Word: ensler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ensler uses her work as a tool to greater purposes. Since 1998, The Vagina Monologues has been performed as a benefit on Valentine's Day to raise funds for groups all over the world working to end violence against women. This past V-day, as Ensler calls her festival, the play was staged at Madison Square Garden in New York City, in 50 other cities and on 250 college campuses. Her play Necessary Targets was drawn from the accounts of Bosnian rape victims she interviewed in 1994. It was performed, among other places, at the National Theatre in Sarajevo...
...Ensler is currently working on a play, The Good Body, about liposuction, breast implants and other outgrowths of our obsession with appearance. So far, she has traveled to 30 countries, interviewing women about what they have done to their bodies and why. She is particularly troubled by the state of teenage girls in America. "The consumer culture is so out of control, girls are surrounded by images of how they are supposed to look and behave and be," she says. "Their level of self-hatred, their obsession with body images, their incredible competitiveness with each other--sexuality gets lost...
...feminist movement once stood for sexual liberation and enjoyment--gales of laughter were characteristic of the early "consciousness-raising" groups--but Ensler thinks we lost these values somewhere in the struggle to be taken seriously on equal pay, child care and the rest of the agenda. Conservative-media stereotyping has also hurt. Talk-show hosts have presented feminists as humorless man haters who believe all heterosexual sex is rape...
...feel honored to be called a feminist," Ensler says. "I would hope young women really examine what the word means. To throw out the word itself would be to dishonor all the women who have gone before us. We need to reclaim, invigorate and update the word. If I have learned anything from all the great feminists before me, it's that this is a chain and we just keep widening the circle...
...widened circle is an essential theme for Ensler. The patriarchal nuclear family is "a deadly institution," she says. "It exists in enormous isolation, disconnected from the broader community, and when you're isolated like that, there are no watchdogs. But when you're exposed to other people, it's safer--you can see that life can be different." Ensler does believe wholeheartedly in the extended family, and in the broadest sense. She fights for the women of Afghanistan and of Burma and passionately believes their best hope, and ours, is finding the common bonds. After all, pregnant is pregnant...