Emma interviewed Eve Ensler, the author of The Vagina Monolgues for ELLE! I have Part 1 and 2, you can also read these in our Articles/Press section aswell. Part 3&4 coming soon! xx During Emma and Eve's must-read conversation - that will run for the next 4 days right here on ELLEUK.COM - Emma gets to the heart The Vagina Monologues, discussing its continuing relevance in 2017.
She also hears Eve's thoughts on Trump's America, the future of the women's resistance and the devastating and inspiring experiences behind her One Billion Rising campaign to end violence against women. PART 1. 'A wild vagina journey.'In this first part, Emma and Eve talk about the difficulties of bringing The Vagina Monologues to publication and the activism it helped create. Emma Watson: Hello lovely Eve, how are you? Eve Ensler: You know, this is One Billion Rising season, so it's been crazy. Emma Watson: Ok, so I've written out my questions for you because I'm nerdy like that. Eve Ensler: I do love your book club, I think it's amazing. Emma Watson: It's my favourite project, I just love it, it's so cool. Here's where I'll start: I went on holiday last week and I read Insecure At Last, which I hadn't read before, which I just loved. Hats off to you, it's so brave to make your personal political. Last year I also read In the Body Of The World, and then we've obviously been doing The Vagina Monologues. Do you have a favourite of your pieces of work? Eve Ensler: No. They're all so different, and it depends – people always used to ask me about The Vagina Monologues, "what's your favourite monologue?" and it's such a cruel question, like choosing one woman over another woman. I think sometimes you have days when you're more drawn towards one book or one monologue than you are to others. Emma Watson: Absolutely - it's speaking to you at a different time. The book had a bumpy road to publication, with one publisher deciding they didn't want to publish it after all. Can you tell me what that experience was like? Eve Ensler: Oh yeah, it was wild. First of all, no one wanted to touch it. Then we finally we got a publisher that was very gung-ho and I was really excited. But as we were getting closer to publication, they got cold feet. The publisher called me up and he said: "We really want you to change the title." And I knew they didn't want to publish the book. I remember going into this room and looking at this guy and saying: "This is a crossroads, and your decision not to publish this is about your character, your integrity. YOU HAVE TO LIVE WITH THAT, NOT ME." So luckily, I went and sold the book somewhere else. It was incredible to have a publisher pull out the rug from underneath you at the moment of publication. It was pretty horrific. Emma Watson: That's the kind of the critical moment when you really want and need someone to believe in you and back you. How did you just believe in yourself, and the book, so much? Eve Ensler: It was all about the women. The Vagina Monologues is a fictional piece, but it's based on real interviews with women. I was carrying their stories; I was carrying their hearts and very real experiences. So it wasn't about me. Emma Watson: One hundred percent! Was it difficult to go on to write other plays and books when you were still involved in the phenomenon that The Vagina Monologues became? Eve Ensler: In some ways it consumed my life. A really wise producer said to me: "This is your blessing and your curse. Because you're going to compare every play you write after this to it, and it will be disappointing." But honestly, I feel that to have had such a phenomenon in my life, which brought me and connected me to women all around the world, allowed us to be build and be part of these unbelievable movements - 'V Day' and 'One Billion Rising'. My gratitude is so immense for this wild vagina journey. Emma Watson: Awesome. 'V Day' has achieved so much, and done so many different things, is there but what would you say you are most proud of, that has come out of 'V Day?' Eve Ensler: Well, where I've been going recently, there are young women who I call 'Vagina Insurgents'. Women who have done The Vagina Monologues (cut) who are just showing up everywhere, right? Emma Watson: Yeah! Eve Ensler: I was doing an interview recently with a woman journalist who had been in The Vagina Monologues. I was at a school and a woman who was a teacher, had been in The Vagina Monologues. They are everywhere. It is so moving to see twenty years later, so many women coming up to me saying that The Vagina Monologues was the moment in their lives when they came into their activism, when they found their voice. And to think there's a world of 'Vagina Insurgents' out there who are now activists, social workers, teachers, lawyers, running for political office-- that is thrilling. I think the other thing I am most proud of is that at the very beginning, we made a decision that every production would have a woman of colour in the cast. It was actually in my contract and the producer David Stone totally supported this idea. Then Lisa Gay Hamilton and Rosie Perez did an all women of colour production in Harlem and I think the combination really allowed women of colour to not only be front and centre in performing the piece, but directing, producing and bringing it to their communities. Ten years ago I spent time with transgender women interviewing them and writing a new piece based on those interviews which is now part of the show. They did the first all Transwomen production of The Vagina Monologues and it was very powerful and at the time, ground breaking. I feel proud of the diversity. I feel proud of every woman who's put the play on for the first time in their community and taken a huge risk. Emma Watson: I love that idea of having an activist spine and the strengthening of it, that's brilliant. Do you think that the word vagina is still hard for people to say in 2017? Over the years, have you noticed moments in time when you feel like people are getting more comfortable saying it, and then we pull back again, and we move forward? Eve Ensler: Well, when I started The Vagina Monologues, no one could say the word vagina. They did a ten-minute CNN piece on the play and they never mentioned the word. Emma Watson: Hang on - it was essentially considered a swear word? Eve Ensler: Yes, you could say penis on television but you couldn't say vagina. Emma Watson: Wow. Eve Ensler: To see how much it's become part of the discourse now is pretty incredible. You can't turn on anything without somebody talking about vaginas. We have definitely made strides forward, but it seems to me it's always one step forward two steps back, because patriarchy is the most persistent, stubborn virus. We are still searching for political and spiritual antibodies to fight this massive infection. Then perhaps we will be able to wipe it out for good. PART 2. "There's a profound emergency in America."Emma Watson: Are things changing with regards to the patriarchy? Eve Ensler: I think what is sad is that the men in power still don't understand that the liberation of women is their liberation as well, because they're still hungering for domination. I think that desire for domination, that predatory mind-set, is destroying our world in every respect. Whether it's immigrants who are being denied entry after the U.S. bombed their countries, whether it's the greed of extraction of oil which devastates the earth, whether it's women's bodies endlessly raped and abused and denied reproductive rights - there's such a predatory mind-set at present. I think the younger generation were born with so many of the Rights that my generation didn't have, so they naturally took them for granted. Now when those rights are under siege, suddenly people are waking up and realizing, " We have to resist. We have to fight." I think we're in a profound emergency in America. I think we had to hit rock bottom, so that we could address all the things that haven't ever been dealt with. We have to finally deal with the fact that this is a country built on genocide of the Indigenous people, this is a country built on slavery. This is a country rooted in misogyny. This is a country that does not respect, honor cherish and pay working people, (especially women) what they deserve. This is a country that has been committing imperialist wars for years on people around the world, killing them, raping them, destroying them economically and literally. It's a comeuppance - we're in a time of our karma coming to roost. This moment is a huge opportunity to deal with our history and to say - "We are going to reckon with our past, make restitutions, be guided and transformed by our mistakes, reset our course. It's going to require protest, protection, planning and prophecy. Smack in the middle of the word emergency is the word emerge. Emma Watson: So, lots of members of my book club sent in questions for you.... Anne would like to know: "What is it about the female reproductive organs that causes such debate?". I know it's a broad question, but in a nutshell, what do you think it is about the female reproductive organs that are causing all of this commotion? Eve Ensler: I think women have never had the rights to their own bodies or desires. They have been objectified and abused by the state, the Church, family structures. We are slowly coming into freedom and choice. Choice over whether we have babies or don't, choice over sexuality and sex, choice over what jobs we will and wont do, choice over how we are respected and treated on those jobs. Choice to have our desire. Emma Watson: Was there a hardest monologue for you to put together, and why was that one more difficult than the others? Eve Ensler: I think that the Bosnia piece was the hardest piece to write. I had just come from the Bosnian War and I had been in Bosnia and Croatia for a period of time where I had been in refugee camps interviewing women who had been horribly raped in the war. That was my first time I had been in a war zone and the first time with women who were on the front lines, having been in rape camps. It was devastating. It was utterly devastating. I think every time I performed that piece I would break down because I would remember those women, their faces and their stories. I went back to Bosnia years later to a town where one of the horrible massacres had occurred and the women in that town were performing 'My Vagina Was My Village' in a production there and it was a profoundly cathartic moment. Everyone weeping, actually wailing. That piece still disturbs me and sadly it's still going on. How many women live in countries where rape is used as a systematic tactic of war? How many women have lost their minds and had their vaginas and bodies eviscerated during conflicts? It still continues and escalates in this neo-liberal global capitalist system where women's bodies become the landscape on which global wars for resources are fought. Emma Watson: Neo-liberal capitalist is very true. Here's a question I like - and I'm interested in what you think about it - what do you think about the way boys are raised in our culture specifically? Eve Ensler: I think being raised a boy in a patriarchy is almost more torturous than being raised a girl, because at least we are allowed to keep our hearts. We are allowed to feel, to cry, and we are allowed to connect. With boys, from the time you open your eyes, you are taught not to cry, feel, show weakness and not to ever let anyone know you have doubts, and so your heart is cut off. You are severed from it from such a young age. What has it done to our boys? It has turned them into soldiers and men capable of battery, rape. When boys are not allowed to feel their vulnerability or their tenderness, they become hard and uncompassionate. In 'Insecure At Last,' I said "Bullets are hardened tears.".
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