Eve Ensler is an internationally bestselling author and an award-winning playwright whose works include The Vagina Monologues, The Good Body, Insecure at Last, and I Am an Emotional Creature, since adapted for the stage as Emotional Creature. She is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised more than $90 million for local groups and activists, and inspired the global action One Billion Rising. Ensler lives in Paris and New York City.
Ex-stepmother (before legally adopting him) of Dylan McDermott. After adopting him, she became his mother, legally and otherwise, which is still the case.
Protested alongside actresses Sally Field , Jane Fonda & Christine Lahti , urging the Mexican government to re-investigate the slayings of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, on the Mexico-Texas border. (February 2004)
Adopted her husbands son, Dylan McDermott , when she was 26 and he was 18.
Graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont, 1975.
Ex-mother-in-law of Shiva Rose.
An advocate for the eradication of violence against women, Ms. Ensler herself was a victim of incestuous rape. In fact, she was raped by her own dad.
[on working with women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] The,stories saturated my cells and nerves. I stopped sleeping. All the,stories began to bleed together. The raping of the earth, the pillaging,of minerals. The destruction of vaginas. They were not separate from,each other or from me. The Congo threw me deep into the crisis of the,world. [It] was where my life pinnacled. There was a coming together,and a consciousness of what violence against women and femicide looked,like. And these women had found ways to transform pain to power.
Looking at it, I started crying. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy , that someone or something was going to do this for me – the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.
. . . to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.
I am going to stop mainlining my life force / Into your self-esteem: / Air pump girl blowing up boy rubber ball / You can stay flat and go nowhere by yourself,Poor women suffer terrible sexual violence that goes unreported. Because of their social class, these women do not have access to therapy or other methods of healing. Their repeated abuse ultimately eats away at their self-esteem, driving them to drugs, prostitution, AIDS, and in many cases, death.
Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one has ever asked them before.
Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women—that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. I do not think I am being extreme. When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy of the planet. You force what is meant to be open, trusting, nurturing, creative, and alive to be bent, infertile, and broken.
Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back.
I have always been obsessed with naming things. If I could name them, I could tame them. They could be my friends.
Three of the ten principles governing the City of Joy are (a) tell the truth, (b) stop waiting to be rescued, and (c) give away what you want the most.
So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things. I had been so busy creating a future of love that I never identified the life I was living as the life of love, because up until then I had never felt entitled enough or free enough or, honestly, brave enough to embrace my own narrative. Ironically, I had gone ahead and created the life I secretly must have wanted, but it had to be covert and off the record. Chemo was burning away the wrapper and suddenly I was in my version of life. Thus began the ecstasy - the joy, the pure joy of a spiritual pirate who finds the secret treasure.
Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing.
What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it. What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on?What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart, and all the while-even if and particularly when you were dying-you would be supported by and be part of a community?,You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.
The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.
I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.
After all, the Indo-European word cunt was derived from the goddess Kunda or Cunti, and shares the same root as kin and country.
