Vagina Monologues writer releases new book on girlhood
Eve Ensler, creator of the world famous 'Vagina Monologues' has turned her focus to the shared experience of girls from all over the world. Her new book, 'I Am An Emotional Creature' is a compilation of fictional monologues, including a teenager in a New York suburb struggling with high school peer pressure; a Masai girl resisting female genital mutilation in Kenya, where V-Day maintains a safe house; a survivor of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo; a teen who blogs about her self-starvation.
“It’s one universal story with different manifestations, depending on the class, the culture, the community, the religion: how does the culture in any given place, mutate, censor, undermine, diminish and eradicate girls, and the power of girls?” observes Ensler. “And that can be getting a girl to believe that she has to be the size of a pencil,” so that she devotes all her energy to “losing weight and disappearing. Or it can be a girl sold into marriage with an old man in a culture where people cut off girls’ clitorises. Or she can be used to blow herself up in the front line of a fundamentalist war. In all of it she is basically fodder.”
Read the full interview with Eve Ensler at the Women's Media Center.
You can find out more about 'V-Day', the global campaign to end violence against women – funded by performances of 'The Vagina Monlogues' and about V-Girls, the new website linking to Ensler's new book, at V-Day.org.
