It was clear in a way that few things have been clear to me in my life. In Brussels, members of the European Parliament performed the Monologues in 2012.Īfter about fifteen minutes talking to Karin at that birthday party in Berlin, it was clear to me that I needed to produce the Vagina Monologues, too. Celebrity productions have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and put the subject in the limelight. Women in community centers, theater clubs, college campuses, and political organizations launch V-Day events. The Vagina Monologues have been translated into more than 45 languages. Today, well over 5000 V-Day events are produced worldwide each year. The majority of the proceeds would benefit local organizations that were active in ending violence against women, and a fraction would support the international campaign of V-Day. The events would spread awareness, get people talking, giving them the language to speak up and to share their own stories. She made the rights to the script available for a designated period – in the beginning just on Valentine’s Day (thus the wordplay on V-Day) – and later for several months from Valentine’s Day through the end of April, which became the “V-Season.” During that time, groups of women were invited to organize benefit performances of the Vagina Monologues. The concept was simple and effective and caught on like wildfire. In 1998, about two years after the play opened, Eve Ensler was moved to put the Vagina Monologues to work in a global effort to end violence against women and girls. And when bad things, dangerous things happened “down there”, there were no words and there was no courage to speak of them to parents, friends, authorities. The unnamed had become unnameable, unspeakable.
And for many, like me, the missing language had created a shadow of shame.
Many, like me, had been raised without a language to speak about their bodies, their sexuality. She was approached again and again by women who were inspired, comforted, and who felt a vital need to share their own stories. The Vagina Monologues touched audiences in a way that Eve Ensler had not foreseen. How did women feel about their vagina? How did they talk about or not talk about their vagina? What were the most important experiences they related to their vagina? The result was a one-woman performance that included stories of sexual awakening, of abuse, of birth, and of brutal violence. The questions in the interviews were all about vaginas. A New Yorker herself, she wrote the Vagina Monologues based on hundreds of interviews that she held with women from all walks of life. Karin was Director of V-Day Europe and described to me the principle of the project: Eve Ensler was the author and original performer of the theater piece whose title gave me such a shock in my youth.
It was about 25 years later that I met a woman at a birthday party in Berlin and found out what the Monologues were all about. I had no idea what might be behind the title, but I was offended purely by the word itself. I recall being vaguely outraged at the indecency, the arrogance, the unnecessary provocation. I do remember looking in the New York Times Arts and Leisure section as a teenager and finding advertising for a play called The Vagina Monologues in bold print. And yet, I cannot remember a single mention of a vagina in all of my years at home in New York City. The obligatory copy of “The Joy of Sex” was there for all to see on the bookshelf in my parents’ bedroom. On the surface, we were a progressive household, with left-leaning politics and generous yearly donations to Planned Parenthood. There was no word for the most private parts of me when I was growing up.
0 kommentar(er)
