Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler

: Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Author of Photo: Justin Hoch photographing for Hudson Union Society

Overview

* Playwright best known for creating _The Vagina Monologues_


Eve Ensler was born in New York City on May 25, 1953. For details about her early years and young adulthood, click here.

An author and playwright, Ensler is best known as the creator of The Vagina Monologues, an enormously popular 1996 play based on Ensler’s interviews with more than 200 women and billed as a celebration of female sexuality, independence, and power. American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers describes The Vagina Monologues as “a poisonously anti-male play” featuring “a rogues’ gallery of male brutes, sadists, child-molesters, genital mutilators, gang rapists and vile little boys.” High-profile actresses like Glenn CloseJane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, and Lily Tomlin all participated in productions of the Monologues at various time. The early success of the show inspired Ensler in 1998 to establish “V-Day,” or “Violence Against Women Day,” in an effort to use Valentine’s Day as an occasion to raise awareness about “violence against women and girls.” “The ‘V’ in V-Day stands for Victory, Valentine, and Vagina,” says Ensler’s press kit.

In 1996 Ensler wrote yet another play, titled Necessary Targets, about the spiritual poverty of materialistic Americans whose “patronizing, top-down way of seeing the world” robs them of the “profound … sense of community” that people in poorer nations often possess. According to Ensler, Americans “really don’t know how to be with each other,” but only “know how to achieve and sell things and buy things [and] … how to consume.”

In 1999, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton attended a reading of Ensler’s Necessary Targets at the Kennedy Center in Washington. “The First Lady really became enamored of the play,” said a happy Ensler afterwards, “and she’s going to do the introduction to the foreword of it when it is published. She gave an incredible speech that night of the reading, because she’s … been a real fighter for women’s rights.” Mrs. Clinton subsequently invited the playwright to serve on the exploratory committee for her 2000 U.S. Senate run.

Opposed to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), Ensler helped form the organization New Yorkers Say No to War; she joined the artists’ network of Refuse and Resist!; and she gave her endorsement to the Not In Our Name antiwar coalition (a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party).

Condemning President Bush’s January 2002 reference to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an “Axis of Evil,” Ensler said: “Evil is a really problematic word … Evil is reductionist. It destroys ambiguity and takes away duality and complexity; it says that they are dark and we are light, they are evil and we are good. That’s all a lie … I’m not going to accuse anyone of evil.”

In Ensler’s opinion, America’s military overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was an example of U.S. terrorism: “[V]iolence only creates violence. And there may be a momentary, apparent victory in Kabul, but that violence has created in so many other people seeds of things that will come to be, in our lifetime, as deadly as anything we’ve seen … Our terror is better than their terror? I don’t believe that.” Further, Ensler derided the United States for “living in a paradigm of escalating violence – based … on corporate greed and the emerging globalization of the world.”

During the early 2000s Ensler traveled several times to Afghanistan, where she visited with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an organization that opposed the U.S. invasion. “There are a lot of people who say all kinds of false things about RAWA,” said Ensler. “That they are Maoists, [that] they are communists. They are very militant, they are very pure. They are very radical. And I’m very drawn to that. People call them uncompromising, and they are right. But bravo! I feel a kindred spirit.”

In a 2004 interview about the Iraq War, Ensler stated: “[W]e have killed thousands of Iraqi women and children, not to mention American soldiers. We have completely uprooted a country so that women are completely unsafe…. Not to mention the complete desecration of women’s rights [in the U.S.], whether it is the ending of women’s reproductive freedoms, the complete cessation of funds that go to stopping violence against women, or the lie that the women of Afghanistan are better off.”

On December 5, 2008, Ensler and a number of fellow feminist leaders gathered in New York to craft an open letter to president-elect Barack Obama, telling him that “we are are honored and proud to have you lead the nation during this historic time.” They then called on Obama to “ensure that women are equally represented in everything, [including] your administration’s infrastructure [and] its decision-making and solution building”; to “exercise leadership in dismantling the structures that perpetuate gender inequality [and] impede women’s full participation in society”; to make “long-term investments in women’s education, health and leadership”; and to address “economic structures” that “continue to marginalize women.” Among Ensler’s co-signatories were Linda Basch and Sara Gould.

In 2012 Ensler founded One Billion Rising, a project billed as “the biggest mass action to end violence against women in human history.”

In a January 2013 interview, Ensler, who says that she herself was once raped, condemned America as a “rape culture” that grew out of “capitalism” and “patriarchy”:

“What is this rape culture that we are living in? A culture where a few with powers dominate those who don’t have it. Where people occupy people’s field because they don’t have powers and they make them landless. When people take other women’s body because they have guns, because they have sharp objects. There is a culture that is formed in capitalism, formed in patriarchy that is really about domination and occupation, and its end product is rape. We are raping the land, we are raping the women, we are raping economies and we are commodifying things and we are turning people into things.”

In August 2014 – after Israel, in response to a massive barrage of Hamas rocket attacks, had launched a military operation designed to degrade and destroy Hamas’s terror infrastructure in Gaza – Ensler joined numerous fellow leftists in issuing a public statement designed to: “strongly condemn” the ongoing “Israeli brutality” and “the current massacre of the Palestinians”; “affirm our support for and commitment to the growing international movement for a free Palestine”; and denounce “the deeply rooted and ongoing violence that Palestinians are forced to endure on a daily basis.” The letter also referred to Israel’s 1948 creation as “the Nakba” (Arabic for “the Catastrophe”); called for “an end to U.S. military aid … for the Israeli state and its occupation”; and voiced support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, a pro-Hamas initiative.

In July 2016, Ensler wrote an opinion piece impugning the allegedly deep-seated racism of her “fellow white Americans”; their “explicit and implicit participation in crimes against black people,” particularly in the form of “outright slaughter” by police officers; “the history of the very intentional policies that created abject conditions that so many black people are forced to live in”; “the daily terror that occupies the lifeblood of every black woman, man and child in America”; “the prisons filled with millions of black folks who are held and incarcerated at a rate 14 times higher than whites”; and “the burning pain of those we have abused and enslaved, raped, incarcerated, shot, lynched, ignored and degraded.” Moreover, Ensler demanded that whites “stop saying that agonizing and aggressive phrase ‘all lives matter’” – a phrase condemned by many Black Lives Matter supporters – “when we know full well they don’t.” “Our whiteness is our skin color,” added Ensler, “but it’s also a torn sheet draping the dead, a flag of privilege that will not surrender, a town called separateness. Our whiteness is that poisonous sky right before it rains, the color of shame.”

In January 2017, Ensler penned an opinion piece in The Guardian condemning the newly elected president of the United States, Donald Trump. Characterizing Trump as “our predator-in-chief,” she wrote: “I will never accept Donald Trump – a self-confessed sexual assaulter, a nationalist, an Islamophobe, a climate denier, and a racist – as my president. He is illegitimate, elected by less than a quarter of the population. His agenda of divisiveness, hate and misogyny is a danger to people here and everywhere.” Ensler also articulated the following objectives of the so-called Women’s March in Washington, D.C., in which she was participating:

  • “We are marching with our sisters throughout the world who are on the devastating end of neoliberal policies wreaking havoc on their economies, land, livelihoods and safety.”
  • “We are marching against US imperialist aggression and interventions that have led to the maiming, murdering, raping and destruction of women’s lives across the planet.”
  • “We are marching against a system of morbid inequality of wealth where eight men own as much wealth as 3.6 billion people.”
  • “We are marching to deepen a collective understanding of radical feminism – so we can offer an unapologetic assault on the racist patriarchy that has damaged so many of us.”
  • “We are marching so that women and men who are incarcerated, after years of being abused and impoverished, are seen and cared for and lifted – rather than being punished and abused even more.”
  • “We are marching for strength in these coming years and for the ability to survive in a culture that erases and excludes and forgets women, and denies women their humanity, and refuses to recognize their achievements and all the ways they serve and lead selflessly.”
  • “We are marching to sow more seeds and invite more women into that renaissance and to take the energy of this march and use it to set fires of resistance [against Trump] everywhere.”

In 2018, Ensler strongly opposed the Senate’s confirmation of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whom psychologist Christine Blasey Ford had accused, without evidence, of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when they were both teenagers. Ensler demanded that white women unite in an effort to block “the ascension of a man who is angry, aggressive, and vengeful and could very well be a sexual assaulter.”

Over the years, Ensler has made campaign contributions to a number of left-wing political candidates, including Barbara BoxerHoward Dean, Kamala Harris, Pramila JayapalJohn Kerry, Barack Obama, Jan SchakowskyCharles Schumer, and others. She has also given money to the Web-based political network MoveOn.org.

Additional Resources:


Sex, Lies and the Vagina Monologues
By Christina Hoff Sommers
August 3, 2004

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