Eve Ensler - February 11, 2002
AFGHANISTAN IS EVERYWHERE
Eve Ensler
Author, The Vagina Monologues
Where Misogyny is Complete
In Afghanistan, under the Taliban we could all define that what was happening to women was something really horrible. Now there's a blurring - we think something good has happened and that there's been relief. But every email I get from Kabul and outside Afghanistan says that things are worse now for women. Women are not taking off their burqas because they are being raped and are terrified of warlords prowling the streets. One reason the Taliban were accepted was that the amount of women being raped and ravaged by the Northern Alliance was so extreme that women felt comforted by the idea of burqas: If they could be covered and shrouded, there might be some protection and security. In some ways, this was offered by the Taliban; but then women had every other right and freedom destroyed.
I am working on another project called "The Good Body," an investigation of how women mutilate, shape, fix, change, hide and bury their bodies throughout the world. I knew Afghanistan was a place where women were disembodied, where they were not living in their bodies in the open in public. When I went to Afghanistan a year and a half ago with my partner in V-Day, executive director Willa Shalit, it was one of the most disturbing trips of my life. Under the Taliban, you see what it would be like if misogyny were to finally complete itself. Women couldn't work; they couldn't leave the house without being accompanied by a mahram (a male escort); they didn't have basic rights like laughing or singing, and they couldn't eat ice cream.
If you choose to wear a burqa, it's no different than choosing a tight pair of inches-high boots. But under the Taliban there was no choice. A burqa is suffocating, claustrophobic, and you can't see under it. I was in a panic every time I put it on. I was trying to be brave like the RAWA women (The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), so I didn't reveal my fear.
We were driving out of Afghanistan and were pulled over by one of the squads that supported virtue and prevented vice. They patrolled the streets with floggers and would literally pull women over if they thought they were flirting or wearing white socks or touching a bird; the rules were arbitrary. I was wearing a scarf as opposed to a burqa. I was asked to get out of the car and was almost beaten. Since that time we have become very close to the women of RAWA, and V-Day has become a sponsor of them. We bought them video cameras to document the atrocities of the Taliban. We've supported orphanages and given them money for schools.
After September 11 everything changed. There was a moment when people seemed to care about the women of Afghanistan. I hope it goes on, but I'm not so sure it will. With Equality Now and other groups like Feminist Majority, we brought 40 Afghan women to a summit in Brussels: ten from Afghanistan, 30 from surrounding countries, Europe and America. They were fierce, brave and brilliant. They met for two days and came up with an extraordinary document called the Brussels Proclamation, which outlines what Afghan women want for the future. Here are women who have been exiled, abused, broken, raped and beaten: They are concerned with human rights, health care, education and refugees - there wasn't one mention of armaments or defense. It didn't even occur to anyone to think about building a war machine. All they were interested in was reconstruction of their country.
That document became the basis for a tour. We brought six women to America, who met with Secretary Powell, the Senate, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In Afghanistan, women are dying in droves from childbirth - one out of every five women. Depression is so out of control that people are committing suicide right and left. It's freezing cold, refugees are starving, and nothing is happening for the people of Afghanistan. Things that were promised by the Bush administration are now being reneged upon because of "reproductive issues." After we have bombed Afghanistan to smithereens, if we abandon the women and people this will be on our conscience, and there will be many more planes flying through buildings in this country. If we do not understand that the situation of women in Afghanistan could be the situation of women anywhere in the world then we're really blind.
Universal Symbol of Oppression
After we met with the women of Afghanistan our slogan was "Afghanistan Is Everywhere." I often hear women in the West talking about the terrible lot of women in Afghanistan, but are you aware that 700,000 women in America are raped every year? We all have different forms of enforced burqas. Every culture has it. Whether it's an idea or a fascist tyranny of what women are supposed to look like - so that women go to the extremes of liposuction, anorexia and bulemia to achieve it - or whether it's being covered in a burqa, we all have deep, profound, ongoing daily forms of oppression. If you're a 13-year-old girl in this country and there's an ideal of what you're supposed to look like, do you really have a choice to look like yourself? The pressure of capitalist consumer culture is more than any 13-year-old girl can bear.
With the campaign "Afghanistan Is Everywhere," I've sat in the middle of the Rift Valley with African women who were stopping female genital mutilation. I've sat with women in Zagreb who opened the first rape crisis center. I've interviewed Bulgarian teenagers who have escaped sex slavery. The good news is that women around the world are fierce, energized, brilliant, creative and passionate. If we listen to our hearts, spirits and vaginas, the time has come for women on the planet.
I went to the Masonic Auditorium today and there was a huge, eight-foot vulva in the lobby. It's been shrouded for a week because people were scared that children would see it. And what? They would know they had a vulva? What are we afraid of? The person who built that vulva is living - fully living - in her big, vulva self. She is not holding back, not apologizing, not saying that her vulva is small and should be invisible and polite. She's saying, "I've got a vulva, and it's here, and it's beautiful, and you need to see it." That, to me, is a metaphor for everything.
The interviewer for a New York Times Magazine piece kept saying to me, "You're so dramatic." I finally realized what that means: You're really alive. Things really bother you. Things really move you and excite you. Look at teenage girls. They get crazy, excited, pissed off, and they do it all the time. Then the world comes along and shuts it down and clamps it and punishes it, makes it immoral or too sexy. Then we get to be good, contained, quiet, behaved, then disappear.
Taking Back the Planet
More than at any other time in history - if we look at the earth, if we look at women, if we look at wars - we're disappearing as a planet. I traveled to 31 countries, and there were only two where you could swim in the water - an indication of the evaporation of the source. I'm not talking about taking power or dominating, because that's not what women do. They include, invite in, make bigger; they expand. They say, There's a future and I'm concerned about it.
We have been trained as women to divide against each other, to fight for each other's space, to not believe there's enough for each other. I've looked at San Francisco and how the women here have worked together. They've raised close to half a million dollars, just on one night. That goes to all the groups in this city, because all of them understood that together they were stronger than if they were separate. If you're jealous of your sister, if you think she's shinier, bigger or more fabulous than you, get over it. If you can do anything for a sister today, if you have a moment of jealousy or competition, give her something. If I feel competitive, I just give it away: Have it, take it. Otherwise, I'm saying there's only room for me to shine and not for you to shine - and we all have to shine right now. Remember that Afghanistan is everywhere and that all of us get to be big, so that we can take back the planet.
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: As "The Vagina Monologues" has traveled the world, has there been any culture - maybe France - where the word vagina has lost its shock value?
A: Actually France was the first country to ask me to change the title. Cultures that appear to be "liberated" sexually are often the cultures that take the most time getting the play done. You can have women be seen as objects or loose sexual beings, but vagina is a different story. I was doing a whole thing about the "Vagina Mary" for a while that was not going over well in Italy - I suspect because of the Vatican. There have been several cultures where there's no word for vagina. It took Israel a long time to find a word for vagina, which I thought was instructive.
Q: Why don't you mention menstruation much in your dialogue?
A: There is a monologue in the book on menstruation. I just don't do it because I don't perform it well. I agree that cultures that honor menstruation are much less violent. In Narok, outside Nairobi, we're working with an extraordinary woman named Agnes Pareiyo. She was circumcised and mutilated as a child, and made it her mission to stop it from happening to other girls. For years she has walked through the Rift Valley carrying this box with a female torso inside. It has a vagina replacement part. She shows them what a beautiful, healthy vagina looks like and what a mutilated one looks like. Over the years she has stopped 1,500 girls from being cut. In the process she has created an alternative ritual for when girls have their periods and come of age, with theater and dance. We asked how V-Day could support her. She said, "You could buy me a jeep, because I walk, and it takes a long time to go from village to village." Then we asked what else we could get her. She said, "You could build me a house, because if I had a safe house, when girls wanted to flee to save their clitoris, they could come to the house and stay there until the time passed." On April 5, we're going to Kenya, and the house will be completed.
There are two projects that need financial support. One concerns the violation of Native American women in this country. On many reservations they are being battered, because of alcoholism, and raped by members of other communities. There's no protection under the Constitution. This April 20, I'm doing a performance in Rapid City with all kinds of extraordinary women participating, such as Jane Fonda. We have secured a piece of Sioux land from the tribe, on which we're going to build a safe house for Native women. And in Afghanistan we're hoping to open a woman's health center in Kabul, so that we'll have a place where women will be safe. There's no place for women to go for reproductive health care, for depression, for any kind of violence treatment.
Q: What happened in your growing-up years that motivated you to write "The Vagina Monologues"?
A: I didn't have a vagina-friendly father. My growing-up years were awful. My mother once said, "Maybe it was a good thing, everything that happened to you, because it made you like this." I thought, Maybe not. We can always find reasons to make good out of the bad. I don't see myself as a victim anymore. My childhood was full of incredible violence; I was shaped, determined and created out of a violent paradigm. When I was 23, a woman told me my nervous system was shot. A teenage girl is doing a testimony about her life for "The Vagina Monologues," telling us about all the times she'd been beaten as a child. Of course, I was just going back there again. I looked at her body and her inability to trust a hug, that stiffness and inability to relax. I believe that had a great deal to do with me caring about ending violence. It took me 37 years to get to the point where I wasn't living in total depression and feeling tortured all the time.
I don't think women should spend their time recovering and surviving. We have better things to do, like feeding the planet, nurturing, creating, envisioning. If we bang, beat, burn, mutilate and destroy women, we've destroyed everything. If we really put our attention on stopping violence toward women, it would be like bringing back the sun or earth. It's not coincidental that the earth is being destroyed as women are being destroyed.
Q: What is your definition of violence?
A: My definition of violence is when somebody takes something away from you or enters into something that is yours and rips it asunder. It's also something that violates your gentle, still self. Why have women have been the targets of violence? I look at my own upbringing: I was a little girl and my father was a big man. When he looked at me he saw innocence, sweetness and something tender. He had an inability to feel his own tenderness and to feel vulnerable, because it scared him. Rather than asking to sit and sob, he beat the shit out of me; it was an easier thing to do. In the process of doing "The Vagina Monologues" I have met so many tender, seeking, loving men who really want the world to be better for women and men. We have to allow them to find ways to embrace their own vulnerability and tenderness. We have to stop shaming them for not being these superheroes and power creatures that they're supposed to be.
Q: Is the notion of getting rid of violence similar to Bush's notion of ridding the world of evil?
A: No. I think this idea of evil is ridiculous. I spend a lot of my time working with women in a maximum-security prison. Thirteen out of the 15 women in my group are there for murder. If you met these women and didn't know anything about them - we're making a documentary about them right now - you would fall in love with each and every one of them because they are funny, tender, brilliant, smart and emotional. If I didn't tell you they had killed someone, you would never know it. There goes the theory of evil, because they would be defined in the Bush world as evil people. People do evil things all the time. There is no way I will ever support anyone killing, maiming or destroying anyone else, but there are reasons why people do things. If you look at the history of the people I have interviewed you will see enormous violence, shaming and desecration to the point where something in them broke and became something else. They need enormous amounts of attention, transformation and support.
To characterize us - people who can bomb anywhere in the world - as good is bizarre. I was shocked by Margaret Thatcher's piece in The New York Times, where she essentially says, "America has become the military empire of the world, and that is good." She says not to even think about doing humanitarian things: Don't worry about building Afghanistan after you bomb it. Just bomb it. Now go and bomb all the rest of the places in the world that need to be bombed. That is an example of why when women come to power they should stay women, as opposed to becoming men. What's terrifying is to see how many women get elected and put into positions of power and suddenly give up the woman agenda. They are not walking around with vaginas anymore. I don't know what's been implanted.
Q: Which areas of the world besides Afghanistan concern you most in terms of treatment of women?
A: There isn't a place on the planet that doesn't concern me in terms of treatment of women. There are terrible things going on in South Africa. A nine-month-old baby was raped recently by grown men and left to die. Apparently that has now provoked an outcry and a revelation that many babies and children under 14 are being raped.
In America, I cannot tell you how many teenage girls I've interviewed who've been raped and are getting into relationships with boys who are beating them up. Every time we do V-Day, I ask women in the audience who have ever been beaten or raped to stand. At Madison Square Garden, there were 18,000 people, and 9,000 women stood up. For days afterwards, I got email after email from women who told me why they didn't stand up.
The sex-slave industry is out of control. Young girls are literally being kidnapped in villages all over the world and sold into slavery. Girls are being raped 24 hours a day. This is happening in Israel and Paris. I spent a night on the streets with French prostitutes and sex slaves from Ghana. People were queuing up in cars on the side of the road. I believe it is the central piece to all of this. People say it's about poverty. It is, but if women were empowered and not afraid, they could fix all those things. If you disempower women and make them so terrorized that they cannot function, they can no longer teach, educate or feed families, because they're destroyed. You see it in Afghanistan, where 95 percent of the women are depressed. You see that broken-down, "I can't do it anymore" feeling.
Q: Given that, what is your message to today's youth?
A: Know and love thy vagina, and hold it sacred. Do not give it to anyone you do not want to give it to. I mean that as a metaphor. So much of what happens to girls is that we don't know our desires and bodies. We don't know what we want, so we enter the world in a haze. I love college students: They have cunt clubs and big vagina parades and balls, and they have speak-outs. They wear vagina pins. They're outrageous and they're fully here. I look at them and think, What happened to all of us? When did we lose this? Be as revolutionary and passionate as you are, and don't let anyone talk you out of it.
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