Sandra Cattich
An attractive man pulls up in a convertible to ask me where he can find The Vagina Monologues. I have to tell him that I’m still looking as I wander towards the closest building at Caesar’s Palace, venue of South Africa’s first V-day event, musing that the bizarre interchange is probably one of the more meaningful I’ve had on the topic of women’s sexuality.
Germaine Greer may mock Eve Ensler’s enactment of women’s “search” for their vaginas (which perhaps are easier to find than the car keys), but to nitpick this play in her article “Paying lip service”, in the Sunday Times of April 7, she often has to force a surprisingly literal reading on her audience. And anyway, hasn’t the grande dame herself had a few false starts after turning on the ignition?
I’m beginning to think critics like Greer simply feel upstaged by a woman who has managed to popularise feminist issues in a way that few would have dreamed possible, by one whose fundraising campaign to end violence against women has been so successful worldwide that the Harvard Business School requested its use as a case study. I recently had the opportunity to ask Ensler about her friends, foes and future visions.
Among your supporters you have both feminists and “women who don’t define themselves”. Why has “feminism” become such a dirty word do you think?
“I think it’s because everyone has bought into the pathology of patriarchy that has tried to stigmatise and cannibalise feminism. For me personally, feminism is about desire. I think that, if you know your desire and you have a vision of your desire, you can fulfil your desire within this lifetime. I don’t think it’s more complex than that. If you’re a person who has been battered, abused or raped, you don’t have that desire, you don’t even have enough esteem to desire.”
Greer says that you’re making points about women’s attitudes to their bodies that feminists made 30 years ago, that this is all “old hat”.
“Why is that a criticism? I mean to imply that feminism is outdated means that we’re all liberated and there’s no more violence and, as far as I can tell, that hasn’t happened yet.”
What about the area of women taking responsibility for their ambivalence, their aggressive impulses towards one another? Are you ever critical of women?
“I think women need to take responsibility for how deeply we’ve been trained to put one another down, but to be honest, I’m never really critical of women, not publicly. I don’t believe in the press reality, the way you approached this interview by finding my critics, for example.”
Dialogue, balance, I think? I’ve been reading out lines from the critics, including the Camille Paglia. Instead I say:
Well, in a way I feel obliged to raise them because I feel I am too supportive of your cause.
“But just look at that, just examine that as a journalist, what does it mean to be too supportive of someone’s cause?”
Well, people don’t believe you otherwise, you have to be a bit nasty.
“What is that about? And why do we all keep feeding into that, it makes me crazy. The woman who wrote this piece [pointing to Susan Dominus in the New York Times Magazine on February 10] was sent back to ‘get more edge’ and she bought into it.”
But are you so different from a journalist? I often have to find the angle that will get me the space to say what I want to say.
“But take that as a metaphor! That’s what’s killing women: ‘I’ve got to find the angle to allow myself to come through.’ Once women do that they give up their big power …”
But haven’t you done this too? The celebrities, the sexual angle.
“No I have not done it, I have said exactly what I wanted to say in the way I have wanted to say it. I have not angled myself and I believe that’s why The Vagina Monologues is having this impact.”
It feels so refreshing to be chided in this way, like a blessing in fact. That I should even find myself trying to “peddle” women’s rights through a defensive or protective “edge” is an utter absurdity.
On the night of South Africa’s first V-day event I watch people throw their heads back with laughter, wave their arms in the air, and ululate to music performances so inspiring I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
It’s a vision taking shape, something Ensler describes as “the really empowering thing when you realise the community is attracting the community and you don’t need outside names”. And while feminists like Greer have in the past provoked what is probably justifiable anger, this self-professed “radical” seems to work more with joy in the most unlikely places.