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Taboo body talk

According to playwright Eve Ensler, you can’t really love yourself until you learn to love yourself down there. Sara Singer Schiff reports

With all the recent coverage of celebrity diets and body image, we couldn’t resist asking Eve Ensler, creator and sometime performer of the groundbreaking hit play, The Vagina Monologues, the question: ‘would your vagina ever feel the need to go on a diet?’

Even Ensler, who has been waxing poetic on the West End stage for 6 months about the female nether region, has to think for a moment. After all, she wrote the play based on the idea that a woman’s attitude towards her vagina is closely tied to her self-image, including her body image. And asking hypothetical questions about the identity and behaviour of vaginas – such as ‘if your vagina could get dressed, what would it wear?’ or ‘if your vagina could talk, what would it say?’ – is part of Ensler’s effort to encourage women, symbolically and playfully, to express how they feel about their vaginas; thereby offering them insight into their self-image.

After a brief pause, she indirectly answers that her vagina would never go on a diet, by drily stating her disapproval of severe eating plans in general. ‘I don’t think it serves women to deprive themselves, because the minute you start doing this, you become hungry,’ she says. She goes on to talk about the connection between how you feel about your vagina and the rest of your body, explaining, ‘If you have an open, active, curious, satisfying and explosive relationship with your vagina, you’ll have the same relationship towards other aspects of life.’ By the same token, she suggests, if you have a closed, shameful, ‘I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-that’ attitude toward your genitalia, you’re likely to have a similar attitude towards the world around you.

When asked about her own body image and self-esteem, Ensler, a New Yorker in her late forties with a strong, well-sculpted physique and a passionate personality, seems very self-assured. However, despite her confidence and positive outlook, she admits to struggling with her own body image – more specifically, to having a ‘fraught relationship’ with her ‘rounded tummy’, which is no longer the flat stomach of her youth. Her admission reveals that women who have accepted themselves in some ways can still struggle with self-acceptance in other ways.

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