Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, has been in South Africa for the past few weeks with her new play, Emotional Creature, which is based on her latest book I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls from around the World.
This has been a celebratory affair. On the night of her talk the Market Theatre was packed. Unlike many South African theatrical productions, she drew a racially diverse crowd — and a fair smattering of men, too. People cried and clapped at her talk and, although Karabo Kgoleng was a bit long-winded with her questions, which some of us felt cut into Ensler’s time, it went down well. Most people left with a newfound understanding of the whole Vagina Monologues phenomenon and understood what the V-Revolution was all about. Wine flowed, books were signed and much laughter and revolutionary speak abounded.
I, being a social smoker, got so beside myself with enthusiasm and possibly a little too much red wine that I thought it best to go outside and have a smoke to calm myself down, lest I start to look foolish. That is where I found myself eavesdropping on a group of feminists bitching about Ensler’s whole approach.
“I found it shallow. I just was not satisfied with her answer,” said a tall and somewhat intimidating woman. Those clustered around her agreed.
“And, on top of that, what is this whole vagina thing other than a refetishising of a woman’s private parts?”
She went on to insist that what Ensler is doing is no different from pornography and that she’s feeding right into the hands of the male obsession with the vagina, drawing unnecessary attention to it.
“Personally, I didn’t get that at all,” I began to interject, but was met with a look of disdain. I continued anyway: “As a writer who subscribes to ‘writing the body’, and who holds a special love for the pagan word ‘cunt’ and believes that these ‘profane’ words reclaimed do hold a certain energy that is empowering to women, naming the vagina makes complete sense to me.”
The woman I’d addressed turned towards another woman, who looked equally disdainful, and they continued to agree with each other’s vagina grievances as though I hadn’t said a word. Feeling somewhat indignant, I puffed hard on my cigarette, clicked my tongue and thankfully saw my husband walking towards me.
Safely in his company, I continued my conversation in my head. I had interviewed Ensler the day before and knew how committed she was to the cause of women and girls. I could not match this attack on her movement with my research. One only has to read about the way The Vagina Monologues has continued to politicise, delight and empower women all over the world, in all sorts of communities and cultures — as well as recognise the amount of money V-Day has raised through benefit performances of this play — to appreciate the positive impact this has had for womankind.
All monies raised from these benefit concerts go to community projects to stop violence against women and girls. The size of this vagina phenomenon is mind-blowing, as is the fact that it all started because Ensler found her truth and said the word out loud.
Witnessing the force of reclaiming this word, this one precious body part, it’s no surprise that a patriarchal system tried to silence it altogether. The word “vagina” contains magic and Ensler is the catalyst for unleashing this magic. She has, uncannily, blended celebration and activism – an alchemy that works.
When I next bumped into Ensler I asked her to respond to the pornographic allegation.
“I cannot see how this can be mistaken for pornographic fetishisation of the vagina. You know, naming the vagina makes women the subjects of their own lives — it makes the subjects of vagina their own, not the fetishised, objectified and often brutalised patriarchal view of the vagina. Rather, it is a way to start the conversation with our own bodies, to cherish and make our bodies safe, but most of all to reconnect with our bodies, in particular our vaginas … so that they are no longer separate to us or symbolic and mythic things.”
The Vagina Monologues, the V-Day movement and the vagina magic that has grown out of it are both a linguistic and a bodily phenomenon. It is the sensual and political language of the body spoken through the body.
To my mind, Ensler has transcended the Cartesian mind-body dualism and bought back the pantheistic experience of the body with its sexuality and intellect intact. And it is a celebration that dances wildly in the face of the fire-and-brimstone wrath of a patriarchal, capitalistic, heteronormative, linear interpretation of life — a destructive, anti-celebratory, phallocentric force that has for centuries been thrust upon the entire global community. For me, this is the pornography we should rally against.