The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition
- Book Review,
by Eve Ensler
Amazon.com
"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.
From AudioFile
Outrageous, funny, poignant, and never dull--you'll be amazed at how much this woman has to say about this one topic, but then when was the last time anyone had a chance? This is a complete and utter celebration of being female and of female sexuality, as well as a plea to stop violence against women. So be warned, if you don't want to hear frank language, don't listen. Eve Ensler does a forceful job of delivery that smacks you in the head and rivets your attention. By turns angry, whiny, and seductive, she adds a generous dose of humor with great comic timing. You'll never feel the same way about a woman's body after hearing this. A real eye-opener! D.G. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Ensler, famous, maybe notorious, for her witty, wildly popular meditation on female sexuality, The Vagina Monologues (1998), is as much journalist as playwright. Even her more traditional plays, such as this one, are based on extensive research. For Necessary Targets, she went to Bosnia to interview women who had survived the recent, brutal war. As in the Vagina Monologues , her hard work pays off. The play is a sobering reminder of the barbarism committed in the name of national sovereignty. Its accounts of the Serbian use of terror, especially rape, as a weapon against civilians are especially chilling. But the play is more than another news account of the war. Ensler shapes her findings into a series of compelling, highly characterized portraits of the refugees and a pair of well-meaning, sometimes misguided American women who come to help them. Ensler's portrayals avoid the easy cliches of quick-hit news stories and convey human experience in all its painful complexity. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews
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.
Review
"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
"Spellbinding, funny, and almost unbearably moving . . . 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
"Often wrenching, frequently riotous. . . . Ensler is an impassioned wit." —Los Angeles Times
"A compelling rhapsody of the female essence. . . . Ultimately Ensler achieves something extraordinary." —Chicago Tribune
Join the V-Day movement! Visit www.vday.org.
Review
"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
"Spellbinding, funny, and almost unbearably moving . . . 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
"Often wrenching, frequently riotous. . . . Ensler is an impassioned wit." ?Los Angeles Times
"A compelling rhapsody of the female essence. . . . Ultimately Ensler achieves something extraordinary.
Book Description
A poignant and hilarious tour of the last frontier, the ultimate forbidden zone, The Vagina Monologues is a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery. Hailed as the bible for a new generation of women, it has been performed in cities all across America and at hundreds of college campuses, and has inspired a dynamic grassroots movement--V-Day--to stop violence against women. Witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise, Eve Ensler's Obie Award-winning masterpiece gives voice to real women's deepest fantasies and fears, guaranteeing that no one who reads it will ever look at a woman's body, or think of sex, in quite the same way again.
Download Description
Loved by everyone from Calista Flockhart to Joy Behar, the talk of tabloids and TV, performed at over two hundred colleges every year for V-Day -- a dynamic grass-roots movement to stop violence against women -- The Vagina Monologues is a national phenomenon. Witty, irreverent, and wise, it has become the bible for a new generation of women. "You don't just hook up with Eve", says Glenn Close. "You become a part of her crusade". Next February, the crusade takes us to Madison Square Garden for V-Day 2001, a huge, all-star, day-long extravaganza and call to action for which Jane Fonda will make a triumphant return to the stage. The V-Day edition of The Vagina Monologues includes three new monologues, a new preface by Eve, and heartbreaking testimonials from young women around the country. February will also see the opening of Necessary Targets, Eve Ensler's groundbreaking new play about women and war. Necessary Targets is the story of two American women, a Park Avenue psychiatrist and a human-rights worker, who go to Bosnia to help women refugees confront their memories of war and emerge deeply changed themselves. It has been read in New York by Meryl Streep, Anjelica Huston, and Calista Flockhart and was performed in Sarajevo with Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei. It will open its New York run with a similar all-star cast.
From the Inside Flap
A poignant and hilarious tour of the last frontier, the ultimate forbidden zone, The Vagina Monologues is a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery. Hailed as the bible for a new generation of women, it has been performed in cities all across America and at hundreds of college campuses, and has inspired a dynamic grassroots movement—V-Day—to stop violence against women. Witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise, Eve Ensler's Obie Award-winning masterpiece gives voice to real women's deepest fantasies and fears, guaranteeing that no one who reads it will ever look at a woman's body, or think of sex, in quite the same way again.
From the Back Cover
"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
"Spellbinding, funny, and almost unbearably moving . . . 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
"Often wrenching, frequently riotous. . . . Ensler is an impassioned wit." --Los Angeles Times
"A compelling rhapsody of the female essence. . . . Ultimately Ensler achieves something extraordinary.
About the Author
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.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
I bet you're worried. I was worried. That's why I began this piece. 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. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas-a community, a culture of
vaginas. There's so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them-like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there.
In the first place, it's not so easy even to find your vagina. Women go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it. I interviewed a high-powered businesswoman who told me she was too busy; she didn't have the time. Looking at your vagina, she said, is a full day's work. You have to get down there on your back in front of a mirror that's standing on its own, full-length preferred. You've got to get in the perfect position, with the perfect light, which then is shadowed somehow by the mirror and the angle you're at. You get all twisted up. You're arching your head up, killing your back. You're exhausted by then. She said she didn't have the time for that. She was busy.
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 older 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. Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one's ever asked them before.
Let's just start with the word "vagina." It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: "Hurry, Nurse, bring me the vagina." "Vagina." "Vagina." Doesn't matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say. It's a totally ridiculous, completely
unsexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct-"Darling, could you stroke my vagina?"-you kill the act right there.
I'm worried about vaginas, what we call them and don't call them.
In Great Neck, they call it a pussycat. A woman there told me that her mother used to tell her, "Don't wear panties underneath your pajamas, dear; you need to air out your pussycat." In Westchester they called it a pooki, in New Jersey a twat. There's "powderbox," "derrière," a "poochi," a
"poopi," a "peepe," a "poopelu," a "poonani," a "pal" and a "piche," "toadie," "dee dee," "nishi," "dignity," "monkey box," "coochi snorcher," "cooter," "labbe," "Gladys Siegelman," "VA," "wee wee," "horsespot," "nappy dugout," "mongo," a "pajama," "fannyboo," "mushmellow," a "ghoulie,"
"possible," "tamale," "tottita," "Connie," a "Mimi" in Miami, "split knish" in Philadelphia, and "schmende" in the Bronx. I am worried about vaginas.
Some of the monologues are close to verbatim interviews, some are composite interviews, and with some I just began with the seed of an interview and had a good time. This monologue is pretty much the way I heard it. Its subject, however, came up in every interview, and often it was fraught. The subject being
Hair
You cannot love a vagina unless you love hair. Many people do not love hair. My first and only husband hated hair. He said it was cluttered and dirty. He made me shave my vagina. It looked puffy and exposed and like a little girl. This excited him. When he made love to me, my vagina felt the way a beard must feel. It felt good to rub it, and painful. Like scratching a mosquito bite. It felt like it was on fire. There were screaming red bumps. I refused to shave it again. Then my husband had an affair. When we went to marital therapy, he said he screwed around because I wouldn't
please him sexually. I wouldn't shave my vagina. The therapist had a thick German accent and gasped between sentences to show her empathy. She asked me why I didn't want to please my husband. I told her I thought it was weird. I felt little when my hair was gone down there, and I couldn't help talking in a baby voice, and the skin got irritated and even calamine lotion wouldn't help it. She told me marriage was a compromise. I asked her if shaving my vagina would stop him from screwing around. I asked her if she'd had many cases like this before. She said that questions diluted the process. I needed to jump in. She was sure it was a good beginning.
This time, when we got home, he got to shave my vagina. It was like a therapy bonus prize. He clipped it a few times, and there was a little blood in the bathtub. He didn't even notice it, 'cause he was so happy shaving me. Then, later, when my husband was pressing against me, I could feel his spiky sharpness sticking into me, my naked puffy vagina. There was no protection. There was no fluff.
I realized then that hair is there for a reason-it's the leaf around the flower, the lawn around the house. You have to love hair in order to love the vagina. You can't pick the parts you want. And besides, my husband never stopped screwing around.
I asked all the women I interviewed the same questions and then I picked my favorite answers. Although I must tell you, I've never heard an answer I didn't love. I asked women:
"If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?"
A beret.
A leather jacket.
Silk stockings.
Mink.
A pink boa.
A male tuxedo.
Jeans.
Something formfitting.
Emeralds.
An evening gown.
Sequins.
Armani only.
A tutu.
See-through black underwear.
A taffeta ball gown.
Something machine washable.
Costume eye mask.
Purple velvet pajamas.
Angora.
A red bow.
Ermine and pearls.
A large hat full of flowers.
A leopard hat.
A silk kimono.
Sweatpants.
A tattoo.
An electrical shock device to keep unwanted strangers away.
High heels.
Lace and combat boots.
Purple feathers and twigs and shells.
Cotton.
A pinafore.
A bikini.
A slicker.
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