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The Rice Thresher
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Ensler discusses V-Day and the monologues On the play's success You know, a lot of this is a mystery to me - I have to be honest. I sometimes feel like I'm just in the wake of a great vagina miracle. ... I think that . The Vagina Monologues are talking about something that nobody's talked about before. So, there's just this great liberation that occurs in the talking about it. People hunger to know and have dialogue around this subject. So it's just feeding something that people have been hungry for for a long time.
Advice to parents of girls I think first of all that if girls don't know their bodies, they don't own their bodies. So I would begin there. I would begin with helping girls see what incredibly sacred, powerful, gorgeous, delicious things they have in terms of their bodies. . They [shouldn't] feel shame around their vaginas and around their sexuality. That's where I'd begin. I think what happens when you love your body and love your vagina, you hold a sacredness around it. And you know it's yours and you know it's your choice to give it or not give it. You know that it's your responsibility to find out what you desire and what feels good for you and what doesn't feel good for you. I think if you're disassociated with your body from the early point it never becomes yours. . And I think that if parents were to really help girls see their bodies, embrace their bodies, talk about their bodies, feel good about their bodies, when they enter the world and they came to that crucial point of adolescence, they would hold onto themselves.
Her interest in vaginas Well, I can only say it was very accidental. This whole thing has been like a divine accident. I was talking to a friend about menopause and we got onto the subject of her vagina and she started saying things that really surprised me. And then I had no idea what women thought about their vaginas. So I started casually saying to people, well, what do you think about your vagina, and everything that any woman said was so interesting and so profound that before I knew it I was sucked down the vagina trail and I've been there for many years now. Where is this going? It's really leading me to a large degree, you know. The Vagina Monologues and V-Day is this huge wave and I feel that I am just riding it and really surfing it and I know that my life is, from this point on, devoted to ending violence toward women. And I'm in the process of creating another book that will serve that mission. It's called The Good Body and it's about how women change, transform, mutilate, fix their bodies in order to fit in with their particular culture.
On feminism I love being a feminist. I never know why people are afraid of being feminist. Let's look at what feminist means. Do I want to have my desires? Yes. Do I want to know my desires? Yes. Do I want other women to have and fulfill their desires? Yes. Do I want day care, do I want equal pay for equal work, do I want to live in a world where women are honored and respected and treated fully as evolving and true citizens? Yes. Of course I'm a feminist. I don't understand how women can say they're not feminists. . If I hadn't had strong women come before me like Gloria Steinem, like Simone de Beauvoir, like all the extraordinary women who have laid the path for liberation of women, I wouldn't be here today.
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