Eve Ensler is in South Africa to workshop her latest play, I am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls Around the World.
This work takes the messages of female empowerment that she popularised with The Vagina Monologues and applies them to the stories of teenage girls from around the world.
We spoke to Ensler about her reputation as an “angry feminist”, where these messages leave men, and about being an activist as well as an artist.
In terms of your work and your past, with The Vagina Monologues and V-Day and the other things that might be projected onto you — does that change depending on the context, depending on the country you are in? Is that message always relevant? Is it always the same?
Well, if you look at V-Day, which grew out of The Vagina Monologues, which is a movement to end violence against women and girls around the planet, that movement is massive and having a great impact. And now V-Girls, which grew out of this play, is about teenage girls taking their power back, saying: “I have a voice, I am authentic, I matter, I count, and I’m going to be bold about it.”
And I think the individual stories of girls changes across the planet but there are many themes, particularly the mandate to please. Please their mothers, please their boyfriends, to please religious leaders, fashion setters. And this verb “to please” usually meanS you give up your own will, your own imagination, your own desires, to serve someone else. So this play is about changing the verb — defy, resist, create, invent — but not please.
And is that message ever met with resistance? Some girls may take to that message because of their cultural outlook, but there must be some for whom it is very foreign. How do they react?
I think it’s the same as The Vagina Monologues. There were many who just wished I would go away. And there many who didn’t feel that. And I’m sure it will be true with this too. I am there are people who don’t like me talking about masturbation, and girls asking their partners to use condoms, and about girls not wanting to have their clitorises cut. But I think that there will be many that are very happy that those taboos are being broken and that we are actually talking about the truth.
So these are issues that young girls are telling you about. Is there any resistance to you coming in as a foreigner, as an American?
I’m an artist. I live in the world. I live part time in Congo, part time in Paris, part time in America. I don’t even know where I live anymore. I don’t pretend to represent anyone. I am an artist. I am not claiming to have the definitive take on the issues. It’s just my take.
Do you find that it is possible for you to approach issues without the “angry feminist” label attached to everything you do?
Well, for a start, I think that I’m really funny, not angry. But people will project onto you whatever they want to. For example, I wrote a piece in the Guardian about what issues the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case had raised. I did not say he was guilty. I made a list of the questions this case has raised. How do you prosecute a rape trial if you have lied in your past? If you have had a sexual past?
And then I saw a response saying “Feminist Eve Ensler, after saying Strauss-Kahn was guilty, won’t say sorry”. If you are defined as a feminist, people will attach all sorts of things to you.
I don’t concern myself with that. My business is to tell the truth the way see it, and write plays that move people to change, so that women are free, and free from abuse, and are able to get justice.
And those issues prove the relevance of the feminist movement?
Last year there 5000 productions in 1400 places of The Vagina Monologues, so clearly it hasn’t lost its relevance. We’ve raised $80 million to support local groups.
What V-Day is about is a revolution of women and girls — and men — to release them from the shackles of patriarchy. I don’t think men are served by those systems either.
So what is the role of men in this movement? Is there not a danger that, making theatre about women, spoken by women, that you restrict them to the peripheries?
Many men come to The Vagina Monologues and are involved in the movement. We also look at roles that they have been subject to — being forced to be ‘men’, which often means not being able to feel, not being able to cry, not being able to have questions, and that is an awful kind of tyranny in itself.
All I can do is create work that inspires dialogue and discourse so that there can be change. The world is in pretty rough shape right now. In South Africa, one out of two women and in the world one out of three women is raped or beaten. We need to look at why the world has become a place that is so unsafe for women.
I’m not against men. I don’t hate men, I love men. I have a son, I adore my son. I have had many boyfriends, a husband, I love men! I think men need to be with us as allies — to stop the violence and denigration. But not with hostility.
And throughout your travels and dialogues, have you found anything that has surprised you or made you see things slightly differently?
I think my attitude towards men has changed. When I began this I had a much more monolithic view of men. I think it was based on my own history. And I have seen now how many men want to live and be in a different modality.
Guys would come up to me after shows and tell me about their girlfriends who had been raped and how they didn’t know how to have sex with them. And there were men who had watched their mothers being beaten and that had attacked their sense of being a man.
I think I have much more sympathy and empathy toward men than I ever have. We are in this together. This is a joint project. Violence against women won’t stop unless men stop doing it. And the majority of men aren’t rapists and abusers, but they need to stand up to and speak to their brothers who are.
Is this a universal message?
I think it is. I wish I could tell you the story was different. The world is a patriarchal world. And we’re united in this struggle of how we are going to break out of it — to fight against capitalism, and for equitable wages, and to fight for an earth that we have plundered without ever thinking of the consequences. And I don’t think there’s much different between plundering the earth for oil and raping women. It’s the same drive.
So you think that there is truth in the idea that an activist is always an activist, that one should always keep people aware of the problems with the status quo that does not benefit the majority?
I sometimes wish I had been born an artist, not an activist too. It would be a lot less tiring.
But the truth is, if you look at where we are living, if you look at fracking, and global warming, and overpopulation, and what’s happening to women across the planet. there are signs that we are in very deep trouble. It would be nice to just be writing lovely plays. But we are in a state of emergency. We are fighting for the survival of the human species.