Feminist: Body Bard

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Best feminist in America?!" said Eve Ensler, at her characteristic verbal 98 m.p.h. "Not only an oxymoron, but so patriarchal, even as a concept!" It is, isn't it? She explains, "Feminism to me is the inclusion and empowerment of everyone. Being the best feminist is like being the best vagina. What would that be?"

Tough question, but at least, thanks to Ensler, we might be able to get the word out. Ensler is, if nothing else, the woman who has made it safe to say vagina in both serious discussion and polite company. She is the writer and performer behind The Vagina Monologues, which has moved beyond hit play into the realm of cultural phenomenon. A dozen or so sketches based on 200 interviews, The Vagina Monologues is about, well, vaginas. As they used to say in Vietnam, there it is.

This is not your mother's feminism. Ensler is a self-confessed survivor of sexual and physical abuse by her father and of drugs and alcohol. Yet she does not think women should be stuck with the role of victim. Instead, The Vagina Monologues is a joyous, sometimes poignant and often hilarious exploration of women's conflicted feelings about their vaginas. The play--which has been known to propel women in the audience to their feet, whooping and stomping in recognition--has been performed from Antarctica to Zaire. It is currently playing in more than 25 countries and is almost a cult piece on college campuses, where feminism, for some young women, has become a dirty word. Ensler originally did the play as a one-woman show, but it is now usually played with a cast of three. Innumerable celebrities have performed in it, including Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, Rosie Perez, Jane Fonda, Calista Flockhart and Kate Winslet.

Guys think about their penises a lot (they do, they do) and, as Ensler will tell you, much of Western culture is built around metaphors about the penis as dominator or conqueror. But odd though it is, women rarely think about, let alone talk about, vaginas. When they have, it has often been in big books by the feminist intelligentsia and mostly in the context of a power struggle--vaginas as a target of oppression (Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape), or vaginas as a primal, mysterious force that intimidates men (Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex). Ensler's contribution is to embrace both those traditions in the Monologues and also build on them by demystifying the vagina and thus arguing for it as a source of power and pleasure for both sexes.

Ensler uses her work as a tool to greater purposes. Since 1998, The Vagina Monologues has been performed as a benefit on Valentine's Day to raise funds for groups all over the world working to end violence against women. This past V-day, as Ensler calls her festival, the play was staged at Madison Square Garden in New York City, in 50 other cities and on 250 college campuses. Her play Necessary Targets was drawn from the accounts of Bosnian rape victims she interviewed in 1994. It was performed, among other places, at the National Theatre in Sarajevo.