Not the V Word!

NEW YORK —  When Eve Ensler tried to place a newspaper ad last month, nobody thought she’d have trouble with the subject--a gala fund-raiser protesting violence against women.

But she hit a serious snag over language. One word in particular that the paper felt uncomfortable printing:

Vagina. As in “The Vagina Monologues,” a play Ensler had written and would perform at the event along with a star-studded cast.

“The guy from the ad-acceptability department said they had trouble with the fact that we used the word so much,” Ensler recalls, laughing at the story. “And I said, ‘What’s wrong with the word? It’s not a curse word. It’s part of our anatomy!’ ”

The newspaper adman, she continues, “didn’t really know” what was wrong with the word. “But then again, nobody ever does.”

Ensler’s Obie-winning play takes a provocative look at sexual politics, gender identity and the female body. Told in the voices of diverse women across America, it has built a strong cult following.

Now, it is about to reach a much larger audience. On Saturday, Valentine’s Day, “The Vagina Monologues” will be the centerpiece of the “V-Day” fund-raiser in New York, an event celebrating women and calling for an end to sexual violence. Individual scenes will be performed by Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Rosie Perez, Lily Tomlin, Marisa Tomei, Margaret Cho, Shirley Knight, Calista Flockhart, Barbara Walters, Liz Smith and others.

Later in the spring, Ensler will take the play on the road, performing all the scenes herself, as she normally does; a four- to six-week run is booked for Los Angeles. Villard is publishing a paperback edition of the monologues this month with a special introduction by Gloria Steinem.

Yet, with all this firepower, Ensler still had to twist arms to get word of V-Day into a newspaper ad. Finally, after protracted negotiating, the paper OKd an ad that toned down the graphics (too Georgia O’Keeffe-ish) and permitted the lines: “All Together. All Talking About Vaginas. All Night Long.”

“We’re talking about ending sexual violence,” Ensler says. “We’re talking about women celebrating their bodies and their power. But some people can’t get past that word.”

*

In an age of lurid talk-show debates over oral sex, severed penises and semen-stained dresses, the squeamishness over Ensler’s work may seem absurd. Yet vagina is a word rarely mentioned in the mainstream American press.

“It’s a word of such central importance to women,” Ensler says. “But in this culture, we don’t talk about things. We talk around them. We avoid what’s important.”

Ensler, 44, didn’t simply wake up one morning and start talking about vaginas. The crusade that consumes her came about by accident, at a time in her life when “body politic” was an abstract term instead of a rallying cry.

“Several years ago, I was talking to a very well-known woman, a feminist, and we stumbled onto the subject of sex and menopause,” Ensler relates, curling up on a chair in her Greenwich Village office. “Out of nowhere she started talking about her vagina, and she said really negative things. She spoke with such contempt, and I was shocked.

“When I raised the subject with other women, they had much the same kind of reaction.” Ensler wondered: Aren’t feminists supposed to be liberated and in touch with their bodies? How could women talk this way?

The problem, she suggests, is that many women have made a distinction between the party line of the feminist movement and its deeper, more revolutionary implications for their bodies.

“What happened to us has happened in other movements,” Ensler says. “It certainly happened in the black liberation movement. People locked into positions without addressing their deepest feelings. That’s why racism is still so prevalent.

“Some feminists have been revolutionized and changed. But for the most part, women bought into an ideology without it touching them personally. I see a lot of feminists who are incredible thinkers and yet hate their bodies. Until you make that connection, things don’t change.”

Galvanized, Ensler began talking to women about their most intimate thoughts and feelings. She interviewed elderly women, girls, homeless mothers, professors, divorcees, rape victims, corporate professionals, therapists, suburban moms, urban singles and others. She talked to African American, Latina, Asian American, Native American, white and Jewish women.

“At first, women were reluctant to talk with me,” Ensler says. “But once they got going, you couldn’t stop them.” Each had a riveting story to tell, and the best made their way into “The Vagina Monologues,” which debuted in New York in 1995.

Critics were impressed: “That Eve Ensler avoids mere shock value or even titillation is a tribute to the intelligence with which she has fashioned this courageous piece,” said the New York Daily News. The New York Times said Ensler’s writing “has the intensity of poetry . . . eliciting roars from the audience.”

By talking about something most women rarely discuss, the characters in Ensler’s play turn their souls inside out. In one scene, a Bosnian rape victim mourns that she no longer feels connected to the most vital part of her body:

Not since the soldiers put a long thick rifle inside me. So cold, the steel rod canceling my heart. Don’t know whether they’re going to fire it or shove it through my spinning brain. . . . Not since they took turns for seven days, smelling like feces and smoked meat. . . . I became a river of poison and pus and all the crops died.

Toward the end, Ensler tells a powerful story about the night her granddaughter was born. Ensler was in the hospital room, watching her daughter-in-law, and she learned once again that what appears to be anatomy is a metaphor for life:

I stood, and as I stared, her vagina suddenly became a wide red pulsing heart.

The heart is capable of sacrifice.

So is the vagina.

The heart is able to forgive and repair.

It can change its shape to let us in.

So can the vagina.

It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world.

So can the vagina.

I was in the room.

I remember.

*

Some memories are not so joyful.

The child of middle-class parents in suburban Westchester, Ensler was sexually and physically abused by her father at an early age. At 16, she finally escaped him by running away.

Battered and alone, she drifted into alcoholism and heavy drug use. Hitting rock bottom at 23, she ran with a rough bar crowd, gangster boyfriends and the strong belief, instilled by her father, that she was stupid.

A caring and generous bartender helped her get sober, and she began rebuilding her life. Ensler hasn’t had a drink in 20 years, but the real growth has come in her work as a writer.

She always loved words, dabbling in poetry and drama as a college student. Soon, she began writing one-act plays and got a break when Joanne Woodward performed one of her works in a drama class years after her graduation. Gathering up courage, Ensler asked the actress whether she could write a play especially for her.

“She said, ‘Go ahead,’ and that really changed my life,” Ensler says. “She and Paul Newman were my first mentors.”

In short order, Ensler wrote “The Depot,” a play about ordinary people and nuclear disarmament. Woodward and Newman ended up co-directing, and the show toured the nation for two years, finally reaching the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Her confidence growing, Ensler wrote “Necessary Targets,” a play about Bosnian rape victims. It was commissioned by the Public Theater in New York and was performed as a fund-raiser for the International Rescue Committee; the glittering cast included Anjelica Huston, Meryl Streep and Cherry Jones.

This weekend’s V-Day celebration, produced by Willa Shalit and co-produced by Sally Fisher, will be held at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan. Proceeds will benefit a variety of grass-roots groups, including the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, Equality Now and Sanctuary.

“I got into the theater because I craved a sense of community,” Ensler says. “And that’s what this event is all about. If nothing else, it has brought women together.”

Beyond the fund-raiser, Ensler is working on a film project for Miramax and Glenn Close about women behind bars. She has written a script for Goldie Hawn and also does volunteer work in city shelters, counseling rape victims.

But the monologues remain her prime focus.

Some women who see the play are numbed by it; others are moved to tears and exuberant laughter. Some men are shocked into silence, while others feel excluded by the feminine focus.

A few get downright hostile.

“One man came up to me after the show and said: ‘Are you saying that all men are rapists? Well, I’m not a rapist,’ ” Ensler recalls. “I told him, ‘I’m saying there are a lot of rapists in the world, and so rather than get angry at me, why don’t you form a group and help men not become rapists?’ ”

Ensler says she is lucky to have supportive men in her life. Her partner, artist Ariel Orr Jordan, helped her conceive the idea for the monologues. Her adopted son, Dylan McDermott, plays the lead trial attorney on ABC-TV’s “The Practice.”

“He plays a lefty lawyer,” Ensler says, beaming.

For all its moments of pain and trauma, “The Vagina Monologues” leaves viewers with an upbeat and hopeful feeling. Women should honor their bodies, the author says. They need to connect with themselves, for themselves. And it all begins with The Word.

As the monologues opened during a recent performance in Baltimore, a lone spotlight hit Ensler, sitting on a chair. She anticipated her audience’s unease, flashed a wry, knowing smile and began:

“I bet you’re worried. I was worried. That’s why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas.”

* More information about V-Day and the groups involved can be found at https://www.Feminist.com/VDAY.