Inspired by intimate conversations with friends, Eve Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues. The play recounts tender, funny, gripping and horrifying stories she gathered from hundreds of women about their bodies, their sexual experiences, and yes, their vaginas. Since its first staging in 1996, it has been translated into more than 45 languages, performed in more than 120 countries and re-created as an HBO film.
The Vagina Monologues‘ success allowed Ensler to create V-Day, a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls, which has so far raised $85 million to prevent violence and protect abused women. In February 2011, Ensler received the Isabelle Stephenson Tony Award for her philanthropic work. Ensler has also drawn praise for The Good Body, a play that cuts to women’s obsession with their appearance, and her film What I Want My Words to Do to You, which portrays a writing group she leads at a correctional facility for women. Today, she continues to find new projects and push the envelope. Her latest play, I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, hit the New York Times bestseller list and just wrapped a workshop production in Johannesburg — nest stop is Paris and then Berkeley in June 2012.
“Eve is bringing women back, she’s giving us our souls back.”
Glenn Close
Quotes by Eve Ensler
“When we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us.”
“[Carrie Rethlefsen] wore an ‘I heart my vagina’ button to her high school in Minnesota. She was basically threatened to be expelled from school. They told her she couldn’t love her vagina in high school.”
“Security is elusive. It’s impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.”
“Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn’t exist.”
“The U.N. now says that one out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime; we’re talking about the desecration of the primary resource of the planet.”
“As the warm Gulf washed over my naked head, I realized that it held the best and the worst of us. It was the greed and recklessness that led to the drilling explosion. It was all the lies that got told before and after. It was the honey in the water that made it sweet, it was the oil that made it sick.”
“I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. I would drive it and demand things from it. It had no limits. It was invincible. It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself.”
“The more I talked about it, the more objectified and fragmented my body became. It became entertainment; it became a new kind of commodity, something I was selling.”