The Vagina Monologues The V-Day Edition

The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition

by EVE ENSLER
“The Story of V-Day” copyright © 2001 by Karen Obel
The vagina monologues / Eve Ensler.—Rev. ed. p. cm.
ISBN 0-375-50658-6 v.1
1. Monologues. 2. Vagina. 3. Women.
PS3555.N75V3 2001 812'.54—dc21 00-043844
Villard Books website address: www.villard.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham
 
For Ariel, who rocks my vagina and explodes my heart
 
FOREWORD by Gloria Steinem
 
 
 I come from the “down there” generation. That is, those were the words—spoken rarely and in a
hushed voice—that the women in my family used to refer to all female genitalia, internal or external. It
wasn't that they were ignorant of terms like vagina, labia, vulva, or clitoris. On the contrary, they were
trained to be teachers and probably had more access to information than most. It wasn't even that they
were unliberated, or “straitlaced,” as they would have put it. One grandmother earned money from her
strict Protestant church by ghostwriting sermons—of which she didn't believe a word—and then earned
more by betting it on horse races. The other was a suffragist, educator, and even an early political
candidate, all to the alarm of many in her Jewish community. As for my own mother, she had been a
pioneer newspaper reporter years before I was born, and continued to take pride in bringing up her two
daughters in a more enlightened way than she had been raised. I don't remember her using any of the
slang words that made the female body seem dirty or shameful, and I'm grateful for that. As you'll see in
these pages, many daughters grew up with a greater burden. Nonetheless, I didn't hear words that were
accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before
I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function other than to feel
pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear
about it—and what it would be used to justify?) Thus, whether I was learning to talk, to spell, or to take
care of my own body, I was told the name of each of its amazing parts—except in one unmentionable
area. This left me unprotected against the shaming words and dirty jokes of the school yard and, later,
against the popular belief that men, whether as lovers or physicians, knew more about women's bodies
than women did. I first glimpsed the spirit of self-knowledge and freedom that you will find in these pages
when I lived inIndiafor a couple of years after college. In Hindu temples and shrines I saw the lingam, an
abstract male genital symbol, but I also saw the yoni, a female genital symbol, for the first time: a
flowerlike shape, triangle, or double-pointed oval. I was told that thousands of years ago, this symbol
had been worshiped as more powerful than its male counterpart, a belief that carried over into Tantrism,
whose central tenet is man's inability to reach spiritual fulfillment except through sexual and emotional
union with woman's superior spiritual energy. It was a belief so deep and wide that even some of the
woman-excluding, monotheistic religions that came later retained it in their traditions, although such beliefs
were (and still are) marginalized or denied as heresies by mainstream religious leaders. For example:
Gnostic Christians worshiped Sophia as the female Holy Spirit and considered Mary Magdalene the
wisest of Christ's disciples; Tantric Buddhism still teaches that Buddhahood resides in the vulva; the Sufi
mystics of Islam believe that fana, or rapture, can be reached only through Fravashi, the female spirit; the
Shekina of Jewish mysticism is a version of Shakti, the female soul of God; and even the Catholic church
included forms of Mary worship that focused more on the Mother than on the Son. In many countries
ofAsia,Africa, and other parts of the world where gods are still depicted in female as well as in male
forms, altars feature the Jewel in the Lotus and other representations of the lingam-in-the-yoni. InIndia,
the Hindu goddesses Durga and Kali are embodiments of the yoni powers of birth and death, creation
and destruction. Still,Indiaand yoni worship seemed a long way from American attitudes about women's
bodies when I came home. Even the sexual revolution of the 1960s only made more women sexually

available to more men. The “no” of the 1950s was just replaced with a constant, eager “yes.” It was not
until the feminist activism of the 1970s that there began to be alternatives to everything from patriarchal
religions to Freud (the distance from A to B), from the double standard of sexual behavior to the single
standard of patriarchal/political/religious control over women's bodies as the means of reproduction.
Those early years of discovery are symbolized for me by such sense memories as walking through Judy
Chicago's Woman House inLos Angeles, where each room was created by a different woman artist, and
where I discovered female symbolism in my own culture for the first time. (For example, the shape we
call a heart—whose symmetry resembles the vulva far