Body Bard

By Molly Ivins

Best feminist in America?!" said Eve Ensler, at her characteristic verbal 98 m.p.h. "Not only an oxymoron, but so patriarchal, even as a concept!" It is, isn't it? She explains, "Feminism to me is the inclusion and empowerment of everyone. Being the best feminist is like being the best vagina. What would that be?"

Tough question, but at least, thanks to Ensler, we might be able to get the word out. Ensler is, if nothing else, the woman who has made it safe to say vagina in both serious discussion and polite company. She is the writer and performer behind The Vagina Monologues, which has moved beyond hit play into the realm of cultural phenomenon. A dozen or so sketches based on 200 interviews, The Vagina Monologues is about, well, vaginas. As they used to say in Vietnam, there it is.

This is not your mother's feminism. Ensler is a self-confessed survivor of sexual and physical abuse by her father and of drugs and alcohol. Yet she does not think women should be stuck with the role of victim. Instead, The Vagina Monologues is a joyous, sometimes poignant and often hilarious exploration of women's conflicted feelings about their vaginas. The play--which has been known to propel women in the audience to their feet, whooping and stomping in recognition--has been performed from Antarctica to Zaire. It is currently playing in more than 25 countries and is almost a cult piece on college campuses, where feminism, for some young women, has become a dirty word. Ensler originally did the play as a one-woman show, but it is now usually played with a cast of three. Innumerable celebrities have performed in it, including Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, Rosie Perez, Jane Fonda, Calista Flockhart and Kate Winslet.

Guys think about their penises a lot (they do, they do) and, as Ensler will tell you, much of Western culture is built around metaphors about the penis as dominator or conqueror. But odd though it is, women rarely think about, let alone talk about, vaginas. When they have, it has often been in big books by the feminist intelligentsia and mostly in the context of a power struggle--vaginas as a target of oppression (Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape), or vaginas as a primal, mysterious force that intimidates men (Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex). Ensler's contribution is to embrace both those traditions in the Monologues and also build on them by demystifying the vagina and thus arguing for it as a source of power and pleasure for both sexes.

Ensler uses her work as a tool to greater purposes. Since 1998, The Vagina Monologues has been performed as a benefit on Valentine's Day to raise funds for groups all over the world working to end violence against women. This past V-day, as Ensler calls her festival, the play was staged at Madison Square Garden in New York City, in 50 other cities and on 250 college campuses. Her play Necessary Targets was drawn from the accounts of Bosnian rape victims she interviewed in 1994. It was performed, among other places, at the National Theatre in Sarajevo.

Ensler is currently working on a play, The Good Body, about liposuction, breast implants and other outgrowths of our obsession with appearance. So far, she has traveled to 30 countries, interviewing women about what they have done to their bodies and why. She is particularly troubled by the state of teenage girls in America. "The consumer culture is so out of control, girls are surrounded by images of how they are supposed to look and behave and be," she says. "Their level of self-hatred, their obsession with body images, their incredible competitiveness with each other--sexuality gets lost in the middle of all that."

The feminist movement once stood for sexual liberation and enjoyment--gales of laughter were characteristic of the early "consciousness-raising" groups--but Ensler thinks we lost these values somewhere in the struggle to be taken seriously on equal pay, child care and the rest of the agenda. Conservative-media stereotyping has also hurt. Talk-show hosts have presented feminists as humorless man haters who believe all heterosexual sex is rape.

"I feel honored to be called a feminist," Ensler says. "I would hope young women really examine what the word means. To throw out the word itself would be to dishonor all the women who have gone before us. We need to reclaim, invigorate and update the word. If I have learned anything from all the great feminists before me, it's that this is a chain and we just keep widening the circle."

The widened circle is an essential theme for Ensler. The patriarchal nuclear family is "a deadly institution," she says. "It exists in enormous isolation, disconnected from the broader community, and when you're isolated like that, there are no watchdogs. But when you're exposed to other people, it's safer--you can see that life can be different." Ensler does believe wholeheartedly in the extended family, and in the broadest sense. She fights for the women of Afghanistan and of Burma and passionately believes their best hope, and ours, is finding the common bonds. After all, pregnant is pregnant in any culture.