Archive for the "V-Day" Category
Posted — Filed under
V-Day
Tagged — No Comments
by Regina Cornwell
http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/043008.html
“I’ve been trying to free myself of Katrina’s grasp. …With what I’ve gone through I should be just stark raving mad by now, but I’m able to go on.” These are the words of Herreast Harrison, Upper Ninth Ward resident, political and cultural activist.
Welcome to New Orleans, newly christened the “Vagina of America” by playwright Eve Ensler, because, as she explained, it’s a delta, it’s fertile, and people love to party there. She chose the city to commemorate the 10th anniversary of her global V-Day movement to end violence against women and girls, and dedicated the celebration to the women of NOLA (New Orleans, LA) for holding up the sky during and since Katrina. Not one for small gestures, Ensler rented out the Superdome—the once infamous home to thousands of New Orleanians, mostly people of color, abandoned when the levees broke—and renamed it Superlove. Entry was free to all for the mega-weekend events, April 11-12…
Read More >
Posted — Filed under
V-Day
Tagged — No Comments
http://www.ourchart.com/content/no-more-beatings-no-more-rape
You have been reading our blogs and watching our video diary about the incredible V To The 10th event that took place in the Superdome in New Orleans from April 11-12. Some of you lucky ones were there.
It was the 10th anniversary celebration of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls launched by Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. There will be thousands of V-Day events held around the world this year, but this was the BIG one; V-day chose the location to honor the women of New Orleans and the Gulf South.
It was a complex and consciousness-raising gathering of activists, performers and speakers who came together with a common purpose. But the women of New Orleans and the Gulf South were the event’s heart center; 1,200 women of the Katrina diaspora returned home for the event and the local activists of the Katrina Warriors Network brought the community into the movement.
The Superdome, a site of suffering during the Hurricane Katrina disaster, was transformed into a vaginal, pink “Superlove” space. I roamed around this space, crossing paths with the inspiring people who had come from near and far. Take the next three minutes, sit down, put on some headphones and come meet some of them on this tour of the “Superlove.”
When you are done watching, please go to the V-Day website and dig deeper into these activists and this movement.
Were you there? Are you involved in V-Day? I hope you will share your stories and send links to your Vagina Warrior worlds.
Read More and Watch The L Word Video Diary >
Posted — Filed under
V-Day
Tagged — No Comments
By Rob Okun, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/83437/
It was no accident that New Orleans was the site of the 10th anniversary of V-Day, a dizzying two-day celebration in April of the global movement to end violence against women and girls. The vibrant, pulsating city, though far from healed in the two and a half years since the levees broke, flooding the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, offered safe harbor for the slam poets, artists, writers, healers, hell raisers, and hope mongers — activists all in the struggle for truth, justice, and a new American way. I was part of the tribe that converged on the Big Easy, in my case to also speak at Tulane University and to visit one of my daughters.
While it was a far cry from Mardi Gras, colorful costumes, laugh-out-loud T-shirts (“Viva las Vulvas” read one), Native American dancers, and the Mahalia Jackson Choir made for a celebratory mood. We needed all that upbeat energy as a counterweight to the grim stories of violence against women recounted from the main stage. It was both chilling and hopeful that V-Day was held in the Superdome where so many suffered, primarily New Orleanians of color who had no way to get out of the city after the storm. Transforming the space from a suffocating container of despair to a vessel of great hope was accomplished by imaginative art–installations suggesting vaginal canals and portraits of “sheroes” of the women’s and civil rights movements. Upper floors had places for women to go for free health care, a hair salon, and yoga instruction. An “activists’ lounge,” open to women and men, was filled with literature, art, books, and animated conversations.
An imaginative, urgent effort to raise consciousness and money, V-Day grew out of playwright-activist Eve Ensler’s wedding of art and activism. Her award-winning play The Vagina Monologues is expected by the end of 2008 to have been performed at more than 3700 V-Day events around the United States and the world. A star-studded performance of the play, featuring Jane Fonda, Julia Stiles, Salma Hayek, and Jennifer Beals, capped off the two-day gathering and included music by Jennifer Hudson, Faith Hill, and the New Orleans Gospel Choir.
Among the conversations Eve Ensler facilitated from the stage was one with women activists from conflict zones — Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and the Congo. The struggle for women’s lives in these war-torn countries was as heartbreaking to hear as it was inspiring to learn of women’s vision and small victories.
At V-Day, men were also visible, albeit a minority of all who attended. Some were activists working to prevent violence against women; others were eager to learn what they could do. A men’s panel featuring local and national figures in the antiviolence men’s movement held the attention of the audience with a sophisticated discussion of men’s roles in perpetuating and preventing violence.
As more men — from high school to middle age — are encouraged to examine (and break out of) the box of conventional masculinity men have been socialized to inhabit, a burning question looms large: How can we inspire more men to acknowledge that some men’s violence requires all men to reject any kind of abuse of women? There is no middle way. To paraphrase the current tenant of the White House, “Either you’re for the abusers or you’re against them.” We have to continue to challenge ourselves to find our voices and to shift our position from the “I’m-a-good-guy-I-don’t-abuse-women” bystander to someone who won’t tolerate men who act abusively. Men’s participation in inspirational gatherings such as V-Day is a part of the strategy.
Perhaps the most compelling expression of the possibility for men in the movement to end violence against women was the conversation Eve Ensler conducted with Dr. Denis Mukwege, director and founder of the Panzi General Referral Hospital in Bukavu, in South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The lone physician at Panzi Hospital, Dr. Mukwege said the hospital is the only center for victims of sexual violence in eastern Congo. The level of violence against women there is unthinkable: vaginas violated with bayonets, bottles, sticks. “This is not rape,” Dr. Mukwege said, “this is a decimation, destruction, the destruction of life force, of life.” At Panzi Hospital, he repairs and reconstructs that which has been destroyed.
After 10 years of the world knowing about these unprecedented assaults, why has there has been no real progress? Ensler asked Dr. Mukwege. “The world needs to be altered,” he said. “The world comes, sees, is moved and then forgets.” He said V-Day inspired him with the spirit of healing and hope it engendered. “I see the image of a snowball gaining momentum, of change coming.” To the question, “What about you, as a man, keeps you in the Congo, keeps you giving your life to women?” he answered:
“We live with women. We understand the strength of women. Women’s work — unlike men’s — extends throughout the day. When you’ve been raped, when you are without your strength, it is necessary to help women regain their strength, to work beside women.” Dr. Mukwege is currently overseeing construction of the City of Joy, a refuge for healed women, survivors of torture and rape who have no family and no community.
Throughout the gathering, Dr. Mukwege’s words came back to me, like a call and response one might hear out on the bayou. “Every day … every day … Say no to violence, say no to rape … Say no to violence, say no to rape … In each community … In each community … Each individual should say No! Should stand up and say No! … Each individual should say No! Should stand up and say No! … If everyone would do that, things will change … If everyone would do that, things will change…
V-Day’s 10th anniversary brought together women and men of conscience from around the United States and around the world. By being held in New Orleans, symbol of struggle and possibility for a renewed America, the gathering radiated a moral urgency. Creating a world safe for women and girls means creating a world safe for boys and men. Women have long been doing their part; as men we must redouble our efforts to do ours.
Rob Okun is executive director of the Men’s Resource Center for Change in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he edits the center’s Voice Male magazine. He can be reached at rob.okun@mrcforchange.org.
Posted — Filed under
V-Day
Tagged — No Comments
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080428/lewis
Today is a day that has largely–and rightly–been given over to Dr. [Denis] Mukwege and his astonishing and heroic work in the Congo. (For those who may have missed his panel, he is, of course, the internationally famed doctor who heads the resolute and magnificent staff of the Panzi Hospital in Eastern Congo.) Driving the work is the endlessly grim and despairing litany of rape and sexual violence. All of us assembled in the Superdome, talk of V-Day and The Vagina Monologues; in the Congo there’s a medical term of art called “vaginal destruction.” I need not elaborate; most of you have heard Dr. Mukwege. But suffice to say that in the vast historical panorama of violence against women, there is a level of demonic dementia plumbed in the Congo that has seldom, if ever, been reached before.
That’s the peg on which I want to hang these remarks. I want to set out an argument that essentially says that what’s happening in the Congo is an act of criminal international misogyny, sustained by the indifference of nation states and by the delinquency of the United Nations.
Dr. Mukwege and others have said time and time again that the current saga of the Congo has been going on for more than a decade. It’s important to remember that it’s a direct result of the escape of thousands of mass murderers who eluded capture after the Rwandan genocide–thanks to the governments of France and the United States–by fleeing into what was then called Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The wars and the horror that followed have been chronicled by journalists, by human rights organizations, by senior representatives of the United Nations Secretary-General, by agencies, by NGOs internationally and NGOs on the ground, by the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs, by the Security Council, and in the process, accentuated and punctuated by the cries and the pain and the carnage of over 5 million deaths.
The sordid saga ebbs and flows. But it was brought back into sudden, vivid public notoriety by Eve Ensler’s trip to the Congo in July and August of last year, her visit to the Panzi Hospital, her interviews with the women survivors of rape, and her visceral piece of writing in Glamour magazine which began with the words “I have just returned from Hell.”
Eve set off an extraordinary chain reaction: her visit was followed by a fact-finding mission by the current UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs who, upon his return, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in which he said that the Congo was the worst place in the world for women. Those views were then echoed everywhere (including by the EU Parliament), triggering front page stories in the New York Times, the Washington Postand the Los Angeles Times, and a lengthy segment on 60 Minutes by Anderson Cooper of CNN.
Largely as a result of this growing clamor against the war on women in the Congo, and the fact that Eve Ensler herself testified before the Security Council, the United Nations resolution that renewed the mandate for the UN Peacekeeping force in the Congo (MONUC, as it’s called) contained some of the strongest language condemning rape and sexual violence ever to appear in a Security Council resolution, and obliged MONUC, in no uncertain terms, to protect the women of the Congo. The resolution was passed at the end of December last year.
In January of this year, scarce one month later, there was an “Act of Engagement”–a so-called peace commitment signed amongst the warring parties. I use “so-called” advisedly because evidence of peace is hard to find. But that’s not the point: the point is much more revelatory and much more damning.
The peace commitment is a fairly lengthy document. Unbelievably, from beginning to end, the word “rape” never appears. Unbelievably, from beginning to end, the phrase “sexual violence” never appears. Unbelievably, “women” are mentioned but once, lumped in with children, the elderly and the disabled. It’s as if the organizers of the peace conference had never heard of the Security Council resolution.
But it gets worse. The peace document actually grants amnesty–I repeat, amnesty–to those who have participated in the fighting. To be sure, it makes a deliberate legal distinction, stating that war crimes or crimes against humanity will not be excused. But who’s kidding whom? This arcane legal dancing on the head of a pin is not likely to weigh heavily on the troops in the field, who have now been given every reason to believe that since the rapes they committed up to now have been officially forgiven and forgotten, they can rape with impunity again. And indeed, as Dr. Mukwege testified before Congress just last week, the raping and sexual violence continues.
The war may stutter; the raping is unabated.
But the most absurd dimension of this whole discreditable process is the fact that the peace talks were “facilitated”–they were effectively orchestrated–by MONUC, that is to say, by the United Nations. And perhaps most unconscionable of all, despite the existence for seven years of another Security Council resolution 1325, calling for women to be active participants in all peace deliberations, there was no one at that peace table directly representing the women, the more than 200,000 women, whose lives and anatomies were torn to shreds by the very war that the peace talks were meant to resolve.
Thus does the United Nations violate its own principles.
Now let me make something clear. In the nearly twenty-five years that I’ve been involved in international work, I’ve been a ready apologist for the United Nations. And I continue to be persuaded that the United Nations can yet offer the best hope for humankind. But when the United Nations goes off the rails, as is the case in the Congo–as is invariably the case when women are involved–my colleagues and I, in our new organization called AIDS-Free World, are not going to bite our tongues. There’s too much at stake.
What makes this all the more galling is that in many respects, the UN is the answer. Those of you who intermittently despair of ending sexual violence should know that if the UN brought the full power of its formidable agencies to bear, tremendous progress would be made despite the indifference of many countries. But therein lie cascading levels of hypocrisy.
You heard today about the collective UN campaign to end rape and sexual violence in the Congo–twelve agencies united in this common purpose. But with the exception of some magnificent UNICEF staff on the ground, about whom Ann Veneman, executive director of UNICEF has every right to be proud, the presence of the other UN agencies ranges from negligible to nonexistent. This is all largely an exercise in rhetoric. Even the UN Population Fund, ostensibly the lead agency in the Congo, is pathetically weak on the ground, and on its own website talks of the problems of funding.
It does induce a combination of rage and incredulity when the UN tries to pawn itself off as the serious player in combating sexual violence when the record is so appallingly bad. In fact it could be said– indeed, it needs to be said–that the V-Day movement and Eve, relatively minuscule players by comparison, have probably done more to ease the pain of violence in the Congo than any one of eleven UN agencies. Who else, I ask you, is building a City of Joy so that the women who have been raped can recover with some sense of security and then become leaders in their communities?
Is there an answer to this collective abject failure of the international community to protect the women of the Congo? There sure is, and the answer sits right at the top, and the answer is the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
I don’t know who is advising the Secretary-General on these matters, but he’s being led down a garden path soon to be strewn with ghosts that will haunt his entire stewardship, and leave an everlasting pejorative legacy. I know how the UN works; I’ve been an Ambassador to the UN for my country, the Deputy at UNICEF, an advisor on Africa to a former Secretary-General, and most recently a “Special Envoy.” In the incestuous hotbed of the thirty-eighth floor of the United Nations secretariat, where sits the Secretary-General, critics are scorned, derided and mocked. And exactly the same will happen to me. But I want all of you here assembled to know that it need not be.
If the Secretary-General were to exercise real leadership against sexual violence, instead of falling back–as his advisors have suggested–on statements and rhetoric and fatuous public relations campaigns, he could turn things around. What in God’s name is wrong with these people whose lives consist of moving from inertia to paralysis?
The Secretary-General should summon the heads of the twelve UN agencies allegedly involved in “UN Action” on violence against women and read the riot act. He should explain to them that press releases do not prevent rape, and he should demand a plan of action on the ground, with dollars and deadlines. He should equally summon the heads of the ten agencies that comprise UNAIDS and demand a plan of implementation for testing, treatment, prevention and care for women who have been sexually assaulted, again with deadlines. I’m prepared to bet that UNAIDS has never convened such a meeting, despite the fact that the violence of the sexual assaults in the Congo creates avenues in the reproductive tract through which the AIDS virus passes. Dr. Mukwege talks of increased numbers of HIV-positive women turning up at Panzi.
The Secretary-General, taking a leaf from Eve Ensler, should insist on a network of rape crisis centers, rape clinics in all hospitals, sexual violence counsellors, and Cities of Joy right across the Eastern Congo… indeed, across the entire country. The Secretary-General should demand a roll call, an accounting of which countries have contributed financially to ending the violence, and in what amounts, plus those who have not, and then publish the results for the world to see so that the recalcitrants can be brought to the bar of public opinion (How’s this for a juxtaposition by way of example: over the course of over a decade? The UN Trust Fund to end Violence Against Women has triumphantly reached $130 million. The United States spends more than $3 billion/week on the war in Iraq).
But there’s more. The Secretary-General should launch a personal crusade to double the troop complement–that is, MONUC–in the Congo. The protection provisions in the new so-called peace accord, for women, cannot be implemented with the current troop numbers, large though they may seem.
And finally, the Secretary-General should pull out all the stops in getting the United Nations to agree that the Congo is the best test case for the principle of the “Responsibility to Protect.” This principle was universally endorsed by heads of state at the United Nations in September of 2005. It’s the first major contemporary international challenge to the sanctity of sovereignty. It simply asserts that where a government is unable or unwilling to protect its own people from gross violations of human rights, then the international community has the responsibility to intervene. That responsibility can be diplomatic negotiation, or economic sanctions, or political pressure or military intervention–whatever it takes to restore justice to the oppressed. Responsibility to Protect was originally drafted with Darfur in mind–it’s equally applicable to the Congo. We have to start somewhere.
The Secretary-General has a tremendous challenge. He has the opportunity, and the wherewithal, and the influence and the majesty to save thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of women’s lives–physically and psychologically. And once the process begins in earnest in the Congo, it would spread to all dimensions of violence against women everywhere.
To whom else is such an opportunity given? The Secretary-General of the United Nations has said that violence against women is one of the gravest issues of our time. Well, if that’s the case, surely he can understand that speeches aren’t enough. And if he truly believes what he says, then let him stake his tenure on it. I believe that the struggle for gender equality is the most important struggle on the planet: Ban Ki-Moon should say to the 192 countries that make up the United Nations: “Either you give me evidence that we’re going to prevail in this struggle or you find yourself another Secretary-General.”
“Ah,” people will say, “Lewis has finally lost it.” I don’t think so. We’re talking about more than 50 percent of the world’s population, amongst whom are the most uprooted, disinherited and impoverished of the earth. If you can’t stand up for the women of the world, then you shouldn’t be Secretary-General.
Alas, I guess I know what will happen. We’ve already had signals. Last fall, in an unprecedented initiative, a High-Level Panel on Reform of the United Nations recommended the creation of a new international agency for women. The recommendation was based on the finding that the record of the UN on gender has been abysmal. If the new agency comes into being, headed by an Under-Secretary General, with funding that starts at $1 billion a year (less than half of UNICEF’s resources), and real capacity to run programs on the ground, issues like violence against women would suddenly be confronted with indomitable determination.
The women activists on the ground, the women survivors on the ground, the women activist-survivors on the ground would finally have resources and support for the work that must be done.
But the creation of the new agency is bogged down in the UN General Assembly, caught up in the crossfire between the developed and developing countries. The Secretary-General could break that impasse if he pulled out all the stops. He and the Deputy-Secretary General make speeches that give the impression they support the women’s agency, but in truth the language is so carefully and artfully couched as to gut the agency of impact on the ground, in-country, were it ever to come into being. Again, the advisors read the tea leaves in a soiled and broken chalice.
This weekend has been filled with hope in the struggle to end violence against women. Thoughtful, decent men have come to the fore on this very platform, and women from so many countries have made the case for sanity in words that are moving and compelling in equal measure. I have chosen to link the Congo and the United Nations because as Eve said at the outset, the Congo is the V-Day spotlight for the coming year, and the United Nations can truly break the monolith of violence. We just have to apply unceasing pressure so that the issue is joined rather than manipulated.
I don’t have Eve’s rhythm and cadence. But I cherish a touch of her spirit, a lot of her anger and a microscopic morsel of her trusting love, commitment and courage that will one day change this world.
Posted — Filed under
V-Day
Tagged — No Comments
http://www.ourchart.com/content/v-the-10th-the-red-tent
It was an unforgettable weekend at the Superdome in New Orleans — thousands of activists and performers from around the world joined Hurricane Katrina survivors from New Orleans and the Gulf South in transforming the Superdome into “Superlove” during V to the 10th, the tenth anniversary of the V-Day campaign to end violence against women and girls. Eve Ensler, the mother of the V-Day movement, urged women to share their stories with each other all weekend. Ensler’s Vagina Monologues project is based on this idea of the value of the individual woman’s story — it is comprised of staged readings based on the stories of real women. Local artists and activists from New Orleans used a similar approach to creating their AMAZING new theater piece about Katrina, “Swimming Upstream,” which debuted at Superlove …
View the Full Essay and Photos >
Posted — Filed under
V-Day
Tagged — No Comments
For this slightly skeptical and nervous first-timer, ‘The Vagina Monologues’ performance Saturday night in the New Orleans Arena was a deeply moving celebration of solidarity among the world’s women.
By Millie Ball
Staff writer
It was a love fest, plain and simple.
Wait. Plain and simple aren’t the right words for an event that filled up most of the New Orleans Arena Saturday night, replacing the teal neon of the Hornets with hot pink words you’ve never seen there before and never will again.
And it doesn’t describe the two-hour-and-40-minute, 1960s-style, in-your-face show that ended with Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson belting out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” along with Faith Hill and Charmaine Neville and Jennifer Beals, while Doris Roberts — Ray Romano’s TV mama — was dancing on stage with actresses Jane Fonda, Christine Lahti, Kerry Washington, Shirley Knight, Amber Tamblyn, Didi Conn, Rosario Dawson and who knows who else, all of them moving to Aretha Franklin’s theme and singing and feeling the vibe.
And just about all of us in the arena — women from all over the world, and a scattering of men, too — were on our feet, clapping and singing along. A friend who brought two daughters in their late teens shout-whispered over the noise, “For the first time in 55 years, I feel comfortable saying ‘vagina.’ “
“The Vagina Monologues.” There, I’ve said it too. In public. What would my mama (rest her soul) say?
Saturday’s gala was the culmination of a weekend of activities around the 10th anniversary of V-Day, a grass-roots, worldwide movement that so far has raised $50 million dedicated to “stopping every kind of violence against women and girls.”
It grew out of the monologues written in 1994 by playwright/performer Eve Ensler, who interviewed 200 women on the once (and in many quarters, still) unmentionable topic for her original one-woman show that premiered in 1996 in New York.
Now she says “vagina” 128 times a night when she does the monologues herself instead of joining with other performers for special presentations such as the one Saturday night.
Even the 54-year-old Ensler concedes, “It’s a word that sounds like an infection at best.” When she first read the monologues on stage, she says, “My most pressing concern was being able to get the words out of my terrified mouth.”
But there they were Saturday night, all those famous folks saying it, including Shirley Knight, who’s 71. And Doris Roberts, 77, whose “old lady” character compared her “down there” to a cellar that’s been “closed” for years.
But not Oprah. Other big names dropped out earlier, but Oprah and Salma Hayek, who’s making a movie in New Orleans and is on the V-Day board, were no-shows. Ensler said Oprah was sick. Maybe. Doubters abounded. Anyway, Oprah espouses using the euphemistic “va-jay-jay” in place of the word of the night.
Truth be told, Liz Mikel, a Dallas actress who’s on “Friday Night Lights” — but not exactly a household name — was a dynamite substitute. She stepped in to perform Ensler’s new monologue inspired by Patricia Henry, a New Orleans woman who survived Hurricane Katrina. Mikel, a big brassy woman with a booming voice, broke hearts as she described the flood, and kindled revival fervor as she talked about cooking up okra and gumbo and “resistance,” about “cooking up a way to stay in this place.”
She’d already won over the crowd (official attendance: 16,600) with outrageous comedy. Mikel’s earlier monologue was about her ANGRY vagina. About the way it was treated in her gynecologist’s office and well, you know . . . She had everybody hooting and hollering at the all-too-familiar experiences.
Kerry Washington, who was in “Ray” and “The Last King of Scotland,” was another winner, acting out a relationship with a guy named Bob, who was forgettable in every way but one.
And Jennifer Beals, backed up by three other cast members from “The L-Word,” had everybody roaring at her bit about a former tax lawyer-turned-dominatrix, with imitations of moaning women. There was the elegant woman (with a giggle), the WASP (a silent scream), the African-American . . . we can’t go there.
But several times, tears welled.
Hometown singer Charmaine Neville, her hair streaming down her back, told the audience, “I want you to walk with me, to walk down the streets of this wonderful, warm, sexy, beautiful city . . . where there was music, music, music everywhere. Then Katrina came . . . I cried; I cried; I cried. And then I remembered we have to sing.” She began a lingering and soulful, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.”
Ensler introduced scenes shown on the big arena screens, shots of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where “hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and tortured” over the past 10 years. And then she showed pictures of Dr. Denis Mukwege, who is spending his life helping these women. I never heard of him, but I felt an emotional lump when he walked on stage.
I have to tell you, I’m one of those women who grew up saying “down there,” and frankly, I wasn’t sure how I’d react to “The Vagina Monologues.”
But sitting there in the dark, among the so-called Katrina Warriors — local women who worked to rebuild and make New Orleans a better place for women to live — and surrounded by friends, it worked.
Sure, some of it was like, whoa, did they really just say that?! But much of it enveloped me. I looked around me in the $125 seats — all proceeds going to fight violence against women. A young woman and her boyfriend cuddled. Others laughed, then fell silent as two actresses recounted the story of a woman in Bosnia who was raped by six men repeatedly over seven days.
Near the end, women in the audience who had been abused or beaten were asked to stand, “to break the silence.” Hundreds stood up. There was a sense of solidarity in the arena.
A stranger, a 40ish woman, all dolled up in a in a black and white dress, black lace around her shoulders, wearing a glittering pendant, asked me what I thought of it.
Then she said, “I didn’t know what to expect. It’s different, you know. But it’s true. It’s true.”
Maybe it was good we were sitting in the dark, I suggested. And she laughed and said, “I don’t have no shame in my game.”
And that in a sentence is what it was all about.
. . . . . . .
Staff writer Millie Ball can be reached at mball@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3462.
Posted — Filed under
V-Day
Tagged — No Comments
Outnumbered but unbowed, a man braves the ‘Monologues’
By Doug MacCash
Art critic
http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-0/120…
How does it feel to be a guy in a gal rally?
Suffice it to say, the men’s room wasn’t crowded Saturday at the New Orleans Arena.
It’s hard to say what the exact gender breakdown of the “Vagina Monologues” audience was, but I’d guess something like 20 women for every man in the audience.
From time to time it was embarrassing — if that’s the right word. When the topic turned to rape, subjugation and general male insensitivity, it had the same effect as when I hear about the massacre at Wounded Knee. I can say to myself, I didn’t personally have anything to do with the massacre at Wounded Knee. But I know that people pretty much like me did.
In other words, there were times during the show when the males in the audience probably felt like they were playing for the wrong team.
The performance itself was more fun than I expected. The monologues were short and snappy, with a nice naughty edge to balance the inspirational aspects. And the reactions from the uninhibited crowd were sometimes a show in themselves.
My favorite monologue may have been the very first. Didi Conn (such a great pixie voice) and Doris Roberts (you know, “Everybody Loves Raymond’s” meddling mom) played young and old versions of the same poor woman. She passed through life without ever experiencing real romance, yet her nights were filled with erotic dreams, like the one where she dines with Burt Reynolds in a flooded restaurant — Dean Martin swims by in a tux. Sad, surreal, strangely funny and beautifully acted across the generations.
Another of my favorites was much more abstract. Four actresses (I recognized Shirley Knight) rotated around the stage, reciting a sort of sound poem based on words that make vagina seem tame by comparison. The fact that three of the actresses recited their passages in foreign languages didn’t make a bit of difference — you would have gotten the rebellious gist if they’d been speaking Klingon.
Not to mention that the forbidden words were spelled out in pink lights around the arena interior. I doubt we’ll see that during the Hornets’ playoff games.
Defusing words for the female anatomy is one of playwright Eve Ensler’s causes. Once they’re made harmless, they can’t be used as weapons against women, right?
Forbidden words aren’t the only outré territory in the monologues. Jennifer Beals got some of the night’s biggest laughs when she led a trio of vocal accompanists (an all-women Greek chorus, if you will) in a dramatic recitation of meaningful moans — and that’s all I’m going to say about it.
Oprah Winfrey, the no-show headliner, would have added star pizzazz, but honestly, it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better acting job than her understudy, Liz Mikel.
I thought about my daughter from time to time — during Jane Fonda’s gloriously grotesque monologue about birth, mostly. I’d like my little girl to grow up in a “Vagina Monologues” world, where she’s not ashamed or afraid of anything. I’d like her to be one of those women who spit in society’s eye when she feels it’s necessary.
Speaking of which, Fonda still looks great — I hope that’s not a sexist thing to say.
The stargazing before the show was entertaining, as well.
I met Val Kilmer in the ticket office. He was really tall, handsome in his tan seersucker suit, and lost. I asked if I could take his photo. He said sure, if I could help him figure out how to get where he was going.
And Dylan McDermott, formerly star of “The Practice” and Ensler’s stepson, was in the first row of my section, patiently signing autographs and letting people take his picture.
But my favorite memory is of seeing lanky country diva Faith Hill (she can really belt, by the way) kick off her stilettos and dance with freelance gospel tent percussionist Lady Tambourine. That was an essential only-in-New Orleans moment, no matter what your gender.
. . . . . . .
Art critic Doug MacCash can be reached at dmaccash@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3481. To comment on this story or read others by MacCash, go to www.nola.com/living and click on his picture.
Posted — Filed under
V-Day
Tagged — No Comments
Eve Ensler transformed the New Orleans Superdome into ‘Superlove’ for a celebrity-studded event to campaign against violence towards women
Karen Bartlett
Few people know that New Orleans is the vagina of America. Few would suggest it. “It is fertile. It’s a delta. And everyone wants to party there,” explains Eve Ensler, activist, feminist icon – and the author of The Vagina Monologues. Never one to act on a small stage when a bigger one would do, last weekend she turned the New Orleans Superdome into the Superlove – a two-day global event to mark the tenth anniversary of her V-Day movement, the campaign to stop violence against women which she founded on the back of her play.
Not everyone got it. “When Eve told me New Orleans was the vagina of America, I was like, oh sweet Jesus,” says the actress Kerry Washington, putting her head in her hands. “Sometimes I think, Eve, do you really want to go there. Really? But now I get it. Its sexy, everybody loves it – but when it has problems nobody wants to know.”
Ensler has been coming to New Orleans for more than two years, working with local women’s groups. With benefit performances for V-Day taking place in more than 80 countries, the anniversary could have been staged anywhere, but Ensler chose New Orleans because of its recent unhappy past. “New Orleans has been a war zone for women.” And, yes, because New Orleans is the vagina of the most powerful nation in the world. It looks that way on the map she demonstrates, making a little vagina shape between her thumb and forefinger. She has written a new piece to christen the event called Welcome to the Wetlands.
It seems a stretch, but it appears to have paid off. The concrete overpasses to the Superdome, that were filled with the corralled, homeless, citizens of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, are now filled with women. One office worker looks sick of standing in line until asked what she thinks about The Vagina Monologues and V-Day coming to her city. “Are you kidding?” she shrieks. “This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” A well-manicured Southern matron appears an unlikely convert, until she says: “In Alabama, they press us down, but this is gonna raise us up!” Women are excited; New Orleans is excited. But Ensler has bigger plans. For this is V-World. Her world, over which she presides – part rock star, part President.
Eve Ensler was one of the more fascinating figures to emerge into public life in the 1990s. Instantly recognisable, with her black bob and red lipstick, an encounter with her was both buzzing and draining.After years of anonymity as a New York playwright and political campaigner – among other stunts she staged street protests dressed as a nuclear bomb while passers-by spat at her – she was taken by surprise to be catapulted into stardom by the success of The Vagina Monologues.
Going to see the production was to ride a roller-coaster of emotion. Each event was made up of a varying number of monologues, read by different women, initially Ensler, but later including actresses and famous personalities. All the monologues relate to the vagina. You could laugh at the old lady who discovered her vagina was better than the Grand Canyon, cry with the Bosnian woman who was raped by soldiers in My Vagina Was My Village: get your hair blown back when Ensler instructed you that she was “reclaiming c***” and she wanted you to chant it with her.
Ensler’s loud, nightly, staged orgasms meant that she was quickly dubbed the “vagina lady”. With success, she turned her time, and a portion of her profits, over to creating V-Day, a charity aimed at stopping violence against women. And that meant all violence against women in the world. En route, she recruited a cast of A-list celebrities including Oprah, Jane Fonda, Glenn Close, Salma Hayek, Kerry Washington and Rosario Dawson. Kate Winslet was among those who turned out for the first V-Day benefit performance in the UK at The Old Vic in 1999. That was back in the days when Ensler performed the show herself at The King’s Head in Islington, London. “Ah, the King’s Head,” she says fondly. “I had to pee in a pot because there weren’t any toilets.” She returned to London in 2001 for a successful West End run, and annual V-Day performances have continued up and down the country.
Few could have predicted V-Day’s spontaneous success – ranked as a top ten charity, it retains only a few staff, working from their own homes, tuning into a global grassroots network of women that have raised more than £25 million.
Under a giant vagina in the renamed Superdome/Superlove, the celebrations commence. The mostly female participants enter, appropriately, through an origami-like vulva, glowing red. On stage, women from a local Native American tribe open the proceedings, dancing in full regalia, while a female Buddhist priest looks on beatifically.Jane Fonda is in the third row of the audience, smiling gamely as people take her picture on their mobile phones.
After all this, Ensler’s own speech could be an anti-climax. Despite ten years in the spotlight, she continues to look slightly awkward – slipping on to the side of the stage while a local girls choir and Baptist preacher whip the audience into an almost ecstatic frenzy. She begins on a strident note, her voice echoing loudly in the dark depths on the arena. Within minutes she has traversed the world’s misery: the state of New Orleans, the continued suffering of women in Afghanistan, the victims of brutal and systemic rape in Congo, the plight of the missing, murdered, women of Juarez in Mexico and the US Defence Department statistics that reveal that one third of women serving in the military will be raped during their time, often by other soldiers. When she returns to the theme of turning the Superdome into Superlove to redeem the suffering that has taken place there, she breaks down and cries for several moments. “We love you, Eve,” one woman in the audience calls out. “I love you too” she shouts back.
Superlove is a pinnacle for Ensler’s years of efforts. It is “V-World” she tells the audience – a place where women get their power back; a place where suffering can be transformed through love. If you’re too cynical or too emotionally stunted to go there – that is your problem, she implies. But who lives in V-World? Hollywood sparkles some glitter over it for sure, and it has a strong following among the type of middle-class activists with time and money to pursue such causes. It is both trendy and hippy-grungy. The New Orleans event is sponsored by the W hotel group.
But across town in the devastated Lower 9th ward, a group of women from the Superlove have arrived to plant a vegetable garden. The advocacy centre where they congregate has green and rainbow flags hanging from the windows and a van outside that claims to be the “Toxic Avenger”. The women start making rose clippings to give out at V-Day, and paint little hearts on them.
V-World might, in fact, be a perfect constellation of new age hokum and celebrity hubris were it not grounded by people carrying out the grittiest kind of human rights work. And they do attend in number.
“When I heard about Eve Ensler I did not want to get involved with her,” says Christine Schuler Deschryver from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We’ve had so many celebrities passing through. They cried a lot but all they left behind was their business cards.” Deschryver works with woman and girls who have been violently raped and suffer from fistula – a condition that leaves them doubly incontinent. The problem in the Congo is so systemic that there are now vast hospital wards full of victims. “When I saw Eve holding these women, listening to them, it really touched me. She is not here for the short haul. She is genuine.” Deschryver is pleased that V-Day’s focus next year will be on the women of the Congo.
UN statistics show that a third of all women in the world will be beaten or raped in their lifetime. In Britain, where a quarter of all women are attacked by someone they know, the police receive a complaint about domestic violence every 12 seconds. It is these figures – shocking in their magnitude – and the women who constantly seek her out to tell their stories that spur Ensler on. And she has won their respect. “There is a big gap in leadership on women’s issues,” Irene Khan, secretary-general of Amnesty International, says, “Eve has filled it.” In the run-up to Superlove, Ensler embarks upon a 20-city speaking tour to mark V-Day’s ten years. At her first stop in Smith College, Massachusetts, 700 women line up to talk to her. There is an event outside, drumming up support for Barrack Obama, that attracts far less attention. Making a brief stop back in her New York apartment two days later, she ponders the nature of her public appeal. She has just seen a play with a character that’s supposed to be her – which must be unsettling. “It was too glib to be me,” she says. She admits that the actress and playwright may have been put off by her being there. “I hear she waves her hands around a lot.” She did not tell the writer what she thought. “Like I’m going to say, you’re not deep enough.” She rolls her eyes.
Eve Ensler is intense. Her old apartment in New York was boldly red. The new one, bought after a messy break-up and property battle with her partner, dubbed The Apartment Monologues, is noticeably more understated. “I was feeling the need for…less red,” she says.
She is playful and flirtatious while getting her photo taken, giving the photographer the finger and poking her tongue out. Later they get into a discussion about Israel and the Middle East and she quickly looses her composure. “The world is f****d!” she says angrily, tears in her eyes.
In the V-Day war room next door, three assistants sit, telephone earpieces attached to their heads, scanning their laptops for a never-ending barrage of e-mails. Two walls are covered with arrows and maps that could pass for a plan of the Normandy landings – except yellow notes have brief notations such as “c***”, “clit fact” and “Birth – Jane Fonda”. That night, at another stop on her speaking tour, Ensler takes a Churchill-type stance; thrusting her arm forward in a two-fingered peace sign to the audience.
“I’m a little scared of meeting her,” one young woman confesses, “she looks so severe.” In her speech, Ensler switches between impassioned, tearful, funny and angry. Answering questions afterwards, she commands the stage with assurance, batting off answers – refusing to be drawn into complicated policy discussions, listening to personal stories just long enough. A queue from the audience snakes back down the auditorium.
“What do you think about stripping?” asks one young student, getting the biggest laugh of the night. “I’m so not going there,” Ensler replies lightly. “But you’re the only one who can help me,” the girl persists. “I can’t tell you what to do,” Ensler says firmly, before adding that in her own life she has done many wild things because she was dissociated from her body – which is not to say that she didn’t enjoy them at the time.
Those wild things included teenage years roaming the country, drinking, drugs and having lots of sex with men and women. She was a woman on the edge. “I had darkness, I still have darkness,” she says. “I was such a loser. I was tragic. I was broken – but either you turn that into something else or you perish.” It took decades to recover from a childhood of sexual and physical abuse from her father, but she is now reconciled to the consequences. “I’m a damaged person, that’s inescapable. Sometimes I cry on an hourly basis.” When the road to rock stardom was denied – she was in a band but they turned her microphone off – Ensler was left with her true vocation, writing. Even on stage with famous women, she mesmerises the audience. When Jane Fonda and Jennifer Hudson step up, women cheer. When Ensler takes the stage, they scream.
She appears to be at the height of her powers, but all that is on the outside. Her recent memoir, Insecure At Last, emerged from a lengthy weeping session on the floor of a hotel bedroom where, the 54-year-old Ensler says, she found herself feeling “fat and old”. In the book, Ensler reveals her father’s name for the first time – Arthur. “Violence has obsessed me since the first time he threw me across the room,” she says. “But when I used his name I felt something shift. I feel much more passionate about men now, I think many more men will come to V-Day. Before I just didn’t care.” In the book, she reveals that she survived her childhood by imagining that a fantasy character, Mr Alligator, would come and rescue her.
In real life, Mr Alligator never did turn up. But, “this is Mr Alligator” she says, pointing to a wooden ornament on her coffee table. A gift from someone on her visit to the Congo and, she believes, another sign of V-Day’s mystical healing powers.
Back at the Superlove, the emphasis is definitely one of holistic healing. The fashion designer Donna Karan is running an Urban Zen zone for the women survivors of Hurricane Katrina that Ensler has bused in to the event. Sitting among the massage tables and essential oils, Karan says: “These women have never done yoga, they’ve never been touched. This could take them from chaos to calm.”
But for Ensler, calming down is not on the agenda. She is constantly in motion as she speeds from city to city. It would not be for everyone, but Ensler says she yearns for freedom. After divorce from a New York bar-owner, and then a long-term relationship with an Israeli artist and psychotherapist, she is alone. “I go where I want. I do what I want. Work is a pleasure, but when someone is calling you up saying, where are you? When are you coming home?” She pulls a face. “The problem that I have with relationships…” she says, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, “well, its really a struggle”. But now she is dating again, or “having adventures”.
Her fame comes with considerable baggage. “Its weird being the vagina person. There’s an assumption that I know a lot about vaginas. Its intimidating on a performance level.” She says that she cannot imagine a partner who could fit into her nomadic life but she is “willing to move forward to whatever comes next”. More plays and possibly directing a movie will come next. What will not come next is traditional politics. Eve Ensler and politics do not mix. In Blackpool, she performed The Vagina Monologues at a Labour Party conference event with women MPs but wasn’t allowed to meet Cherie Blair, the then Prime Minister’s wife, even though the two were in the same room.
Ensler’s relationship with Hillary Clinton, which once verged on friendship, suffered a major parting of the ways over Iraq. “I’ve been very disappointed in her,” Ensler says. “It is complicated to be a woman in power, but there comes a point when you have to be who you are. Women wanted her to be bold.” Some might say being a “vagina messiah” is easier than being a senator or the leader of a more traditional NGO. Ensler does not agree. “Its hard to be outspoken,” she says, flashing a fiery look. “People don’t like loud, in your face, insistent women. We’re programmed to think, do you like me? Do you like me? Who cares! Sometimes I wake up and think, wow, they really don’t like me.” She shrugs. “It feels bad. Move along.” “She is an icon,” says Sandra Horley, the director of Refuge, who has worked with Eve Ensler on her visits to Britain.
At Superlove, a man in the audience airs his concerns. “They seem a bit fanatical,” he says, gesturing towards the women in the rows in front. “I could imagine them disappearing into the jungle and drinking Gatorade.” This is a reference to the Jim Jones cult of the 1970s and the Jonestown massacre. But Ensler’s fans are quick to dispel the idea that she is messianic. “I don’t see her turning into some kind of dictator,” Kerry Washington deadpans. For if the secret of The Vagina Monologues is that it changes hearts not heads, the secret of Eve Ensler is that she is the woman most women would secretly like to be. The woman who, as Kerry Washington puts it, “does not allow anyone to tell her to be less than she is”.
V-Day is about to meet to decide what the next ten years should bring. “I’m sure Eve will want to do it all,” Washington says, looking tired, “So I guess we’ll do it all.” Ensler is leaving for the airport. She is happy. “If there was a V-World, this is what it would look like ({}).”
FACT BOXES
V-Day
The Vagina Monologues has been produced in 120 countries
4,000 benefit productions for V-Day have taken place so far this year
90 per cent of V-Day’s money directly funds anti-violence programmes
Eve Ensler
The Vagina Monologues was nominated for an Olivier award in 2002
Her other plays include The Good Body and The Treatment, about a US soldier returning from Iraq
Her adopted son is actor Dylan McDermott, star of
The Practice TV series
Posted — Filed under
V-Day
Tagged — No Comments
At the V to the 10th in New Orleans, activism is the word of the weekend.
Playwright and founder of V-Day, Eve Ensler, informed us that “Our destiny will not be changed by the people on top.” In other words, this weekend was all about the grassroots movement. We can no longer rely on elected officials to eventually come around and see the light on issues that affect women worldwide; we must take back the power, motivate allies to increase our strength in numbers, and develop our own solutions.
Besides visiting the amazing Activist’s Lounge where a ton of feminist and environmental groups were giving out information, we sat in on a number of panels, one being the fantastic discussion “From New Orleans to the World: Women in Conflict Zones.”
Eve interviewed six activists; Carol Bebelle of New Orleans, Rada Boric of Yugoslavia, Christine Schuler Deschryver of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zoya of Afghanistan, Yanar Mohammed of Iraq and Monique Wilson of the Philippines. Each woman represented a group of women who are suffering and have been spotlighted by the V-Day program. They discussed the major problems in their regions, the many causal factors behind them, and the work being done to improve the lives of women in war torn areas.
At the end of it all, Eve confirmed my belief that she may be the coolest person on the plant when she asked each woman to tell us about a specific project that they are currently working on. Here are their responses. I would urge you all to start checking these out.
New Orleans: The new theatrical “Katrina Monologues” work Swimming Upstream and the idea of getting New Orleans into the national conscience through art. The beautiful phrase “art for life” was mentioned a few times and it is the theory of developing art projects for the sake of social justice work. http://www.ashecac.org/
Yugoslavia: V-Day projects, including a triangle of performances in cities in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia. Ms. Boric described it by using the Bermuda Triangle line in “The Flood” monologue. “No one ever reports back from there,” but the women need to start doing so by speaking up, so she organized this large geographical space to air things out. She said this year they created a program on “Zero tolerance for violence with zero budget” and asked for support and help from the audience for next year’s endeavors. http://www.czzzr.hr/eng/
DRC: V-Day and UNICEF’s City of Joy project. This project is to create a shelter for the women of the DRC who are being raped and abused at an astounding rate. (Try 200,000 women, and that’s just a guesstimate.)
The city would be just a start, but a necessary one for a country that is being left alone to destroy its women. http://www.vday.org/contents/drcongo
Afghanistan: The primary focus is education for women. In a country fighting fundamentalists of every kind, Zoya says that the best place to begin this battle is by targeting ignorance through education for women and girls. http://www.rawa.org/index.php
Iraq: Yanar Mohammed described creating the Freedom Space. These are circles of peace where men and women can step out of the military mind set and find common ground in circles of art and poetry. The project now has 5,000 supporters, including men who have left the militias in order to try and create a more life-affirming culture. Wow. http://www.vday.org/contents/vcampaigns/spotlight/iraq/owfi
Philippines: The Purple Rose Campaign to stop sex trafficking! http://www.ffwn.org/
I think that these are amazing projects being put together by some of the activists who are fighting the hardest just to keep women alive and give them a voice. Now let’s give them some support!
(SMU in NOLA are students Jessica Andrewartha, Meg Bell, and Allie Thompson.)
Posted — Filed under
V-Day
Tagged — No Comments
http://jezebel.com/379212/the-vagina-monologues-anniversary-celebration-…
Earlier this year, author Nancy Redd was asked to give her 2007 body-positive book ‘Body Drama’ to 250 teenage Hurricane Katrina survivors at a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of the ‘Vagina Monologues’. “I’ve harbored a major crush on Eve Ensler for over nine years,” Nancy says. “Growing up with normal teenage angst and inadequate health education, I hated my vulva and I never referred to “down there” as anything other than a “hoo-ha”. The Monologues were my introduction to feminism; nothing was more empowering to 18-year-old me than having a legit reason to scream “MY SHORT SKIRT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU!” and “IT’S SUPPOSED TO SMELL LIKE PUSSY!” to the world.” Below, Nancy fills us in on everything that went down in the (very fertile) Crescent City over the weekend, where 18,000 participants raised awareness of violence towards women by giving love to vaginas and the amazing women who own them.
Read the full post with photos >