[ back ]
All about Eve
She’s the woman who started the vagina revolution — taking the word from its hidden corner of the dictionary and placing it smack-dab in the middle of everyday conversation. She’s inspired the worldwide V-Day movement, which has raised $25 million to help stop violence against women.
She’s Eve Ensler, of course, author of The Vagina Monologues — and St. Louisans have a chance to see her in the flesh as she stars in her newest play, The Good Body, running through Jan. 8 at the Edison Theatre.
In the one-woman play, Ensler turns her attention to the difficulty women face in accepting their bodies. It’s an issue to which every woman who has ever obsessed over thick thighs, wrinkles, sags or cellulite can relate.
In The Good Body, Ensler moves from obsessing over her own stubborn post-40s belly bulge to learning to love the “good body” she inhabits.
“I like my stomach much better these days,” she says over the phone from her Manhattan apartment. “I think doing this play has shifted my whole perspective on it. And it’s been an incredible, profound experience. I’ve been moved by how much women want to change their self-hatred, how preoccupied they are with it, and how much they want to break through and get out of it.”
A play about her stomach may seem light after The Vagina Monologues, which takes an unabashed look at issues of women’s sexuality and sexual abuse, but Ensler says that, like so many women, she found herself obsessing over her “imperfections” when she could have been devoting that energy to more important endeavors.
While the country is in the midst of the war in Iraq, while one in three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime, while the world faces serious environmental challenges, Ensler says it was a wonder to her that her stomach demanded so much of her attention.
“I suppose I had this fantasy that after finally coming home into my vagina, I could relax, get on with my life,” she writes in The Good Body. “This was not the case. The deadly self-hatred simply moved into another part of my body.
“The Good Body began with me and my particular obsession with my ‘imperfect’ stomach. I have charted this self-hatred, recorded it, tried to follow it back to its source. Here, unlike the women in The Vagina Monologues, I am my own victim, my own perpetrator.”
As Ensler struggles with her own desire for a perfect body, she encounters women from Los Angeles to Kabul who are at different stages of self-acceptance. The wife of a plastic surgeon recounts being systematically reconstructed — inch by inch — by her perfectionist husband; a teenager struggles to stay away from Cheetos at a “fat camp” and wonders why the plus sizes are kept at the back of the store like porn; a body artist proudly displays her pierced nipples; an Indian woman transcends “treadmill mania”; and an African Masai woman tells Ensler that this concept of “liking your body” is a bizarre “American 90210” affliction.
Embracing roundness and wrinkles, however, is not an easy task. Even if it seems right intellectually, the battle is thorny, emotional and buried deep in the psyche. It is the desire to be “good” that Ensler says she eventually had to face.
“I bought into the idea that if my stomach were flat, then I would be good, and I would be safe. I would be protected. I would be accepted, admired, important, loved,” she says.
In doing research for The Good Body, Ensler interviewed women in 40 countries from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds and she found very few women who could honestly say they loved their bodies.
There were occasional “body resisters,” as she calls them, such as a woman in San Francisco who went by the name Fatso (Fat, So?), but most of the women with whom she spoke were overwhelmingly distracted by the idea of changing their bodies. A big part of the problem is American culture and capitalism, which Ensler says fuel a manic desire for self-improvement.
“I think all of capitalism is based on creating this fear inside people that something is wrong with them and that they’re messed up so that they have to correct it, and they have to buy products in order to fix it,” Ensler says. “We women, we just think that everything is wrong with us — our thighs, our skin, our butts, our hair, our nose, our feet, our stomachs, and then we busily consume $40 billion a year to fix it.
“It really doesn’t matter what it is that’s wrong, it is the ongoing perpetuation of that ideology, which is you’re born ugly, you’re born stupid, you’re born fat, and we as capitalists are going to help you make it better.”
What’s worse is that Americans are exporting their obsession with improving women’s bodies around the world.
“It’s spreading like wildfire,” Ensler says. “You go to China and you see eating disorders emerging, or in India, where women used to love their roundness, now they’re all obsessed with beauty pageant girls and being skinny. These images are so powerful, they’re almost undeniable. I think part of what is happening is that we’re not just sick ourselves, but we’re contaminating the world. It’s self-hatred flu; instead of bird flu, we’ve got self-hatred flu that we’re pumping through the world.”
If obsessing over perfect bodies is a disease, then the cure is certainly not a matter of one-size-fits-all. The journey toward loving her bulge was a personal one for Ensler, and one she met in her typical style with plenty of humor and enthusiasm.
Ensler says she hopes The Good Body will inspire other women to find their own way to self-acceptance. With less time devoted to shaping, trimming, straightening, flattening, injecting or surgically altering, women will be in far better shape to run the world — and wouldn’t that be perfect, Ensler says.
The Good Body will be performed at Washington University’s Edison Theatre at 8 p.m. Jan. 4-6, 2 and 8 p.m. Jan. 7, and 2 and 7 p.m. Jan. 8. For tickets call MetroTix at 534-1111. Groups of 20 or more may call the Fox Theatre for a special discount at 535-2900.
[ back ]
