Lyn Gardner:BODY LANGUAGE
If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear? A beret? A pink boa? Emeralds and sequins? Perhaps Giorgio Armani only? Or something machine washable?
American playwright Eve Ensler asked more than 200 women this question and many more about how they felt about their vaginas. The result is The Vagina Monologues, an award-winning, off- Broadway hit about the Bermuda Triangle of the female body. ”So much darkness and secrecy. Nobody reports back from there.” Not until the intrepid Ensler, that is.
Like a lot of the best ideas, The Vagina Monologues came about almost by accident. Ensler was surprised by the contempt with which a menopausal friend talked about her vagina. ”Dried-up, useless, shrivelled like a prune. It was as if this really bright feminist, a great thinker, thought of her vagina as something completely split off from herself,” Ensler recalls.
Curious, she asked other female friends to talk about their vaginas – and was so amazed by the complexity of their responses that she decided to spread the net wider. But how do you go up to complete strangers and get them to discuss the unmentionable? With ease, according to Ensler: ”Women are hungry to talk about it because they feel invisible. It’s not getting them started on the subject that’s the problem, but getting them to stop. Years and years of secrets and lies and tears and joys just pour out. The story of a woman’s vagina is the story of her life.”
Ensler took the women’s stories and turned them into quirky, funny-sad, sometimes unbearably poignant monologues. Such as that of the Bosnian woman, one of more than 70 000 estimated to have been raped during the war, who talks of the terrible pain of violation: ”The skin tears and makes screeching lemon sounds.”
It is not all so downbeat. There is a monologue about a woman at a vagina workshop who catches sight of her own for the first time, using a mirror: ”It reminded me of how the early astronomers must have felt with their primitive telescopes.” And the elderly woman whose gnarled, arthritic, fumbling fingers suddenly discover her clitoris – untouched for 72 years.
Oh, and when it comes to demonstrating orgasms, Ensler can out-act Meg Ryan. She started performing an embryonic version of the show in Greenwich Village cafs three-and-a-half years ago and interest was so great that she has since travelled the world with The Vagina Monologues. ”Women are women everywhere and they all have a vagina. The truth is, if the vagina tells women’s history, then the history of women is not a good one – the degree to which they have been violated worldwide is appalling,” she says.
It is not uncommon for women in Ensler’s audience to laugh uproariously, break down or even faint. Plenty contact her afterwards, to talk for the first time of their own abuse, or simply to confirm how much they love their vaginas.
Of course, all this sounds horribly like a piece of 1960s consciousness-raising and also peculiarly American. It is both. But it is also so fresh-faced, open and off-the-wall that you would have to be a rock not to be moved. Even celebrities are queuing up to perform the monologues.
Ensler, meanwhile, has completed a screenplay about women in prison for Glenn Close and has other projects in the pipeline. But these certainly do not include The Penis Poems. ”A friend suggested it and I just said: ‘Redundant.’ We live in the world of the penis every day. Vaginas are interesting because we have not explored what they are. We don’t hold them sacred and maybe that’s why they are so easily violated.”
She leans forward conspiratorially. ”I really don’t want to sound like some wacky, New Age type, but what I’ve learned from doing this show is that there is something called a cunt brain. Before this, the sense I had of myself was through my ideas and work. Like lots of women, all my motor was in my brain and I was disconnected from my body. But I started to live in my vagina and I think there’s a wisdom there that’s not to be found in the mind.”
The question is whether other audiences can overcome their natural reserve and request tickets for something containing the V word. I hope they do.
And by the way, what does your vagina smell like? Earth? Sweet ginger? Wet garbage? Snowflakes? Make mine a pineapple yogurt.