V-Day Blog Archive

Watch Video of Eve’s Interview on NYC’s Channel 2 News

To view Eve’s recent interview on “The Good Body” and Love Your Tree with Dana Tyler of
NYC’s Channel Two News, visit http://www.cbsnewyork.com/

The Reports of Feminism’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/fwis/

The conventional wisdom, whatever that is, is pretty certain about it: Old-time morality is in ascendancy, feminism is over. Whew. Finally.

Morality we’re sure about. After all, George Bush has been reelected. Forget the war and the overwhelming deficit and the loss of civil rights and the demise of Social Security and 100,000 dead Iraqis, all killed for the wrong reason but with the right intentions. This is Armageddon we’re talking about and God wants it this way.

What’s even better, it seems, is that these two things — morality and feminism — are related. Cure one, control the other, cure feminism and get morality, get morality and cure feminism. They’re twofers.

No one ever quite dares to specify exactly what the connection between them may be, of course. But one thing we do know, the link between feminism and the decline of the human race is transparent. As the most recent document from Rome “On the Collaboration of Men and Women” puts it:

This theory of the human person, (feminism,) intended to promote prospects for equality of women through liberation from biological determinism, has in reality inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality. (Sec 1, para 1)

So there.

Nevertheless, I have suspected the accuracy of the obituary from the very beginning. People have been announcing the death of feminism for a long time now. As in, “Don’t you notice that young women don’t go to feminist conferences anymore” or “Women are staying home with their children again” or “Most women don’t want to be priests” or “Style is back” (read “high heels.”) As if any of those things has anything to do with real feminism at all.

In the first place, the last women’s conference I attended in September had over 5,000 women, over half of whom were young. Very young.

In the second place, the women who are “staying home with their children” are largely women who can afford to leave the work force or can’t afford the child-care services going to work would demand.

And right, most women don’t want to be priests as neither do most men. Have you noticed?

But most of all, I observed a kind of data most people aren’t talking about. Yet. They will.

I noticed the audience at a preview performance of Eve Ensler’s new work, “The Good Body.”

You know Eve Ensler. At least you know you’re not supposed to know her. She’s the author of “The Vagina Monologues,” a profoundly tragic, disturbingly funny, revealing play about what it is to be a woman. Even if you don’t know the play you probably know that it was run off more Catholic campuses by people who had never seen it than the world has ever known since they condemned “Gone With the Wind.”

In a way, the hysteria surrounding the VM should have been expected. After all, even women — certainly nice women — never even thought the word ‘vagina,’ let alone use it out loud. They winced, they blushed, they whispered it to other women maybe. But they did not say it. Maybe, in the end, it will be enough to know that the play’s major contribution, as Ensler herself acknowledges, was to bring the word into the spoken language.

No doubt about it, the morality cops were out on this one. College presidents risked their intellectual reputations and pulled up the drawbridge against it. And so many a woman’s group routinely subverted the suppression by simply rescheduling the show for off-campus facilities, a situation that only compounds license with defiance and replaces guidance with authoritarianism.

Nevertheless, this new play of Ensler’s, “The Good Body,” is another experience entirely. It’s going to be harder to make the case to ban this play — despite the fact that this one is far more impacting, far more dangerous than the first one. This play is guerilla feminism. This play makes every woman look at herself.

“Good Body,” like “The Vagina Monologues” is also about what it means to be a woman. It forces us to face what it does to a woman to be physically shaped to the expectations of a male world that is more accustomed to looking for female domestic servants and trophy sex objects than for womanliness in a woman, for an equal and respected companion.

It shows us the women who know they have been destroyed by it and it also enables us to look at what it does to those who don’t know. It is a series of mirrors against which we must each compare ourselves: the exercise junkie, the spa junkie, the clothes horse, the demoralized woman reduced by rape, the violated woman who loves but is not loved, who is used but not cared for by the men who see them more as instrument of their own satisfaction than as companion.

More than that, it shows us the role women themselves, each of us, play in teaching our daughters to accept the manipulation as we pass down our own stifling, distorted but internalized images of female perfection to the next generation.

It shows us to ourselves, the real first step in liberation. And that’s what makes it a very dangerous play.

The night I saw it, the theater was packed with people rapt in the grasp of a tour de force by one woman or many women’s lives — and laughing and gasping and crying over them, too. They laughed and cried with the kind of laughter and tears that say, “Oh no, don’t say that in public; I’m the very kind of person you’re talking about. I’m embarrassed to death. I promise I’ll never do it again.” Like never eat cookies or never kill themselves on tread mills or never have liposuction for the sake of a dress size.

From where I stand, I have a feeling, seeing this, that they won’t. Both men and women left the theater, wrinkles at the edge of their eyes, a slight frown on their brows, all proof that feminism is not over, and in fact may be only now beginning to be clear. Perhaps most meaningful of all, this rollicking, reflective audience was clear proof that morality is a great deal more than moralisms.

Feminism is over? The old-time morality is back? I wouldn’t bet on it if I were you. Not for the people who see this play and recognize that it’s about them: both women and men.

“Until the Violence Stops” to screen on November 3, 2004, at the Amnesty International Film Festival in Vancouver, Canada

http://www.amnesty.bc.ca/filmfest/van2004.html

“Until the Violence Stops” follows the grassroots impact of V-Day in five international communities while exposing the pervasive and cultural forms of violence that women experience all over the world. Directed by Abby Epstein, the story begins at a star-studded V-Day benefit at Harlem’s Apollo Theater and travels to regional events in Ukiah California, the Philippines, and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, culminating in the opening of the first V-Day Safe House for girls in Kenya. What emerges is an alternately devastating and hopeful look at the global and grassroots efforts in motion to stop violence against women and girls. Featuring appearances by Tantoo Cardinal, Rosario Dawson, Eve Ensler, Jane Fonda, LisaGay Hamilton, Salma Hayek, Amy Hill, Rosie Perez, and Isabella Rossellini among others.

The Amnesty International Film Festival will take place in Vancouver, Canada from November 3-7, 2004. “Until the Violence Stops” will open the festival on November 3, 7pm, at The Ridge Theater (3131 Arbutus Street).

Festival Ticket Information:
Advance tickets for Gala Opening Night screenings at The Ridge available in person at The Ridge (3131 Arbutus Street).

Single tickets at the door and available in advance by calling 604-294-5160.

General admission $8.00 / Matinees, students, seniors, underemployed $6.00.

Festival passes available from Amnesty International, for screenings at Pacific Cinematheque only.

Ten-show passes: $50.00; five-show pass only $30.

V-Day Awardee Yanar Mohammed Featured: Shielding Women From a Renewal of Domestic Violence

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/international/middleeast/14shelter.html?pagewanted=2&adxnnl=0&oref=login&adxnnlx=1097852686-DN+0wWeicFvGk7oZ4W4VNw

Shielding Women From a Renewal of Domestic Violence
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A sampling of the smashed lives in this city’s first shelter for battered women shows just how much work its founder, Yanar Mohamed, has before her.

There is Susan, whose new husband began to beat her after discovering that she had been raped as a teenager. He held their new baby to her breast for feedings, because she was not allowed to touch the infant. She now lives in the shelter with the child.

Rana, a 16-year-old who had been abused for years by her father, escaped from her home soon after he beat her sister so badly that she died.

Over the summer, Ms. Mohamed, an Iraqi-Canadian architect-turned-advocate, has opened a shelter in Baghdad and another in Kirkuk, in the north. Between them, the shelters house 10 women. The shelters are the first in Iraq (not including the Kurdish-controlled part of northern Iraq, which has been free from Saddam Hussein since 1991), and they have provided a safe place for victims of abuse.

The women come without papers or passports. They even leave their names behind them, for safety. They are blamed for the very abuse they suffer, accused of bringing dishonor on their families. In a punishing and rigid Islamic tradition, some would be killed if their relatives found them.

Since the American invasion and the virtual collapse of the Iraqi state, Islamic militancy has grown. Hard-line Islamists dominate several cities just north and west of Baghdad. Liquor stores have been bombed, and more women are covering their heads in public.

At the same time, women’s groups have mushroomed. Hanaa Edwar, secretary of Iraqi al-Amal, which provides health care to poor women, estimates that there are a few hundred women’s groups across Iraq now, compared to just a few dozen before the war.

Ms. Mohamed’s group, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, is among them. In addition to the shelters, she runs a newspaper, organizes lobbying campaigns out of a tiny office in central Baghdad, and employs a lawyer who offers legal services to women.

Her decision to become an advocate for abused women grew from her own past. Her family forced her grandmother, as a teenager, to marry a cleric who was 40 years her senior. She ran away but was returned a few years later and eventually bore him five children.

“Imagine being married by force and having five children with a man you despise,” said Ms. Mohamed, 43, who on a recent day was wearing jeans, platform sandals and a red T-shirt. “It cannot happen again. But if you look at the streets now, the politics, it is happening.”

In many ways, Iraqi women were freer a half-century ago than they are today. Women’s groups had pushed through changes to the civil code making multiple marriages more difficult for men and improving rules that governed inheritance for women. Some women were educated abroad, and women were appointed as judges and to government posts.

But women began losing those gains in the 1980’s, when years of war sapped economic resources, plunging the country into poverty and eroding women’s independence. To appease religious leaders in Iraq and his Arab neighbors, Mr. Hussein forced a stricter adherence to conservative religious rules.

The Baghdad shelter is a two-story house rented by Ms. Mohamed and run by a woman in her 30’s. Its location is secret. An armed guard is always on duty. A handful of women live in two bedrooms and a living room.

Rana, the 16-year-old, is from a conservative southern city. She was taken out of school after the fourth grade. She was not allowed to leave the house, or watch television. After her sister died and she fled, a woman from the American military saved her, she said, allowing her to stay on a military base temporarily.

Her family tracked her down, through a local Iraqi translator at the base, and showed up one day to take her back. The family signed an agreement saying they would not beat her, but she said it had no effect. Relatives placed hot coals on her head to cure her of her running away, which they perceived as a mental illness, Rana said.

She escaped again, back to the base, and has been in the shelter since it opened. She spoke sitting on a sunny patch of couch in Ms. Mohamed’s office, wearing a tight lime-green T-shirt, tennis shoes and a leather wristband. Most of all, she said, she wants to return to school, for the first time in many years.

Shelters for abused women are completely new to most Iraqis. Violence against women is not discussed publicly. It is implicitly condoned even by Iraq’s legal system, which gives much reduced sentences in cases of so-called honor killings, in which male relatives kill a woman they think has violated the honor of the family. Rega Rauf, an Iraqi now living in Sweden, wrote a book on honor killings in northern Iraq that detailed 400 cases in Sulaimaniya in 1998.”When you speak about the phenomenon of violence against women, it is very new,” Ms. Edwar said. “It’s a very old problem, but people are not used to hearing it talked about.”

Ms. Mohamed is talking loudly. She separated from her husband and returned to Iraq last year after living abroad since 1993. She sold her house in Canada, left her 17-year-old son there with his father and used the proceeds from the sale to start her organization.

She is a last-resort advocate for women in many situations. She helped a group of 47 who worked in a bank and who were jailed in the spring after their supervisor accused them of stealing. After days of waiting to plead her case, she lost her patience and began shouting at the Iraqi clerks and American military officials in the room with her.

“I had bad manners,” she said, smiling. “But they listened to us.”

Three weeks later, all 47 women were released, and a superior was arrested.

Ms. Mohamed has received threats by e-mail and by phone. Both her phone number and her e-mail address are published in her newspaper so women can reach her about abuse. One person threatened to kill her, and another said he would blow her up.

“He was very specific,” she said. She seemed unruffled, but said she had worn a bulletproof vest to the hearing for the bank workers, just to be safe.

The women most in danger of being killed are those whose families accuse them of besmirching the family honor. They are being sought by their entire tribe. There are three such women in the Baghdad shelter.

The killing and abuse stretches across class and educational lines.

Ms. Mohamed’s newspaper, Equality, recently published a story about a woman who died after being tied to a tree, shot and beaten in an area called New Baghdad after she went alone with the man she wanted to marry to a southern city to fetch a tribal leader. She had hoped he could persuade her father, a lawyer, to accept her choice of husband. “I don’t want to take us back to the time of my grandmother,” Ms. Mohamed said. “It depends on us whether we resist or not.”

Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting for this article.

Correction: Oct. 15, 2004, Friday

An article yesterday about shelters in Iraq that protect abused women referred incorrectly to the risk of death the women often face from relatives, who believe the abuse victims have brought dishonor on the family. While such a reaction occurs in some parts of the Arab world, it is not an Islamic tradition and has been rejected by a vast majority of Islamic scholars.

V-Day Column Misses Point

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/10/11/letter11.DTL

A few points of clarification as sadly Jennifer Nelson (“V Is For Vote, Not Vaginas,” September 27) has missed the point of our “V Is For Vote” campaign and the phrases “Value Your Vagina –Vote!” and “Vaginas Vote.”

V-Day is a global movement to end violence against women that began in 1998, inspired by women’s response to V-Day Founder/ Playwright Eve Ensler’s play “The Vagina Monologues.” In its first six years, V-Day has raised over $25 million dollars to stop violence in local communities via thousands of local activists working in 76 countries, funded thousands of crisis centers and programs, and opened shelters in Narok, Kenya; Pine Ridge, South Dakota; Cairo, Egypt, Delhi, India; and Iraq.

In this crucial election year, it was clear that there was an enormous activist energy in the movement and it was time to translate that into political power, thus the “V Is For Vote” campaign. It was never meant literally, vaginas voting, lifting the lever so to speak. There was irony and humor involved. We have learned in V-Day that this irony and theatre and play can and has cut through the numbness and apathy and allows people to think about an issue that is often numbing and paralyzing.

So when you ridicule this campaign, here’s what you need to know: there are “V Is For Vote” organizers in 44 states; hundreds of V-Posses registering friends, neighbors and colleagues and getting them to the polls; there is education and community building on a nationwide scale.

Most recently on a tour of FL, OH, and CO, we were able to mobilize thousands at public events and rallies and yes, it was the word vagina — the idea, the possibility of being able to protect and honor their vaginas that brought women there, and obviously, it was their brains and hearts that figured all that out.

— Jerri Lynn Fields, Executive Director, V-Day, New York City

The Guardian (UK) Story on Eve Ensler: “The Whole Truth”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1321828,00.html

Women the world over were wowed by The Vagina Monologues, and ‘vagina lady’ Eve Ensler became an unlikely star. Now she is at it again, with a new play that aims to reveal the bigger picture. But will an audience with the author (and a revelation by Jane Fonda) help a sceptical Decca Aitkenhead see the light?

Eve Ensler has been saying the word “vagina” wherever possible for the past eight years and does not appear to tire of it. The writer of The Vagina Monologues takes great pride in being known as “the vagina lady” and her peculiar fame has circled the globe. Ensler has become a worldwide celebrity icon for women who find hearing the word vagina spoken in public to be a profound and transformative experience.

Their response has always completely bewildered me. I read The Vagina Monologues and thought it sounded like post-feminist confectionery – fleetingly bonding, perhaps, but scarcely more consciousness-raising than a trip to see the Chippendales. Germaine Greer took part in a British performance of the play and found it a “much-hyped and fundamentally unchallenging piece of buffoonish American hoop-la”. The scramble of actors to land the part where they got to say “cunt” on stage seemed to smack more of a celebrity bandwagon than a feminist movement, and some critics suggested Ensler was little more than a theatrical one-trick pony, exploiting the word vagina as a publicity stunt.

But Ensler has now written a new play, The Good Body. It is another series of monologues by women, but this time about their whole bodies. The play opens with an admission that the playwright loathes her stomach, and proceeds through a series of monologues featuring a woman with anorexia in Kenya, an Indian woman addicted to the gym, an African-American teenage girl at fat camp, a model almost entirely rebuilt by her plastic surgeon boyfriend. Its message is simple: “Love your body and stop fixing it. It was never broken.”

With a sleek ebony bob, russet red lipstick and mildly unconventional outfits, Eve Ensler looks like a hippy Anna Wintour. She is physically charismatic, and has a way at 50 of seeming both maternal and girlish – a fast-talking New Yorker, yet yoga-calm. Most striking is her intense emotional engagement. She is what therapists describe as “present”.

Ensler has done a good deal of therapy. Her middle-class childhood was scarred by a violent father who raped and abused her from the age of five to 10. She doesn’t like to say much more about her childhood, except that her emotional survival strategy was to “fight back”. By her early 20s she was “as wild as it gets” – an alcoholic drug addict living naked in communes, having “massive amounts of sex”. At 24 she met her first husband and with his support sobered up.

But from her mid-20s to late-30s she suffered from profound depression as she struggled with the legacy of abuse. Her marriage eventually ended, although the couple remain close friends, and 15 years ago she met an artist and psychotherapist with whom she has been since. She attributes her salvation to love and long years of therapy, as well as many years of writing. By the early 1990s she had become a modestly recognised, though “way, way downtown”, New York playwright, staging productions for audiences of no more than a few hundred.

Then, in 1994, she wrote The Vagina Monologues. It was an unexpected and instant hit. Women queued up afterwards to tell her stories about their vagina, often stories of rape, abuse and violence – and the play transferred to off-Broadway. Ensler used some of the proceeds to found V-Day, a worldwide movement to end violence against women, and persuaded famous actors to star in gala performances in Los Angeles and New York. By 2001, V-Day had become a global phenomenon. Through V-Day there have now been 2,300 productions of the monologues in 1,100 cities, including Islamabad and Kosovo, and they have raised more than $25m.

Ensler’s brand of feminism has evolved since The Vagina Monologues. She says her new philosophy is a longing for women to stop trying to transcend their body, in an assertion of intellectual equality, but to name and return to it as the source of female wisdom and power. Women have fallen for a post-feminist delusion that the greater their physical self-control, the greater their prospects of happiness, not realising that alienation from their own bodies actually destroys the possibility of empowerment.

“What a way to control us. This skinny thing is genius,” Ensler exclaims. “It’s genius. If you’re hungry you don’t have a lot of energy, and it’s really hard to think. You can’t do anything except think about food! What women are doing to their bodies is so utterly frightening – and, more importantly, so distracting. And if we don’t get off it, it’s going to be devastating.”

The single greatest source of futile preoccupation and self-reproach in women’s lives today – even the most apparently liberated women’s lives – is the very thing that makes them female. It is taken for granted that a woman will despise at least part, if not all, of her body, and increasingly considered advisable for her to go to any lengths necessary to correct it. Self-acceptance would be tantamount to self-neglect.

This false prospectus, according to Ensler, has been responsible for the decline of feminism’s international power. Women alienated from their own bodies no longer identify themselves by their universal femaleness, but isolate themselves instead into unisex categories – profession, class, nationality – in which a broader sense of sisterhood is meaningless. The feminist context of their problems has become lost.

“When I was researching The Good Body,” Ensler explains, “I went to a vaginal laser surgery centre in Beverly Hills where women were tightening their vaginas and trimming their labia. I flew from there to Kenya, where women were having female genital mutilation. And I thought, this is bizarre. What’s different about it? Somebody got it into their heads that if they got a tight pussy they’d be more lovable. Somebody got it into their heads that if they got their clitoris cut off they’d get a husband. What’s the difference? It’s some system that got imposed to shut women down and cut them off. That’s what people have to understand. Every culture has a mechanism for ritual operations that they utilise to impose their particular beauty tyranny and control women.”

The Good Body is in many ways a globalised dramatisation of The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. Wolf identified a direct correlation between the increase of women’s power and the shrinking of fashion’s edict of the “ideal figure”. Models got thinner, clothes got smaller, and women who as 1950s housewives had been allowed to be content with naturally rounded figures now discovered that to be successful professionals they had not only to be good at their jobs, but to spend a large portion of their life in the gym and of their salary on cosmetic improvements. Despite having opportunities now to change the world, when asked what single change they would like to achieve, repeated surveys of women always produce the same answer: weigh less.

But Wolf wrote The Beauty Myth in 1991. Susie Orbach published Fat Is A Feminist Issue in 1978, Andrea Dworkin was railing against diets long before that, and long-established feminists such as Greer have therefore questioned whether Ensler is offering anything new. “There are serious and important points to be made about women’s attitudes to their own bodies,” Greer wrote, “but feminists were making these points 30 years before Ensler clambered on the bandwagon.”

Nothing annoys Ensler more than the suggestion that her work comes too late to have relevance. It provokes a rapid-fire outburst of evidence to the contrary; when the monologues first became a hit, for example, CNN famously ran a 20-minute profile of Ensler without using the word vagina. It was truly a remarkable editorial decision – but surely only an example of the peculiarly prudish nature of the US.

“Hel-lo! What about Paris? When they first staged the play, they said they couldn’t put it on unless they changed the name. And Rome! They only put it on in Rome two years ago. There has been nowhere – not one country – where this word did not cause problems. So when people say they’ve been there and done it, I laugh. I go, really? Really? You’ve done it, have you? So that, for example, young girls are being brought up to know their vaginas and touch their vaginas and look at their vaginas? Nowhere is this happening in the world. Do you think there’s sex education happening anywhere, where girls grow up to know what their bodies are, to look at their bodies? It’s not happening. Not happening.”

She is right; it clearly is not. If anything, attitudes are moving in the opposite direction. When Wolf wrote The Beauty Myth, plastic surgery was still relatively rare; 13 years later it is not only routine but sold to women as a trophy of empowerment: you’re an independent girl now, you can afford to buy this gift to yourself. How can Ensler explain women’s willingness to buy into this idea?

“The whole problem with feminism was that it was always too ‘heady’.” The reply is instant and emphatic. “So women were changing their ideas, but they weren’t changing their being. It was all in the head. And so, for example, you could be a very strong woman and have a great independent job – but you could be with a husband who still battered you. We didn’t change our bodies or our beings, so all this stuff kept happening. Now there’s a chance for this next movement to change all of us, not just our heads.”

How does Ensler intend to achieve this? An insight was offered by a conference she organised in New York this autumn, attended by 1,500 women. The event was co-hosted by an organisation called Omega – a vaguely new age foundation (“Dedicated to awakening the best in the human spirit”) which usually holds spiritual retreats and yoga weekends. This made for an interesting aesthetic mix. Young V-Day activists wore T-shirts that read “Value your vagina. Vote!”, Omega devotees wore floaty kaftans from India, and in the exhibits hall there was a touch of Camden Market meets the student union.

Ensler’s collaboration with new age therapies struck me as surprising, for she describes herself as a radical feminist. A therapeutic emphasis on “inner spirit” is a very long way from the radical feminism Ensler grew up with in the 1960s and 70s, and many activists of that era would consider talk of “doing work on ourselves” fundamentally antithetical to their political project. It is men, they would argue, who need working on.

“I used to be a militant maniac,” Ensler admits, smiling slowly. “I used to divide the world into good and evil, right and wrong, because it was much easier. I don’t see the world like that any more. It doesn’t bring about change. I’ve been involved in social activism my entire life and I would argue that many people involved in social activist movements have done very little work on themselves. And that has created power structures and power dynamics that are just like the ones we’re trying to get away from. Look at the inability to unify on the left – the endless fragmentation. I’ve just seen so many dynamics repeated over and over that don’t work. And I think it has to do with people …” she pauses delicately, “not having any self-awareness.”

Anyone who has been involved in leftwing activism could not fail to recognise what she is talking about. But feminism based on new age spiritualism can come dangerously close to pseudo-mysticism, hints of which were on show at the conference. From a stage adorned with candles and flowers there was talk of internal “rivers”, of “waters flowing”, and of other opaque symbolism. One young researcher stood up and solemnly announced: “My focus is the empowerment of women. And what I know is that women know what they know.” Can Ensler truthfully say she knew what that statement meant?

“I’ll tell you exactly what that means.” Her answer is quick and forceful. “When you say to a woman you know what you know, there’s not a woman on this planet that doesn’t have an inner voice. One that she’s learned to disregard because of patriarchal censorship. Like when people say to a girl, why did you get in the car with him? And she says, ‘A voice inside me was telling me not to.’ Only she’d learned to disregard it. That’s what knowing what you know means.”

Another reason why some feminists have been dubious about Ensler is her willingness to promote her work through celebrity. Among the conference speakers were a number of Hollywood stars. Didn’t their presence distract from more important matters? There was a time, she agrees, when she would have said the same. “But there came a day – it was during the anti-nuke days – and there I was on a street corner, handing out flowers, as I did on a regular basis. And some guy spat on me and called me a dirty commie. And I thought to myself, this isn’t working. This just isn’t worth it. You are not changing anything. This is just for me. I’m just doing this for me to feel good; I’m not changing the world.

“And at the time I was so opposed to celebrity culture, and so opposed to the hierarchy of some people matter and some people don’t. But there came a point where I said, OK, you can go on like this and you can stand on the street corner – and you can be right. But not have an impact. Or you can figure out another way of doing this so that people will actually show up to hear what you’re saying.

“Do I think it’s great that we have a celebrity system where some people matter and some people don’t? No. But do I think we’ll always create icons and legends? Yeah, I probably do.”

Ensler’s most eloquent celebrity supporter has turned out to be Jane Fonda. For women under 35, Fonda is synonymous with her workout video, which in turn is synonymous with the 1980s. The Jane Fonda workout was sold to women on a promise that it would help make them thin but, more importantly, that it would make them strong. It was self-punishment masquerading as self-empowerment.

Fonda now travels the world on behalf of V-Day, and was interviewed by Ensler on stage in New York. She addressed the audience in a voice breaking with emotion. “My father always married women with thin legs,” Fonda said. “He used to send messages through his wives: tell her to wear longer skirts. By adolescence I hated my body. And you can’t be in your body if you hate it, so I moved out and into my head. I’d moved out of my body to disown it because I wasn’t perfect enough for patriarchy – and I didn’t move back until I was 61.

“I was bulimic and anorexic for 35 years. I lived on willpower; I have tremendous willpower. I’d just will myself into exercise, and all the while I was living in my head, being perfect.” Fonda said she had always loved trees. She was teaching herself to think of her legs as Arizona sycamores. “I’ve betrayed my legs. They’ve never betrayed me.”

Fonda said her moment of epiphany about her body had come while she was watching a performance of The Vagina Monologues. “For 20 years I thought I was a feminist – and then, while I was watching, my feminism just slipped from my head into my body – I felt it – and I’ve never been the same again. As I’ve begun to heal, I could feel a need to fill my body with what I was seeking all along – which was actually my feminine soul.”

Life-changing epiphanies were once the stock-in-trade of feminism. Women read The Feminine Mystique and suddenly saw the light – they recognised themselves in Betty Friedan’s unfulfilled housewife, obsessed with the trivial tyranny of housework while the world passed them by, and they wanted a change. But the women’s movement stopped producing new epiphanies, and it gradually unravelled from emotional certainty into self-doubt and dispute. Young women today could be forgiven for thinking that feminism was little more than the name given to an interminable media debate about how to get your work/life balance right.

Having grown up in this era, the last thing I expected from Ensler was a moment of epiphany. It certainly wasn’t forthcoming from The Vagina Monologues. But as she and Fonda were talking about bodies, quite suddenly the penny dropped. I felt something happen inside – intellectual anger about beauty tyranny changed into physical rejection of it, a less sophisticated but more formidable force – and I understood the difference between them.

Feminists have for generations been urging resistance to the tyranny of beauty. But their language has been grounded in “issues”, with the effect that Botox or anorexia became interchangeable with equal pay and flexible working hours. Ensler is proposing something quite different – not a version of feminism that includes, among other things, an argument against hating our bodies, but a feminism that derives entirely from trusting our bodies. “When things change in your body,” Ensler says, “you say no to things. You have to.”

It is hard not to feel angry that feminism still has so far to go – and this may explain why some feminists have found Ensler so irritating. The popularity of The Vagina Monologues can be read as a depressing revelation of how little earlier feminist works had achieved. But it is hardly Ensler’s fault if women still get a thrill out of hearing the word vagina; her plays are transforming armchair post-feminists into activists, and radicalising women more effectively than a whole generation of feminist theory.

And The Beauty Myth is not the only book that appears to have passed many women by. There were some at the conference who could have stepped straight from the pages of The Feminine Mystique. One woman was 60 and said she felt rather uneasy with the “politics” she’d heard here. She had raised her sons “in a traditional way”, and they were fine men. But then she added, uncertainly, “I’m coming up to retirement age. I’m going to see a fortune teller and I want to ask, will there be more for me to do? I’ve been in the same house for 30 years. I’ve just redecorated it. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to move on – I think, maybe I should get out there. But I don’t know where to go.” She paused. “I’m a bit afraid, to be honest. But I think I’m capable of more.”

Ensler is the first feminist in a generation to have won this 60-year-old woman’s interest. The capacity to inspire epiphany in others is a life-changing gift. It is remarkable to inspire it in a woman who had never given feminism a thought – but possibly even more so in a younger woman who imagined she’d heard all that feminism had to say.

· The Good Body by Eve Ensler is published by William Heinemann on October 21 at £10.99.

Best of New York Issue Spotlights V-Day

http://www.villagevoice.com/bestof/2004/detail.php?id=4008

Best international feminist organization – V-DAY

V-DAY–its V kinda stands for “vagina” and “valentine”– was started by black-bobbed playwright Eve Ensler (of The Vagina Monologues), and what makes it compelling is international focus: This past year, for instance, they organized an anti-violence protest in Juarez, Mexico, and presented feminist speakers from Baghdad, from Israel and Palestine (together), and from Iran. V-day has also focused attention on the situation of Japanese comfort women, on acid burning, and on female genital mutilation. Their slogan: “Vagina Warrior.”

-Hillary Chute

V-Day College Organizer Molly Kawachi Sets Ambitious Pace

http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.aspx?re=6B32A69C-8161-4EC2-9D85-0E71865F83CB

New London — No one would ever accuse Molly Kawachi of wasting her teenage years on trivial pursuits.

In the last few years alone, Kawachi, a Connecticut College junior, has worked as a “trendspotter” for Teen People Magazine and as a production assistant on the set of the Bill Clinton interview for “60 Minutes.”

She’s also rubbed elbows with the kings and queens of the music world at the Video Music Awards in Miami, serving as a production coordinator for MTV.

She also is a part-time model, a stylizer for Wet Seal, a teen clothing company, and still finds time to excel in the classroom and on the volleyball court at Conn.

“I’m a very ambitious girl,” Kawachi said.

But none of those experiences have had a more profound impact on Kawachi than her work with V-Day, a non-profit organization fighting to end violence against girls and women, which inspired her to make a trip to a Kenyan safe house three years ago.

What really struck Kawachi, 20, was a conservation with a 16-year-old Kenyan girl named Mary. She sensed an instant connection between the two.

“She totally changed my life,” Kawachi said. “She had this awful, awful story. Every horrible thing you can think that can happen to you — she was beaten, raped, forced to marry a 50-year-old man, mutilated.

“What amazed me about her, she was telling me her story through a translator, and despite all the horrific things that happened to her she still had the biggest smile on her face, loving life. … Here I am complaining about going to school and having a test and these girls are literally risking their lives to go to school and get an education. It gives you another perspective on life.”

When Kawachi returned home to New York City, she organized a fundraiser at her high school the Fieldston School, raising $3,000. She sent the proceeds to her Kenyan friend to help pay tuition for school. The pair remains in contact. She takes great pride in reporting that Mary speaks fluent English now and is living a better life.

That’s just one cause that the driven and compassionate Kawachi is passionate about. She truly cares about life outside her Conn College world.

“She’s a great Division III role model,” volleyball coach Josh Edmed said. “She’s very well-rounded. She fits our model great.”

Her V-Day experiences have touched her heart. Kawachi has marched with other V-Day supporters, including Jane Fonda, to protest the abductions and murders of the factory women in the impoverished town of Juarez, Mexico.

She also organized, directed, produced and acted in a production of the Vagina Monologues as part of a V-Day fund-raiser at Conn College in February. Her godmother is Eve Ensler, the award-winning author of the Vagina Monologues and source of inspiration for countless number of women, including Kawachi.

The play raised more than $3,000. Two thousand went to the Women’s Center of Southeastern Connecticut, which is recognizing her contributions by nominating her to be in a soon-to-be published book called “Celebrating Women.” She will be honored along with other nominees at a dinner at the Mystic Marriott Oct. 23.

“I’m a little humbled,” said Kawachi, a sociology and gender and women’s studies major. “I don’t think I’ve done that much.”

The other $1,000 was sent to an organization that helps the women of Juarez. During a trip to Mexico, she met with victims’ families and heard their stories. She felt their pain and wanted to help.

So after the play ended, she asked audience members to donate money on the way out the door in order to provide bus fare for the women on their way home from work when many of the crimes occur. Her plea raised another $1,000.

“I wept with this one mother,” Kawachi said, referring to her trip to Juarez. “We just cried together. I told her I’d do whatever I can to help her. They are so helpless there. You go down there and it’s just wrong. … When you hear it from them first-hand, you can’t turn your back on it. I can’t sleep at night knowing this stuff is going on and I’m not doing anything about it. That’s just me personally.”

If you think Kawachi is trying to save the world, well, you’re right. She’s always had sympathy for those in need.

“They broke the mold when they made her,” said her mother Judy Corcoran, a published author. “If anybody can save the world, she can. I have no small expectations. Nothing would surprise me.”

Corcoran raised hr daughter to be an independent spirit. When Molly complained about her second grade teacher being man instead of a woman, her mother encouraged her young daughter to call the school and ask for a different teacher. The assistant school principal that took Molly’s call declined to make a change. But a valuable lesson had been learned.

“I made a conscious effort to empower her to fight her own battles,” Corcoran said. “She’s a better person than I feel I am.”

Everywhere she’s gone, Kawachi has made quite an impression. At Fieldston School, her adviser, Andrew Meyers, referred to her in a glowing recommendation letter as “deep, thoughtful and smart, completely sincere, a fashionable jock with a playfully profound intellect.”

Volleyball always has had a place in her busy life. Her mother wanted her to be a ballet dancer but she was drawn to volleyball because of its energetic, fast-paced action. She was the leader of a championship volleyball team and also played on the club level as well as being a member of the New York City junior national team.

As a setter for the Camels, she leads the team in digs. More importantly, she provides stable leadership to a young team.

“I’d love to have 6-foot players all across the net,” Edmed said. “But I’d much rather have girls like Molly that are 5-4 that will bleed for you on the court and be a great leader.”

Kawachi is still trying to figure which career path she wants to head down. She’s considering pursuing a career in entertainment or broadcasting, anything that could give her a voice. And she plans to continue her work with V-Day.

“I still have no idea what I want to do, but I’m still working on it. I’m creating a good network.”

Eve Ensler Hosts CU Rally, Says ‘V is for Vote’

http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/election/article/0,1713,BDC_16316_3214515,00.html

Eve Ensler has added another “v” word to her repertoire.

Vote.

As in, “Value your vagina: vote” and “Get your pussy posses to the polls” — slogans that came of no shock to her 400 or so excited fans at the University of Colorado’s University Memorial Center on Monday. Ensler’s free speech was part of the Conference on World Affairs Athenaeum.

Ensler, the famed writer of “The Vagina Monologues,” told the crowd of mostly women the upcoming election will determine the future of the world, not just the country.

“And women would determine this election if they went to the polls,” Ensler said.

More than 22 million women registered to vote nationwide didn’t vote in the last presidential election, and 50 million eligible women aren’t even registered, she said.

“Some women say they don’t feel connected to this world,” Ensler said. “But voting connects you to this world.”

She encouraged voters to choose candidates who support ending violence against women, the drive behind her “V-Day” campaign. Boulder has joined worldwide V-Day celebrations on or around Valentine’s Day for the past three years.

Ensler said CU students have a unique chance to help change the way women are treated. With national attention on campus following allegations the football team used sex as a recruiting tool, she said students now “have the opportunity to be a model community … . This community could turn it all around.”

She urged football players to publicly speak out to end violence against women. She suggested programs or classes that teach about healthy sexual relationships, compassion and “persuasion instead of coercion.”

Several CU students are trying to start a men’s resource center, which would provide such information and seminars for men. Sophomore Ryan Polk told Ensler and the crowd about the effort.

“There’s this stereotype that violence against women is a woman’s issue,” Polk said. “A partnership like this could help break down a huge amount of problems on campus.”

Contact Camera Staff Writer Aimee Heckel at (303) 473-1359 or heckela@dailycamera.com.

V is for Vote in Cincinnati

The YWCA’s battered women’s shelter in Cincinnati is over capacity.

The Rape Crisis and Abuse Center of Hamilton County is straining to respond to 10,000 calls a year from abused women.

Federal funding for both organizations has been stagnant or reduced in the last several years while problems escalate.

Disturbing statistics like those have prompted the playwright of “Vagina Monologues” to visit Cincinnati Wednesday with a call for voters to choose the candidates in November who will respond best to an epidemic of violence against women.

Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day, an international organization seeking an end to violence against women and girls, said all people should consider sexual and physical abuse of women a top national priority.

“It’s not a women’s issue. It’s everybody’s issue,” she said.

Her organization is not endorsing candidates but encouraging voters to ask questions, including:

• Whether they feel safer than they did four years ago.

• Whether the Bush administration has followed up on promises to improve the lives of women in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• Whether federal funds are being properly used to fight sexual and physical abuse of women.

Ensler said the problem affects everyone. In addition to the women assaulted, their children and spouses suffer. A mother scarred by rape may have trouble instilling a healthy attitude about men in her sons.

A woman may be too scarred to engage in a healthy sexual relationship with her spouse, sometimes suffering flashbacks years after being assaulted, she said. “If you look at the faces of the women who have been raped, you know it has changes their lives forever,” Ensler said.

She was joined Wednesday by Ann McDonald, director of the Rape Crisis Center of Hamilton County, and Charlene Ventura, YWCA president and CEO.