Like vaginas, women need love and attention, says ‘Vagina lady’ Eve Ensler, as she introduces the V-Day campaign

I’m not sure why I was chosen. I didn’t, for example, have girlhood fantasies about becoming ‘vagina lady’, which I’m often called across a crowded shoe store. I could not have imagined that I would one day be talking about vaginas on talk shows in places like Athens in Greece, chanting the word vagina with four thousand wild women in Baltimore or having 32 public orgasms a night. These things were not in my plans. In this sense, I don’t think I had too much to do with The Vagina Monologues. It possessed me.

I see now that I was a prime candidate. I was a playwright. I had for years written plays based on interviews with people. I was a feminist. I had been violated sexually and physically by my father. I had exhibitionist tendencies. I had been known to outrage and I longed to find my way back into my vagina.

I don’t really remember how it began; a conversation with an older women about her vagina, her saying contemptuous things about her genitals that shocked me and got me thinking about what other women thought about their vaginas. I remember asking friends, who surprised me with their openness and willingness to talk. One friend told me that if her vagina got dressed, it would wear a beret. She was going through a French phrase.

I was never a performer. It did not occur to me that I was actually performing The Vagina Monologues until I had been doing it for about three years. Before then, I felt merely as if I was telling very personal stories that had been generously told to me. I felt strangely, and at times fiercely, protective of these women and their stories. I could not move when I was telling them. I had to remain seated in a high-back stool with a place to rest my feet. It was like climbing into a spaceship every night.

Vagina stories found me, as did the people who wanted to produce the play or bring it to their town. Whenever I have tried to write a monologue to serve a politically correct agenda, for example, it always fails. The Vagina Monologues is about attraction, not promotion. Many things that have happened in the life of The Vagina Monologues seem completely surreal and at the same time completely logical. Here are some examples:

Vagina miracles, sightings and occurrences

• Glenn Close gets 2,500 people to stand and chant the word cunt.
• A woman rabbi sends me a hamantasch (a food) and describes its vaginal meanings.
• There is now a Cunt Workshop at Wesleyan University.
• A woman brings her uterus to the theatre to have me sign it.
• A young man makes and serves me a vagina salad for dinner with his parents in Atlanta, Georgia. Bean sprouts are pubic hair.
• Roseanne performs ‘What Does Your Vagina Smell Like?’ Answer: ‘My husband’s face.’
• Alanis Morissette and Audra McDonald sing the cunt piece.
• Women and men faint during the show. It happens a lot. Always at the same place in the script.
• People bring and send objects – vagina products: vagina glass hand sculptures, clit lollipops, vagina puppets, vulva lamps, cone-shaped art pieces.
• There is a huge vagina cake in London at the V-Day party and no one can cut it. Hundreds of sophisticated partygoers eat mauve vagina cake with their hands. The clit is auctioned off and Thandie Newton buys it for £200.
• The Vagina Monologues opens and is published in over 20 countries, including China and Turkey.
• V-Day has an impossible time raising money from corporations. Even companies that sell vaginal products refuse to associate with the word.
• Women call up for tickets to the Monologues; men ask for tickets to the Vagina Chronicles. The punk ticket seller tells women that if they can’t say it, they can’t come.
• A young corporate woman bursts into my dressing room to tell me she isn’t really dry. It’s a lie.
• Two older Israeli women rush my dressing room in Jerusalem and hug me while I’m naked. They don’t even notice.
• A 70-year-old man in a trance walks into my dressing room unannounced after a show to tell me that he ‘finally got it’. Two months later he brings his girlfriend back with him and she thanks me.
• Midwives storm the dressing room to thank me for finally appreciating bodily excretions.

The greatest miracle, of course, is V-Day: an energy, a movement, a catalyst, a day to end violence towards women. It’s born out of The Vagina Monologues.

As I travelled with the piece to city after city, country after country, hundreds of women waited after the show to talk to me about their lives. The play had somehow freed up their memories, pain, and desire. Night after night I heard the same stories – women being raped as teenagers, in college, as little girls, as elderly women; women who had finally escaped being beaten to death by their husbands; women who were terrified to leave; women who were taken sexually before they were even conscious of sex by their stepfathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, mothers, and fathers. I began to feel insane, as if a door had opened to some underworld and I was being told things I was not supposed to know.

It dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence towards women – that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honour and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. I do not think I am being extreme. When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury and terrorise women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet. You force what is meant to be open, trusting, nurturing, creative and alive to be bent, infertile and broken.

In 1997, I met with a group of activist women, many from a group called Feminist.com, and we formed V-Day. As with all the mysterious vagina happenings, we show up, we do the groundwork, we stay in shape and the Vagina Queens do the rest. On 14th February 1998, Valentine’s Day – our first V-Day – was born. Twenty-five hundred people lined up outside the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City for our first outrageous event. Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Marisa Tomei, Shirley Knight, Lois Smith, Kathy Najimy, Calista Flockhart, Lily Tomlin, Hazelle Goodman, Margaret Cho, Hannah Ensler-Rivel, BETTY, Klezmer Women, Ulali, Phoebe Snow, Gloria Steinem, Soraya Mire and Rosie Perez joined together to perform The Vagina Monologues and created a transforming evening that raised over $100,000 and launched the V-Day movement. There was a stellar event at the Old Vic in London in 1999 and in 2000, V-Day was celebrated in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Sarasota, Aspen and Chicago.

In three years, V-Day has been celebrated at over 300 colleges, with performances of The Vagina Monologues directed and performed by students and faculty. All the productions raise money and consciousness for local groups that work to stop violence towards women.

The V-Day Fund is supporting grassroots groups around the world, in some cases where women are fighting with their lives to protect themselves and end the violence. In Afghanistan there is RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan – a group that had devoted itself to liberating women from the terrible oppression of the Taliban. There, women were not allowed to work, to be educated, to go to the doctor or to leave their house without a male escort. There, women were being buried under their burqas without any protection from rape or murder. The V-Day fund helped RAWA educate women in clandestine schools, documenting illegal executions and building a women’s movement.

In Kenya we are supporting Tasuru Ntomonok (Safe Motherhood Initiative), part of Mandeolo – a project that is stopping the practice of young girls being genitally mutilated by introducing a new coming-of-age ritual without the cut. We were able to buy them a red jeep so they can travel more easily from village to village as they continue their education and prevention programme. In Croatia we are working with the Centre for Women War Victims, which will open the first rape crisis centre in former Yugoslavia. The centre will also be able to train women in Kosovo and Chechyna to work with women who have been raped and traumatised in wars. V-Day is working with Planned Parenthood to implement a strategy to prevent and end violence towards women. The list goes on and on.

The miracle of V-Day, like The Vagina Monologues, is that it happened because it had to happen.

In order for the human race to continue, women must be safe and empowered. It’s an obvious idea but, like a vagina, it needs great attention and love in order to be revealed.

From The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, 2001