Insecure at Last | Eve Ensler | Talks at Google

She did the play, which was how hard it was to say that word at work. It was really hard. Everyone's like, you're taking everyone to what? Like I'm taking everyone to a play called the Vagina Monologues. And we had the giggling and stuff. But that work was very important work and it was based on over 200 interviews she did with real women. Eve has also written several other plays, two books, one of which is the Vagina Monologues, which was here. This is the latest and greatest. Insecure at last losing it in our security obsessed world. And I think potentially most importantly to her, but I'll let her speak to that. She's formed V Day, which is an international movement working to protect women worldwide against violence against women. We are thrilled to have all of you here to welcome her and thrilled to have her here. Welcome Eve.

Thank you all very much. Should we just begin with the vagina? One, two, three, Vagina. Just so we know we can say it at work and feel good about it. Ok. I'm really, really moved and honored to be here and thank you, Cheryl. I'm a huge fan of yours and I'm a Google addict. So I'm very happy to be here for many reasons and particularly that it's in the middle of V Day season. For those of you who don't know V Day, it's a global movement to end violence against women and girls. This is our ninth year and V Day used to be one day, but now it's actually spanning into two and a half months and we're smack in the middle of the season. And I'll come back to this later, but it's escalated and grown and grown and grown and grown and grown. So that this year there are 1,150 places on the planet doing 3,000 productions of the play to raise money in grassroots communities across the world to end violence. And it's very interesting. I was thinking about Google this morning and I was thinking about V Day because we are a virtual, we're a V movement. All good words begin with V. I'm convinced. Vagina victory over violence. Virtual. But I want to talk a little bit today about the movement because I think we're at a very important in the movement and I think we're having enormous impact and I think we could have huger impact with the participation of all of you. I didn't mean to begin V Day at all. I didn't even mean to be talking about vaginas. I always say if you had told me that I Was going to grow up in being shoe stores where people screamed across the room, there she is, the vagina lady. I don't know if that was my life ambition, you know, But I think one of the great things about life is that if you keep showing up and you keep telling what is true to you and following what is true to you, even if it begins in a very, very tiny way, all these amazing things start to happen that you're really not in control over and that you eventually learn how to serve and keep up with. I began this piece accidentally. I was talking to a woman about menopause, A very kind of famous actor in hollywood, and she was a feminist and a forward thinking woman. And we got onto the subject of her vagina and she said all these horrible things and I was shocked. I couldn't believe she was talking about how dried up and finished and dead it was. And I thought, oh my God, I have no idea what women think about their vaginas. So I said to a friend of mine, just casually, well, what do you think about your vagina? And she said, she was the first person. She said, oh, my mother used to tell me, don't wear underpants underneath your pajamas. You need to air out your pussycat, okay? And I went, we're in trouble, you know? So that really began that journey. And I had no intention of writing a play. I was already a way down, down downtown playwright. I was living basically in poverty, I had no money. I was writing plays about homeless people and war and torture. And I was a way, way downtown playwright. So to write a play about vaginas was going to secure that status forever. But what happened was, like all great things. One woman would say to me, well, you really should talk to so and so about her vagina and you should talk to her about her vagina. And I just kind of got sucked down this vagina trail and, you know, and I really haven't gotten out of it as far as I can tell. But I started to do these monologues casually in this downtown theater. And, you know, it was this amazing thing that just happened. And then women would sign up after the show to be interviewed. And I remember spending months and months in my office, it was a small little office, and women would come in and they would sit down and they would stay for days and they would tell me about the history, the autobiography, the story of their vagina. And they were telling it to me because they had never told it to anybody before in their lives. When I started to perform the show at the Beginning, it was really kind of funny because I had done it way downtown, and then all these brave people would invite me to their communities. But it was really arbitrary. Like I'd be in Oklahoma City one day and in Jerusalem the next, and then I'd be in Zagreb and then I'd be in Santa Barbara. And it was very strange and very wonderful and in warehouses with light bulbs over my head and in underground places. But what happened on that tour was that after every single show, women would line up to talk to me. And I thought, fantastic. I'm going to hear about great sex lives and wonderful orgasms. And what started to happen was 90 to 95% of the women who were lining up to talk to me were. Were there to tell me how they had been raped or beaten or gang raped or incested. And it became completely, utterly overwhelming. Of course I knew that women had been violated in the world. I'm a survivor of incredible violence, but I had no idea, no idea the epidemic proportions and what was going on. So I was going to stop doing the show because I felt the way war photographers feel when they witness something terrible and they don't intervene on behalf of the person who's undergoing suffering. And in 1997, I got this fantastic group of women together, one of which is here today. Susan Swan, who has been the director of communications for the last nine years in V Day. And we got this group of women together in my living room. And I said, look, I have this play and we have this epidemic. What are we going to do? And we came up with this idea. V Day. We'll create a day. It'll be one day where we focus on not continuing violence, not managing violence, but actually ending violence against women, putting it out that it's possible to live in a world where women are safe, where they're not violated, where they're free, where they live in pleasure, where they have agency over their sexuality, where they can walk where they want, wear what they want, live the way they like, without threat or battery or invasion or annihilation. So we came up with this idea and we thought we'd do one performance in New York. It'll be fantastic. We'll ask all our favorite actors. I went to Susan Sarandon and Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie Perez and Lily Tomlin and Glenn Close. And they all said yes. No, they all didn't say yes. A couple didn't, but I won't tell you who. And they all said yes. And we put on the first performance, the first evening of the vagina Monologues in New York to raise money for local groups in the city who were working to stop rape and incest and battery and genital mutilation and sex trafficking. And that night was a truly revolutionary night. 2,500 people ended up coming. And when I tell you that the earth moved, I mean that the earth moved. It was very clear that something gigantic, something seismic was being born. And it felt like a catalyst. It felt like a new direction. It felt like a possibility. That was nine years ago. In nine years, the movement has spread, and it's spread in this really fantastic way because it spread from woman to woman, from vagina friendly man to vagina friendly man. It just moved and moved and moved and moved throughout the world. And we have never, for example, tried. I never promote the play. I never call up people and say, bring vagina monologues to Islamabad, Because I would never, for example, presume to know how you would bring vagina monologues to Islamabad in the same way I would not presume to bring it to Indiana. And by the way, they're equally difficult. Do you know what I mean? Indiana, Islamabad, same issues. Okay, you laugh, but I'm not being sarcastic, because we've seen exactly the same kind of forces against women taking agency over their bodies, against freedom of sexuality, against women being, you know, all the things that vide addresses. What's happened in this nine years is what happens is a woman comes and says, you know, I'm seeing vide. I'm seeing vagina pajamas. And she goes, make. She makes pajamas. Another woman comes and says, I want to bring V day to college campuses. Another woman comes and says, I want to begin something in the middle East. And it's just happened that women get seized, they get taken, they get empowered, and then they move V day through the world. So in nine years, we have built and been able to achieve what I really don't understand in any other terms, but a kind of revolutionary phenomena. And in this time, vide has spread to 129 countries. It has been done, in fact, in Islamabad. It's been done in Karachi. It's been done in Lahore. It's been done in places that if you had told me that people were waking up in Beirut or all throughout Africa or throughout the south, in very conservative cities, places where, you know, you probably saw the hoo ha monologue thing this year, because every year there's some crazy place where people call it something and put it somewhere. And this year it was the hoo ha monologues in Florida, because apparently A mother and daughter were driving by the sign, and it said vagina. And the mother said she would have been compelled to tell her daughter what it was. And I thought I said that she had a vagina. She would have to tell her daughter that that was a problem. I was trying to understand it. But these are the kind of issues we face in an ongoing way. We still live in a world, believe it or not, where girls don't know they have vaginas, where they're called coochie and uchi and tucci and moochie and kupuki and kuki, and where we don't have the appropriate name for our body parts because that would actually be giving us agency and direction and clarity over who we are. And a big part of this movement is giving voice and giving language and giving power to women to actually exist in their bodies, to exist in the world. You know, people have accused me of being vagina centric, you know, a lot, obviously. And the answer to that question is, I am, okay? Unapologetically so. And not to the point where I think, like, vaginas matter and our brains don't, which I get accused of also. But I do believe that if you look at a woman's body, our vaginas are actually smack in the center of us. You know, they live in the center of us. And if we are not connected to them, if we don't have agency over them, if we don't know that they're ours, if we don't know that they exist, if we don't know how they operate, if we don't know what gives them pleasure, it's actually a kind of metaphor for the story of our lives. We don't have power in our lives. We're not connected to ourselves. We can't give voice to our desires. We can't give voice to our ambition. And we're not connected to our central self. So, I mean, that's the larger metaphor. And I never. It never ceases to amaze me when I see women and men, but women particularly, begin to say the word vagina enough times and begin to articulate and voice themselves into existence how radically their lives change. I just want to talk a little bit about the movement. The movement's been an extraordinary experience. It's taken all of us by storm. We are still a very anarchic radical. I'll call it an organization, although I am always resistant, because we're more a movement than an organization. There's only seven of us who. I'm a volunteer, but there Are seven paid staff. And then everything else happens virtually throughout the world. This year, for example, in all those 1150 places, everybody got that information through the Internet. They have a downloadable kit of 50 pages which they download in their community. They get the play for free. They have something called a vspot, which is where the organizers go. And it's a fantastic place where people network and exchange information and process problems and communicate with each other. We have a staff who is very small but very great, and they work with people throughout the world to help all the young women in colleges who are doing it and all the people in communities who are doing it, and it all just happens. I mean, what's amazing, if you just go to the V day website and you look at the list of where v day is happening this year around the world. I have a very emotional experience whenever I do that, Because I don't know who many. Most of the people are, but they have found vide, and they have found a way to put it on their communities, and they have risked enormous adversity in many cases, putting it on. As you know, or may not know, we have had controversies with the Catholic community, Not all the catholic community, but a kind of fundamentalist wing of the Catholic community. And they have tried on occasion to shut down productions in Catholic universities, and they have been successful. But v day women are really fierce, and so they just go and they do it off campus, and more people come because there's been controversy, usually. And last year, I did a catholic tour, and I went to a lot of catholic schools, and it was fantastic. To the point where at notre Dame, the topic was contextualizing vaginas within a Catholic university. That was actually the topic. Okay. And just to have that a topic at Notre Dame was a victory, you know, and it was kind of wild to hear all these professors talking about the deconstruction of the vagina within the catholic frame. And I was like, what are we talking about? You know? But what was amazing. What was amazing is to be in a room this size having discussion at a catholic university about sex and women and vaginas. And at one point, a priest stood up and said, are you saying, Ms. Ensler, that you support master masturbation? And I said, I am so definitely saying I support masturbation. And I said, is there someone in the audience who doesn't masturbate? Please raise your hand. And long silence. No hands raised. We moved along, you know, so part of what our work is in v day is putting the truth back in reality, you know, and that's often difficult because people don't want to be in the truth. They want to be in some idea of the truth or some control of the truth. I want to say that this year. Oh, and I want to say something else about the movement that I really love. You know, I have never been a believer in charity in people. You know, this kind of hierarchy that develops in charity where some person's the giver and some people's the get. And we control people through money and we control people through giving. And when the Vagina Monologues made a lot of money, I was in a blessed position because the show raised $5 million on its own to give to violence against women. And then I made a lot of money personally, and I didn't want to just give my money and get into this hierarchy. So one of the great things about V Day is it's a different kind of philanthropy. It's called self empowerment philanthropy. And what that means is that we provide a tool for women and men across the world. It's a play, it's a kit, it's a way of doing something. And then they take this and then they put on the play and they produce it, and they get all these people in their communities involved in it, and then they raise money, which they then keep in their communities. So the process itself is a way of empowering people, and the money they make is their money. We don't take anything in the kind of central V day, except for 10%, which goes to spotlight campaigns which highlights women in some part of the world that are under extreme violence. Women in Afghanistan, women in Iraq, women in the Native American community. Last year we did the comfort women throughout Asia, and this year we're highlighting women in post conflict zones. I want to say that I think a big part of what V Day does is shatter taboos and enacts real change in communities. And we have seen enormous impact over the last nine years. We have seen, for example, the opening of safe houses in Africa, the first safe house ever in the history of Africa for female genital mutilation. I'm going to tell the story later. We opened the first safe house in Cairo for battered women. There was never a battered shelter in Cairo, ever. We have opened safe houses throughout Baghdad. We have changed laws, we have broken taboos, we have ended suffering. We have made violence against women a central issue on college campuses across the world. And I have to say, we have seen congresspeople and members of parliament in London, for example, who performed the Vagina Monologues at The Labour Party conference. I was there, I witnessed this. And last year in Iceland, the members of parliament performed it and the president stood up and declared himself the first vagina friendly president in the world, which is pretty awesome. We are hoping for the same in this country, but not under the current regime. But should Bush want to join in, his name fits in quite nicely. Ok. The movement is predicated on three core beliefs. That art has the power to reach and transform and motivate people to act, that empowered women are unstoppable, and that lasting social and cultural change is spread through the lived experience of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I want to just share one last story with you, if you don't mind. I want to read you this little chapter from my book. It's not too long, but it kind of indicates everything that I think V Day stands for. And you know, this year we are honoring women throughout war zones. And we just bought women from Sierra Leone and from Afghanistan and from Haiti to LA yesterday. And we did this amazing luncheon where women told their stories and just I think woke up a lot of people to the situation of women in the world. I want to say one thing before I read this. You know, I've been doing this work now for nine years. I have spent my life thinking about violence against women. And what I've learned is that violence against women is not an issue, that's a side issue. I think we all think of it like it's an issue we'll get to later when all the other issues are done. Violence against women is fundamental, crucial, and it is central to absolutely everything that occurs. And the reason this is true is that if you think about women, we are the primary resource of life on the planet. We literally, literally hold the future in our bodies. We hold it, we grow it in our bodies. If the primary resource of the planet is battered, raped, annihilated, threatened, bullied, acid burned, et cetera, we are essentially threatening, bullying, the primary resource of life on the planet. And what I will tell you is that I have seen this over and over and over again in communities that should be thriving in places that could be so much further ahead economically, where there would be no poverty, where there would be lack. Women are so damaged and so beaten and so raped and so humiliated that that spirit of thriving and direction is being completely undermined. One out of three women in on this planet will be beaten or raped in her lifetime. One out of three. That's a un statistic. And I promise you that's an underestimation. What I've also discovered, and I'm going to read this in this piece, is that women who have been annihilated, women who have gone incredible violence, when they grieve it, when they feel it, when they process it, become the fiercest, most amazing leaders on the planet. And those women have the potential to seriously change the future of human existence if we support them and provide them resources and provide a bedrock for them to come to leadership. So I'm going to read this to you. It's called waiting for Mr. Alligator. Can everyone hear me in the back? Okay. Until recently, I believed that waiting was a form of protection, a state that ensured my ultimate security. Until recently, I was always waiting for something. I did not know what or whom. I was waiting for this possibility, this thing on the edge of my mind. I had been waiting for so long, it had simply become what I did. Sometimes it was conscious, but most of the time it was like a reflex, a verb. That was my verb. Waiting. I think it is why I felt so connected to refugees. Homeless women, women in prison. They spent their lives waiting, waiting for a return to their homeland, waiting for a new country to invite them in. Waiting for a place where they can finally undo their bags. Waiting for escape. It's why I loved the mail. I loved opening the mailbox. It's why I love email. P.S. i love sealed envelopes. I love going through the pile and seeing some handwriting I didn't recognize. There, there it might be. There it might be. In that letter, I was always thinking, today it would arrive. I would open the envelope. It would be inside. When I was drinking and drugging, it was the next ice clinking gin and tonic, the next hit of white powdered methadrine. When I was wild and promiscuous, it was the next man or woman I could rip off my clothes with. The next person whom I could go all the way, but all the way, where at various times, I imagined this thing would come as a trophy, an announcement, an invitation. Once I almost caught it, deep in the center of the gentlest, hungriest kiss. The waiting was a very specific feeling. I remember on Christmas morning, which were often fraught because of my father's radical mood swings, insanely unwrapping my presents, even though we were supposed to do the unwrapping in a careful, modulated way. I remember thinking, this one will be it. This shiny or fuzzy or brand new thing in this endless tissue paper. This will be what I'm waiting for. I remember once being in a forest and getting lost and being Worried and sitting down and my pants got wet. And then finding this fiddlehead fern, this perfect green wrapped piece of life that would unfurl and become something grand, something beautiful. Whatever it was that I was waiting for would be like this green and becoming bigger than itself. There were people who didn't wait for anything. I knew these people, okay? They either got this thing early on or they were perfectly happy living without it. I spent way too many hours psychoanalyzing this need. What did I miss? What was my early psychological wound? Blah, blah, blah. Sometimes I think it was just some hole, some existential yawn in the center of my being. A muscular craving for some part of myself that got unhinged at birth. Maybe the waiting was some deluded fantasy or the kind of insane optimism that makes deep despair, that masks deep despair. Maybe I was simply unable to face the profound pointlessness of my existence. So instead, I waited. There was a future. In waiting, as a teenager, I found objects that became the symbols, the projections of this thing I was waiting for. When I was 15 and 16, it was butterflies. I drew them. I dreamed about them. I studied them. I wrote poems about them. Each time one would appear, it was proof. It was proof of the presence of something mystical, something arriving. But the truth is, this waiting started much earlier. It started in darkness, in terror. It started inside the drunk and dangerous voice of my father, threatening to annihilate me. It started in his hard, hateful hand, on the side of my little face, in the cold indifference of his eyes, in the shaking rage of his pursed lips. It started in my room after a beating, after his belt had made swollen welts on my legs, after he had banged my teenage head over and over against the wood paneling on the den wall, after the blood poured from my nose on the white and red checkered tablecloth in the family restaurant. And I rushed to the bathroom to stop the bleeding so I wouldn't make him feel bad by reminding him he had just punched me. It started in my room, alone, after the punching and whipping and screaming had stopped. And there was this buzzing in my head and the exhaustion from the crashing adrenaline, rust and the guilt and embarrassment. It started in bleakness, that incessant rocking in my bed. Waiting was better than cutting myself or making myself bleed. Waiting was better than murdering my father or imagining his electrocution. Waiting was less dangerous than killing. I did not want to be a killer. I was afraid to be a killer. So I learned how to wait. As my situation got more desperate, I could no longer wait for something broad and abstract. So I invented this being who was coming to get me. The being could not be human. I did not trust humans. The being was not really benevolent or cuddly. I had no use for soft and cuddly. I was always wary that inside something 10 tender with something cruel. I was waiting for Mr. Alligator. He was a little man reptile. He had an alligator body and short human legs. He was friendly to children in need. He existed for them. He was on call. He protected them. He was only dangerous to perpetrators. He could easily devour the scariest corporate daddy. He had a special phone number you could only access if you were in trouble. When I came to a certain level of desperation, I would suddenly remember it. I would call him. I would speak to him loudly, as if there were a bad connection. My father and family would know that Mr. Alligator was on the phone. Know there was something out there listening. Hi, Mr. Alligator, I would say. It's me, Evie. That's what they called me. It's Evie. And I need you to come and get me. I need you to come as soon as you can. It's bad here. They are mean to me. They do not love me. But I know you love me. Yes. Okay. Come when you can. Mm. Come soon. He would promise to get there as soon as possible. I knew he was busy. There were other children calling. I knew because once, after my father had thrown me against a wall, I had tried to call him and his line was busy. After he and I had spoken, I would go to my room and pack a little brown suitcase. I would put in my pocket sized hairbrush, three magic markers, always purple, and some cookies. I would leave the house. I would walk down the path on our front lawn and I would sit at the end of it, compulsively rubbing my sneakers in the gravel in the driveway. I would wait for him. Sometimes I would wait an hour, sometimes a whole day. The waiting became my defiance. I could not be detoured. My mother would come out after I missed a meal and tell me to come inside, to stop with the nonsense. But this was not nonsense. This was as serious as life and death. Mr. Alligator was coming. He was the future. He was mine. Something I was creating and dreaming. He loved me. He was going to make everything better because he had to. Of course, he never did show up. But that's not exactly true. Forty years later, I went to Africa because I had heard there were women who were working to stop the practice of female genital mutilation. Agnes Pariah was one of them. She lived in the Rift Valley one. One day when she was 12, she was taken against her will, brought into a dark room. Two women held her down, and an older woman cut off her clitoris with a razor. She wasn't allowed to scream or make a noise because it would mean she was weak. After they mutilated her, she was forced to lie still with her legs tied together for three days. She was never the same again. The cutting took her clitoris. She never knew sexual pleasure. She was forced to give up something essential against her will. When she grew up, Agnes could not bear the idea of this happening to other little girls. So she set out with a magic box that contained a woman's medical torso. It had a vagina and vagina replacement parts. She walked through the dusty Rift Valley and she taught girls and boys, women and men and parents what a healthy vagina looked like and what a mutilated vagina looked like. In the time that she walked, she saved 1,500 girls from being cut. And she created an alternative ritual which involved girls coming of age, and they did theater and they got cows, and they did this without the cut. She walked through the Rift Valley. She walked for days. When we met her, I asked her what V Day could do for her. She said, eve, if you got me a Jeep, I could get around a lot faster. So we bought her a Jeep. The first year she had it, she reached 4,500 girls. So I said to her, okay, what else? I'm now in love with Agnes, and that's the basis on which we give money anyway. And I said, what could we do? And she said, well, if you gave me money, Eve, I could build a house and girls could run away and they would save their clitoris and they could go to school and they wouldn't be forced into marriage. So we gave her money to build a house. Two years ago, I went back to Africa. There, in the middle of the Rift Valley, on this little road, was a sign that read, Tesoro Natama Rescue center for the girls until the violence stops, which is the logo for VI Day. Agnes had been preparing this day for weeks. As I drove up, I saw hundreds of girls dressed in red, which is the color of the Maasai and the color of VI Day. I was so overwhelmed, I couldn't get out of the Jeep. It was a bright, sunny African day with a blue, blue sky. Finally, my legs wobbly. I climbed out. Agnes greeted me and began to walk me down the path. Suddenly, it was the path of my childhood. Down the front lawn to the place on the Path either side of me. Young girls, teenage girls lining the path were dancing, stamping the dust, singing a song in Swahili about how the time of female genital mutilation had ended. They gathered round me and they dressed me in a red Masai shawl. Their song, their joy, carried me down the path. There at the end was a house. Our house. The V Day safe house for girls. I stood there and I realized I wasn't waiting anymore. I was dancing, I was crying, I was singing, I was laughing. But I was not waiting. It had taken almost 4, 42 years, but Mr. Alligator had finally come. We get rescued by giving what we need the most. What we are waiting for has always lived inside us.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you. Thank you. So, Agnes, I just want to do a little postscript. You know, Agnes opened that house, and when she opened it, she was reviled in her community. They took. If they could have, they would have taken ads out against her. They spoke badly of her. They said she was corrupt. They said she was destroying the traditions. That was four years ago. Two years ago, she was elected deputy mayor of Narak. Last year, she won the UN Woman of the Year award. She is probably the most powerful woman in her community. She is in the process of wanting to open another house. And because of her work, women all across Africa are now riding to open safe houses in their communities. So it teaches me over and over and over again, one woman, one man, one person, one man doing one thing has enormous impact. And that impacts people. Other. Other people who then impact other people. And we spread it throughout the world. So do we want to do questions?

Okay, incredible. We're going to start with questions. I have one from the Santa Monica office video conferencing in, and then we'll open it up to the audience here. Does that work? So from the Santa Monica office, Vagina Monologues was truly a landmark work. Were you surprised at the success and what do you consider to be the biggest achievement that came from that show?

Everything about the Vagina Monologues has been a surprise to me. You know, I really. When I first started doing it, my dream was just not to get shot, you know, And I say. I don't. I really mean that. I was so terrified every time I would do it, particularly in places that were conservative. What I feel about this movement is it's taught me how profoundly interconnected we all are across the globe. And whether we have. You know, one of the great things about this, this whole movement is that we never ask anyone to do it. Women bring it into their own communities and they make it culturally relevant and they find the ways to move it in their own cultures. But the truth is that violence against women is epidemic around the world. And the truth is that women are powerful in ways we can't even imagine throughout the world. And if we understood that we were one interlocking unit, everything would begin to shift in ways we can't imagine. So I think my proudest thing really is when I look at the list and I see V Day has reached women in every race, in every language, in every class, in every shape, in every size, in every age that we're building a movement. We're building a solid, radical, revolutionary, anarchic movement that in five to 10 years will literally, I believe, empower women in a way we can even imagine. Hi, I was just wondering, you said a lot of the V Day movement takes place with people finding it online and downloading the kit and everything. Do you find that the digital divide has any effect on it not reaching some of the places that this might be most prevalent? That's a very good question. And I think one of the things, one of the great things about, you know, women bringing this to communities. I mean, this year we've seen it happening in really tiny little villages all throughout the world. So I think what happens is the city where people can get connected to the Internet, then women begin, you know, it's a virus. It's a vagina virus. It just spreads all around the world. And so women move here. One week, one year they're in Beijing, but then a year later, they get assigned to a little village and then they bring it to the village. Obviously, you know, one of the things I dream of is that we start opening these safe houses which become, you know, information centers which become empowered Internet places which become resources for information in communities so that they are double fold, you know, and we. I dream I have a joke, because everywhere I go, people come up to me and they don't say, I've seen the Vagina Monologues. They say, I was in the Vagina Monologues. Eventually everyone in the world will have been in the Vagina Monologues, you know, and on V Day, they'll be doing it in their living rooms. You know, it'll just be a. But obviously we want to continue to reach more and more women who don't have access to the Internet. And I think it is happening. But obviously there are ways to escalate that. Yes.

I got it. I want to say a word which is difficult to say at work, which is scrotum. And I'll come back to that in a second. My, my partner said, I think Vagina Monologues was on, like HBO or Showtime. My partner said, oh, vagina Monologues on. We should see this. And I was like, oh, I guess, you know, I mean, and you know, I'm politically correct enough to think maybe I should sit through it. And it was amazing. I laughed and I cried and I was just very moved and it was astonishing. And the reason I bring up scrotum, I don't know how many people have the children's book. There's a children's book based around a heroine who's a 12 year old girl. And in the first page she hears a neighbor boy telling one of his friends that a rattlesnake bit his dog on the scrotum. And it's subject to being banned all over the country. There's big debates about it because they said scrotum. Like, you know, one would think that half the people reading the book have one and the other half know all about them. But. And what struck me when I read this article, among a number of other things, was that you have created a new cultural or linguistic environment in which it doesn't take two days to explain why these people are idiots.

Thank you.

That you can just say, oh, it's like the Vagina Monologues. Cut it out already. Where we've learned, you know, why do we have to go through this again? And although that is not as significant as safe houses in Africa, it still is a ripple throughout the entire culture which stands against a kind of obsessive insanity that's very hard to fight. Otherwise you sort of lay the groundwork for the. That I just wanted to thank you.

Oh, thank you very much. You know, I just want to address that because I, you know, people, this whole thing with language, you know, the power of language. And all I can say is that language is really, really, really powerful. It's really powerful. If you can't say something, it doesn't exist. You know, and I think every year we go through the same, you know, in some ways, the conservative and fundamentalist forces around the world, they're not going away. I mean, they're really not. I mean, they are very well organized and very well funded. And one of the things I see is that this desire to, you know, children know so much more than we want or believe or think they know. And actually if you bring up a girl and you say this is your vagina, and you bring up a boy and you say, this is their penis. They're very happy with that. They don't get scared by it. If you go, this is your vagina, they actually get freaked out by it, you know? And I think part of what conservative forces do is just that, and it's not accidental. You know, when we rob people of agency over their bodies, we rob people of power. They are easier to be controlled. Fascism is easier to happen. When you are actually in control of who you are and have names for who you are, you actually exist. And I don't. I'm not oversimplifying. There's a way that you actually existentially matter, like, you're here. So I really believe. I have a good friend who saw the vagina logs, and she went home and she was bathing her daughter, and she said, oh, let's bathe your mooch. And then she went, you're a vagina. She just stopped herself and she said. And everything changed from that point because her daughter knew she had a vagina and she walked in the world. And it wasn't. There wasn't a distortion on it. There wasn't complicated. That's all about, really, people's. People who aren't evolved or people who aren't comfortable with themselves, their own projections and negativity that they place on those things. So we all have to bring our children up in a way where they love having a vagina and they love having a penis. It's a great thing. Come on. We all work really hard. Without those things, life would really be difficult, you know.

Hi, thank you for talking to us today. I wanted to ask you a question, and it's about a specific controversy and a lot of controversy that has happened with the Vagina Monologues. And the reason I'm asking is because I work for a company that gets into controversy sometimes and sometimes has to make compromises and hard choices. In the Vagina Monologues, in the edition I read originally, there was a passage about a young girl, a teenage girl, who had a sexual encounter with an older woman. That's been revised or changed. And. And I was in theater, I understand Revisions and the Artist. I was actually going to ask, as a playwright, about the decision that went into making that, and was it motivated by activism or by the artistic or both, or all of that.

Thank you for asking me that question. Because it was one of the most difficult, really, decisions I've ever made artistically. And it's complicated being an artist and an activist. It's really complicated. And It's a very hard thing to walk because art is all about ambiguity and asking questions and not taking sides and not being didactic and activism is the exact opposite. Okay, so I feel like a crazy person. I've always been a crazy person. I'm a Gemini and I live with these two, you know. But that particular issue, when I did that initial monologue, which is to some degree based on a true story, when I interviewed the woman for that piece, she was woman in a homeless shelter. And that's a lot of that story is hers. I mean, I obviously made it a literary piece and I changed it. But at the end of that interview, she had been raped, she had been abused. And when she described the story of she was 13 and a 24 year old woman seduced her, she talked about that story as the experience which saved her life. Because of that good sexual experience, she was able to love her body and her vagina and to. To move forward in the world. And at the end of that story, her quote was, people say it was a rape. It was a rape. It was a good kind of rape. It turned my vagina, it turned my coochie snorture into a kind of heaven. I thought that was the most complicated, bizarre, wonderful, strange, disturbing thing I'd ever heard. And it was just, of course, I have to put this in the play because it's like ambiguity and complicated and it's life. It's what it is. It's not PC, it's not the way it was supposed to be, but it's what happened. You know, I never knew the play was then going to become the centerpiece for a movement to end violence against women. Okay, so now we're four years later and everyone's using it to stop rape and stop incest. And I'm getting calls from people saying, how can you say there's such a thing as a good kind of rape? I tell you, I debated this, I dwelled on this, I thought about this, and I finally made the decision that the play was serving something bigger than me and bigger than my artistic ego and bigger than the play, to be honest. It was serving something that had the potential to really shift consciousness. So I changed it. I got rid of that line. I didn't give up the thought. I kept the thought, which is, it transformed my Kucha into a kind of heaven. And I changed the age to consenting, to the average consenting age, which is 16. Now, I want to tell you something. It hasn't stopped the controversy because the right wing has found the early edition. And they just put that out, like, it's still that. And it's still a problem for people that an older woman seduced a younger woman. To me, it's this thorn. It's this kind of. It's this thing inside the pearl. It's. And I kind of love it because it's complicated. And I think we have to keep complication in everything we're doing and ambiguity in everything we're doing. I don't see the world in black and white. I think the world's really complicated. I work with thousands of women, and a lot of time I want to choke them. Okay. I mean, I don't want to pretend that I think women are just easy and fabulous. You know, I heard someone say the other day they didn't like the L word because women behaved as badly as men. And I laughed, and I was like, well, sometimes they do, you know, I mean, I don't think we have to create this world where women are perfect and everything's just. We have to just tell the truth and keep telling the truth. And I think sometimes that creates controversy. So how do we live with this balance while we're moving a movement forward is an ongoing struggle. Ongoing. Questions. Any.

Any other questions?

Can I just talk about men for a second? Because I just want to say something. I'm so appreciative that there's so many men here today, and I really am. And I think the movement's taking a really big turn right now with men. I think there are many more men who are understanding that ending violence against women is their responsibility and that they're connected to. To this, and they're connected to their brothers who behave the way they behave. And I see many more men getting involved in the movement. And this year, at one of the V days, we got this great story. Last week, they did their performance, and at the end of it, a man dropped to his knees in the middle of the performance and proposed to his girlfriend on the spot. And I tell this story because often I hear the conservatives attacking vide that I ruined Valentine's Day Day. I took romance out of Valentine's Day. And if romance means male dominated, sexually abused, women don't have a voice, women don't know their bodies. Women don't have a choice over how they're touched or how they're. I have ruined romance. But if romance means honor and respect and holding women sacred and looking into women's eyes and caring for women and having reciprocity in the insects and it going back and forth, then I think we've really changed Valentine's Day to be a very good thing. And I just want to honor the men here who are potentially carriers of this movement and can bring it to other men to wake them up. Because I often feel the tyranny of masculinity and that tyranny, what it has done to men, how it has forced men to become other than their truly authentic self. It's forced them not to be able to be tender, not to be vulnerable, not to cry, not to not know. I think if we can support men in this, everything will begin slowly but surely to turn around. Yes. What ended up being your relationship with your father? Her question was, what ended up being my relationship with my father? My father died long before I could confront him or talk to him. But this book. At the end of this book, there's a dedication to my father, which I thank him for breaking me open. And I actually have come to a very good place. I think maybe I have learned this idea of turning poison into medicine, that that which breaks us breaks us open if we let it. And that. That isn't to say I think that young women need to be broken. But what I do know is those of us who have been broken have the potential to literally go out there in a way that is fierce and without fear and with more outrage and more humor and more sexuality and more verve, because little can be done to us that hasn't already happened. And I think that's kind of a warrior mentality. We call it in V day a vagina warrior. That you. You move through the world without fear and also with humor. Because it's done, okay? It's already happened. So I actually feel a lot of love for my father and kind of live in a place where I understand the tyranny that was passed down through him to me, and my life is about ending that tyranny.