The Vagina Monologues [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

"I say vagina because I want people to respond," says playwright Eve Ensler, creator of the hilarious, disturbing soliloquies in The Vagina Monologues, a book based on her one-woman play. And respond they do--with horror, anger, censure, and sparks of wonder and pleasure. Ensler is on a fervent mission to elevate and celebrate this much mumbled-about body part. She asked hundreds of women of all ages a series of questions about their vaginas (What do you call it? How would you dress it?) that prompt some wondrous answers. Standouts among the euphemisms are tamale, split knish, choochi snorcher, Gladys Siegelman--Gladys Siegelman?--and, of course, that old standby "down there." "Down there?" asks a composite character springing from several older women. "I haven't been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with [American president] Eisenhower." Two of the most powerful pieces include a jagged poem stitched together from the memories of a Bosnian woman raped by soldiers and an American woman sexually abused as a child who reclaims her vagina as a place of wild joy.

Ensler's powerful, funny, incisive, insightful meditation on one of the most proscribed, vilified, taboo-tainted, shame-shrouded bodily organs in our phallocratic culture is based on personal reminiscences and on interviews with dozens of women of various religious, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Its topics include the many attitudes women have about their vaginas, ranging from fear to fascination, and the ways those attitudes reflect and influence attitudes about sexuality, health, body image, and even spirituality. Even in the wrong hands--say, of a dry academician--Ensler's material would be enlightening. Fortunately, Ensler is first and foremost a storyteller and has fashioned her material into a highly readable script in which interviews are distilled to pithy brevity or reformatted as emotionally charged prose poems. Reading it, it is not hard to see why the off-Broadway one-woman show Ensler also crafted from its material met with critical and popular success and won Ensler a coveted Obie award. Jack Helbig

An adaptation of performance pieces from Ensler's Obie Awardwinning one-woman show, inspired by several hundred interviews the playwright had with women about their genitals. The work, Ensler says, is intended to free women from the shame many have been taught to feel regarding their vaginas and, by extension, their sexuality. It's crucial, she says, ``for women to tell their stories, to share them with other people . . . Our survival as women depnds on this dialogue.'' The monologues (which range from a painful account of rape to a droll record of a woman learning to really see her vagina for the first time, in a ``vagina workshop'') vary greatly in effect, and other portions of the work (which run from character monologues to interpolations by Ensler to lists drawn from her questions to women, such as ``What does a vagina smell like?'') are fragmentary. You might have to be a woman to appreciate the humor and poignancy here, but women will. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"Women have entrusted Eve with their most intimate experiences, from sex to birthing. . . . I think readers, men as well as women, will emerge from these pages feeling more free within themselves—and about each other." —Gloria Steinem

"Eve Ensler is the Pied Piper. She is leading women and the world to a different
consciousness of the essence of women." —Gillian Anderson

"I feel my life has changed. You don't just hook up with Eve, you become part of her crusade. There's a corps of us who are Eve's army." —Glenn Close

"The monologues are part of Eve Ensler's crusade to wipe out the shame and embarrassment that many women still associate with their bodies or their sexuality. . . . They are both a celebration of women's sexuality and a condemnation of its violation."
—The New York Times

"Spellbinding, funny, and almost unbearably moving. . . . Written with a bluntness that is nevertheless intensely lyrical, it is both a work of art and an incisive piece of cultural history, a poem and a polemic, a performance and a balm and a benediction." —Variety

"Frank, humorous and moving . . . a compelling rhapsody of the female essence. Ultimately, Ensler achieves something extraordinary." —Chicago Tribune


From the Hardcover edition.

"I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them. . . . So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues. I talked with over two hundred women. I talked to old women, young women, married women, single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African American women, Hispanic women, Asian American women, Native American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. At first women were reluctant to talk. They were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn't stop them."

So begins Eve Ensler's hilarious, eye-opening tour into the last frontier, the forbidden zone at the heart of every woman. Adapted from the award-winning one-woman show that's rocked audiences around the world, this groundbreaking book gives voice to a chorus of lusty, outrageous, poignant, and thoroughly human stories, transforming the question mark hovering over the female anatomy into a permanent victory sign. With laughter and compassion, Ensler transports her audiences to a world we've never dared to know, guaranteeing that no one who reads The Vagina Monologues will ever look at a woman's body the same way again.

Drawing on conversations with hundreds of women about their genitalia, the author presents a collection of performance pieces from her one-woman show of the same name.

EVE ENSLER is an award-winning playwright, poet, activist, and screenwriter whose many works for the stage include The Depot, Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man, Extraordinary Measures, Lemonade, Ladies, and, most recently, Necessary Targets, which was performed on Broadway to benefit Bos-nian women refugees. She has presented her off-Broadway hit The Vagina Monologues (winner of the 1997 Obie Award) at theaters and universities around the United States, as well as in Jerusalem, London, and Zagreb. She is currently writing a screenplay on women in prison for Glenn Close at Miramax and a new play for the Music Theater Group. An in-structor in the graduate Dramatic Writing Pro-gram at New York University, she lives in New York City with her partner, Ariel Orr Jordan.

FOREWORD

by Gloria Steinem

I come from the "down there" generation. That is, those were the words-spoken rarely and in a hushed voice-that the women in my family used to refer to all female genitalia, internal or external.

It wasn't that they were ignorant of terms like vagina, labia, vulva, or clitoris. On the contrary, they were trained to be teachers and probably had more access to information than most.

It wasn't even that they were unliberated, or "straitlaced," as they would have put it. One grandmother earned money from her strict Protestant church by ghostwriting sermons-of which she didn't believe a word-and then earned more by betting it on horse races. The other was a suffragist, educator, and even an early political candidate, all to the alarm of many in her Jewish community. As for my own mother, she had been a pioneer newspaper reporter years before I was born, and continued to take pride in bringing up her two daughters in a more enlightened way than she had been raised. I don't remember her using any of the slang words that made the female body seem dirty or shameful, and I'm grateful for that. As you'll see in these pages, many daughters grew up with a greater burden.

Nonetheless, I didn't hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function other than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it-and what it would be used to justify?) Thus, whether I was learning to talk, to spell, or to take care of my own body; I was told the name of each of its amazing parts except in one unmentionable area. This left me unprotected against the shaming words and dirty jokes of the school yard and, later, against the popular belief that men, whether as lovers or physicians, knew more about women's bodies than women did.

I first glimpsed the spirit of self-knowledge and freedom that you will find in these pages when I lived in India for a couple of years after college. In Hindu temples and shrines I saw the lingam, an abstract male genital symbol, but I also saw the yoni, a female genital symbol, for the first time: a flowerlike shape, triangle, or double-pointed oval. I was told that thousands of years ago, this symbol had been worshiped as more powerful than its male counterpart, a belief that carried over into Tantrism, whose central tenet is man's inability to reach spiritual fulfillment except through sexual and emotional union with woman's superior spiritual energy. It was a belief so deep and wide that even some of the woman-excluding, monotheistic religions that came later retained it in their traditions, although such beliefs were (and still are) marginalized or denied as heresies by mainstream religious leaders.

For example: Gnostic Christians worshiped Sophia as the female Holy Spirit and considered Mary Magdalene the wisest of Christ's disciples; Tantric Buddhism still teaches that Buddhahood resides in the vulva; the Sufi mystics of Islam believe that fana, or rapture, can be reached only through Fravahi, the female spirit; the Shekina of Jewish mysticism is a version of Shakti, the female soul of God; and even the Catholic church included forms of Mary worship that focused more on the Mother than on the Son. In many countries of Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world where gods are still depicted in female as well as in male forms, altars feature the Jewel in the Lotus and other representations of the Lingam-in-the-yoni. In India, the Hindu goddesses Durga and Kali are embodiments of the yoni powers of birth and death, creation and destruction.

Still, India and yoni worship seemed a long way from American attitudes about women's bodies when I came home. Even the sexual revolution of the 1960s only made more women sexually available to more men. The "no" of the 1950s was just replaced with a constant, eager "yes." It was not until the feminist activism of the 1970s that there began to be alternatives to everything from patriarchal religions to Freud (the distance from A to B), from the double standard of patriarchal/political/religious control over women's bodies as the means of reproduction.

Those early years of discovery are symbolized for me by such sense memories as walking through Judy Chicago's Woman House in Los Angeles, where each room was created by a different woman artist, and where I discovered female symbolism in my own culture for the first time. (For example, the shape we call a heart-whose symmetry resembles the vulva far more than the asymmetry of the organ that shares its name-is probably a residual female genital symbol. It was reduced from power to romance by centuries of male dominance.) Or sitting in a New York coffee shop with Betty Dodson (you will meet her in these pages), trying to act cool while she electrified eavesdroppers with her cheerful explanation of masturbation as a liberating force. Or coming back to Ms. magazine to find, among the always humorous signs on its bulletin board: IT'S 10 O'CLOCK AT NIGHT-DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CLITORIS IS? By the time feminists were putting CUNT POWER! on buttons and T-shirts as a way of reclaiming that devalued word, I could recognize the restoration of an ancient power. After all, the Indo-European word cunt was derived from the goddess K ali's title of Kunda or Cunti, and shares the same root as kin and country.

These last three decades of feminism were also marked by a deep anger as the truth of violence against the female body was revealed, whether it took the form of rape, childhood sexual abuse, anti-lesbian violence, physical abuse of women, sexual harassment, terrorism against reproductive freedom, or the international crime of female genital mutilation. Women's sanity was saved by bringing these hidden experiences into the open, naming them, and turning our rage into positive action to reduce and heal violence. Part of the tidal wave of creativity that has resulted from this energy of truth telling is this play and book.



When I first went to see Eve Ensler perform the intimate narratives in these pages-gathered from more than two hundred interviews and then turned into poetry for the theater-I thought: I already know this: it's the journey of truth telling we've been on for the past three decades. And it is. Women have entrusted her with their most intimate experiences, from sex to birthing, from the undeclared war against women to the new freedom of love between women. On every page, there is the power of saying the unsayable-as there is in the behind-the-scenes story of the book itself. One publisher paid an advance for it, then, on sober second thought, allowed Eve Ensler to keep the money if she would take the book and its v-word elsewhere. (Thank Villard for publishing all of women's words-even in the title.)

But the value of The Vagina Monologues goes beyond purging a past full of negative attitudes. It offers a personal, grounded-in-the-body way of moving toward the future. I think readers, men as well as women, may emerge from these pages not only feeling more free within themselves-and about each other-but with alternatives to the old patriarchal dualism of feminine/masculine, body/ mind, and sexual/spiritual that is rooted in the division of our physical selves into "the part we talk about" and "the part we don't."

If a book with vagina in the title still seems a long way from such questions of philosophy and politics, I offer one more of my belated discoveries.

In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional...