful to their husbands.
So when I talk about V-day, I’m not referring to the commercialized holiday that requires men give women (mostly out of a misplaced sense of guilt or obligation) overpriced flowers or cards with romantic sentiments they couldn’t think up on their own. The V-day I’m talking about is a 24-hour period set aside to honor women, and to educate all of us about the alarming amounts of violence — in its varied and sickening forms — perpetrated against females worldwide every day.
V-Day (which was last Saturday) was started in 1998 by playwright Eve Ensler, creator of the hit play “The Vagina Monologues” — a series of honest, funny and often heartbreaking, first-person vignettes based on Ensler’s interviews with women from all parts of the globe. You can see the play Sunday at Akron’s Highland Square Theatre (profits benefit YWCA of Summit County Rape Crisis Center), and May 1 through 27 at the Music Hall Little Theatre in Cleveland.
In an interview posted on the V-Day Web site (www.vday.org), Ensler said that as she traveled with the show, so many women approached her with their own stories of rape, beatings or other forms of abuse that she decided to turn the play and its message into a sort of crusade. Today V-Day events around the world help women, who would otherwise be too frightened to stand up for themselves, gather into large non-violent armies to confront their male oppressors. The events also help fund groups that fight atrocities like the ones I’ve mentioned.
The goal of this “crusade” is to remove violence from the lives of all women and girls forever. It’s a big battle, but one worth fighting.
Inevitably, some readers will be appalled, not as they should be by the injustices described here, but by seeing words like “vagina” and “clitoris” right here in a “family newspaper.” I invite such readers to kindly get over it. If we, as a society, could manage to get past our fear of words, perhaps we could more openly discuss with our daughters what a vagina is, and how they can respect and protect theirs (along with the rest of their body) from abuse and disrespect from others.
Approximately one-third of all juvenile victims of sexual abuse cases are children younger than 6. And this isn’t just a “foreign” problem. It is estimated that 72 of every 100,000 females in the United States were raped last year. There are at least four million reported incidents of domestic violence against women annually. If you’d like to know the reliable sources from which I’ve gathered these statistics, write me. I’d be glad to tell you.
No, there are more appropriate targets for your outrage than a harmless configuration of letters on a page. Like people who practice female infanticide (killing babies merely because they were born the “wrong” sex) or the 5,000 men who, each year in India, set fire to their brides because the dowry that came with them was considered inadequate.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are things you can do. There are things I can do. Solutions that don’t require a lot of time or money. As usual, there’s not enough space to list them all here, but visiting the V-Day Web site is a good start. They’ll lead you in the right direction. Or write me at craigw@ohio.net, and I’ll tell you what you can do — or where you can turn if you’re a victim yourself.
V-Day may be over, but the issues it addresses continue day after day. And not all women are longing for a candlelight dinner or a heart-shaped box of candy.
Some would settle for a little bit of dignity.
Please see Craig’s site here.