The sound of familiar but not quite placeable classical music crackles through the speakers at Planned Television Arts, a New York-based promotion company. Minutes tick by as the clock moves closer to 2 p.m. Eastern Time. Relaxing sounds of violins and horns become the background music for an ever-growing number of men and women waiting at the other end of telephone lines. Finally, an overly happy and somewhat artificial-sounding woman delivers an introduction. \nVoices of college men and women speaking from New York to Nebraska to Washington State emanate faintly through the telephone, interrupted by electronic beeps and disturbances. These junior reporters, directors and fans are spending an hour glued to the phone to talk to playwright Eve Ensler, author of the acclaimed off-Broadway play "The Vagina Monologues." In the middle of this giant game of phone tag, Ensler's voice comes through loud and clear.\nEnsler is answering the questions of these faceless voices in order to promote the third annual celebration of V-Day. V-Day, a global movement to end violence against girls and women, began while Ensler was traveling the world during the first tour of "The Vagina Monologues." \nAfter watching the performance, a series of narratives about things shaping the lives of women and sexuality, audience members would come up to Ensler and share their own stories of being beaten and violated.\n"I just couldn't keep doing the piece if I didn't do something," Ensler said. "Meeting all those people and hearing all those stories led to the movement."\nThe goal of V-Day is to put a different spin on Valentine's Day; Ensler wants to take the romance out and put the vagina back in.\n"I say that kind of ironically, but the truth is in the name of romance a lot of violence gets committed towards women," Ensler said. "And I'm not anti-romance, but I am anti-romantization of patriarchy and domination. So I think we thought it was the perfect day to liberate women and to look at ending violence against women."\nEnsler will host a V-Day celebration Feb. 10 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There, women can attend empowerment activities, hear of challenges facing women in countries all over the world and see a performance of "The Vagina Monologues," with proceeds going to cause-supporting organizations. Cities, colleges and universities, including IU, will spend some of the days thereafter putting on similar programs.\nDebby Herbenick, visiting research associate at the Kinsey Institute and head of the IU V-Day activities, will see "The Vagina Monologues" performed for the first time at the Feb. 10 benefit in New York City. \n"'The Vagina Monologues' gets women and hopefully gets people talking about their bodies and promotes a positive self-image," she said. "It takes away a lot of the secrecy and kind of gives people the power to reclaim their own bodies."\nKerrie Griffith, the director of the V-Day performance at the State University of New York at Fredonia, will also be a part of the Madison Square Garden audience. She told Ensler she reads parts of "The Vagina Monologues" almost every day.\n"It's such a profound thing for me," Griffith said. "I can't even begin to describe it."
How do you create a 'vagina miracle'?\n"The Vagina Monologues" and Ensler's reputation as the 'vagina lady' began out of a conversation about menopause. She and a friend were discussing this change of life and ended up talking about vaginas. The conversation sparked Ensler's interest and she soon began to casually ask women friends, acquaintances and strangers to talk to her about the subject.\n"I realized I had no idea of what women thought about their vaginas," Ensler said. "So I started casually saying to people, 'Well, what do you think about your vagina,' and everything that any woman said was so interesting and so profound that, before I knew it, I was sucked down the vagina trail and I've been there for many years now."\nShe found out the many ways a woman's vagina relates to body image, self-esteem and each woman's feelings about her place in the world. Out of many of the testimonials came the monologues. Sometimes Ensler feels she is in the presence of what she calls a 'vagina miracle.' The biggest surprise was how many women, and men, were willing and wanting to take part in this miracle along with her.\n"I think because the monologues are based on real women's stories and when women hear them they hear their own stories back at them," she said. "'The Vagina Monologues' are talking about something that nobody's talked about before. So there's just this great liberation that occurs in the talking about it."\nTalking about the violence and degradation she has faced gave Ensler her own personal liberation. She realized her life had become about trying to forget any hurt and pain inflicted upon her and that it was only making things worse.\n"I reached a certain point in my life where I was just too unhappy and I had to find a way not to live in that kind of despair anymore," she said. "You have to go through a certain kind of darkness again and go back into the fire and then you're free."\nMany who called in to last week's interview expressed the joy to be able to go around saying a taboo word like "vagina" as much as possible. In the beginning of the book version of "The Vagina Monologues," Ensler lists the many words women she interviewed used to describe their vaginas, words ranging from "down there" to "VA" to "Gladys Siegelman". Not talking about vaginas, in many cases, meant not talking about violence or mutilation or poor self-image, she said. Having done "The Vagina Monologues" constantly for the past few years, Ensler has the sense of reentering her vagina and her sense of self. This is what she wants V-Day to do for other women.\n"Your vagina is really in the center of your being," she said. "It really is. It's in the center of your body and the center of your being, and if you're detached from it, it's kind of like running a car without a motor. Sometimes you get pushes downhill, but there's nothing really keeping it going."
How do you keep 'the motor' going?\nEnsler found out that this is hard to do. Despite the success of her play, a whole lot of people still have a problem with the word 'vagina'. And shoving the word in people's faces isn't the way Ensler wants to teach people to talk about it. That is why the staging of the play is so simple and why she worked in a stipulation that all V-Day performances must present "The Vagina Monologues" in their entirety.\n"I heard a great story about this from when the National Tour was in Austin, Texas," Ensler said. "A guy came in to see the show because he saw 'The Vagina Monologues' outside and he thought it was like a girlie show. He sat down and he said to the woman next to him, 'God, what are all these women doing here, this is like a chick flick, you know?' And she was like 'I don't think so.' He watched the show and he was kind of getting a little depressed by it, but when it got to the Bosnia part and talked about a woman being raped with a rifle in her vagina, he gasped audibly. By the end of the show he turned to this woman and he said 'Oh my God, I had no idea'"\nThe bottom line being that Ensler said she thinks every man should see this play right alongside women. And after the play is over, Ensler wants men to continue to drop their assumptions about women and to start asking questions.\n"I think men are trained from an early on point that they have to know everything," she said. "So when they get in bed with a woman for the first time, they have no idea what they're doing because how could they? So rather than saying that, they pretend. So this pretense then becomes the thing people then call sex for the next 10 years and it's often a disaster."\nAlthough another stipulation of a performance of "The Vagina Monologues" is only women should be onstage performing, Ensler thinks men play a big role in workings toward what she calls Victory Day, or the day when her efforts pay off completely.\n"Victory Day is when you get up in the morning and you put on any outfit you want to wear, when you have no worries about where you're wearing it, what street you're walking on, what time of day it is and you feel totally safe and free and fabulous in your body and your sexuality and your being," Ensler said. \nParents of young girls are another key part in making "Victory Day" a reality. Ensler said many girls today don't know their bodies, and it is a parent's job to help change that.\n"If girls don't know their bodies, they don't own their bodies," she said. "I would begin with helping girls see what incredibly sacred, powerful, gorgeous, delicious things they have in terms of their bodies and just so girls are familiar with their bodies and feel good about their bodies and don't feel shame around their vaginas and their sexuality."\nWith knowing and loving one's body comes the power to choose whether to give or not to give up her sexuality, Ensler said. And when Ensler says sexuality, she isn't just talking about sex.\n"You can't have a career without exploring your sexuality," she said. "I mean, what is your power without your sexuality? I see sexuality as the whole central life force that pulses through your body and your system and your being. It creates your desire and your ambition and your impulses and your creativity."\nHow far are we from Victory Day?\nThe answer is, like all the issues Ensler is talking about, complicated.\n"We're either three days off or three million," she said. "It's hard to tell. I like to believe that consciousness is a strange thing. I know in my own life there's certain things that took me years to get, but then one day I got it and then everything changed right away. So I think it could be one of those things where in the next five years, seeds could get planted everywhere and one morning we could wake up and things would shift. And that's the way I like to think of it happening"
