Happiness in body and soul

Eve Ensler, creator of The Vagina Monologues, shares how a discussion about menopause with her friends led to talking about all sorts of sexual acts onstage, waging a global campaign to end violence toward women and finding her own happiness.

I bet you're worried.

(Laughter)

I was worried.

That's why I began this piece.

I was worried about vaginas.

I was worried what we think about vaginas

and even more worried
that we don't think about them.

I was worried about my own vagina.

It needed a context, a culture,
a community of other vaginas.

There is so much darkness
and secrecy surrounding them.

Like the Bermuda Triangle,
nobody ever reports back from there.

(Laughter)

In the first place, it's not so easy
to even find your vagina.

Women go days, weeks, months,
without looking at it.

I interviewed a high-powered
businesswoman;

she told me she didn't have time.

"Looking at your vagina,"
she said, "is a full day's work."

(Laughter)

"You've got to get down there
on your back, in front of a mirror,

full-length preferred.

You've got to get in the perfect position
with the perfect light,

which then becomes shadowed
by the angle you're at.

You're twisting your head up,
arching your back, it's exhausting."

She was busy; she didn't have time.

So I decided to talk to women
about their vaginas.

They began as casual vagina interviews,

and they turned into vagina monologues.

I talked with over 200 women.

I talked to older women, younger women,

married women, lesbians, single women.

I talked to corporate professionals,
college professors, actors, sex workers.

I talked to African-American women,
Asian-American women,

Native-American women,
Caucasian women, Jewish women.

OK, at first women were a little shy,
a little reluctant to talk.

Once they got going,
you couldn't stop them.

Women love to talk
about their vaginas, they do.

Mainly because no one's ever
asked them before.

(Laughter)

Let's just start with the word
"vagina" -- vagina, vagina.

It sounds like an infection, at best.

Maybe a medical instrument.

"Hurry, nurse, bring the vagina!"

(Laughter)

Vagina, vagina, vagina.

It doesn't matter how many times
you say the word,

it never sounds like a word
you want to say.

It's a completely ridiculous,
totally un-sexy word.

If you use it during sex,
trying to be politically correct,

"Darling, would you stroke my vagina,"

you kill the act right there.

(Laughter)

I'm worried what we call them
and don't call them.

In Great Neck, New York,
they call it a Pussycat.

A woman told me there
her mother used to tell her,

"Don't wear panties, dear,
underneath your pajamas.

You need to air out your Pussycat."

(Laughter)

In Westchester, they call it a Pooki,

in New Jersey, a twat.

There's Powderbox, derriere,
a Pooky, a Poochi, a Poopi,

a Poopelu, a Pooninana,
a Padepachetchki, a Pal, and a Piche.

(Laughter)

There's Toadie, Dee Dee, Nishi,
Dignity, Coochi Snorcher,

Cooter, Labbe, Gladys Seagelman, VA,

Wee wee, Horsespot, Nappy Dugout,

Mongo, Ghoulie, Powderbox,
a Mimi in Miami,

a Split Knish in Philadelphia ...

(Laughter)

and a Schmende in the Bronx.

(Laughter)

I am worried about vaginas.

This is how the "Vagina
Monologues" begins.

But it really didn't begin there.

It began with a conversation with a woman.

We were having a conversation
about menopause,

and we got onto the subject of her vagina,

which you'll do if you're
talking about menopause.

And she said things that really
shocked me about her vagina --

that it was dried-up
and finished and dead --

and I was kind of shocked.

So I said to a friend casually,

"Well, what do you think
about your vagina?"

And that woman said
something more amazing,

and then the next woman said
something more amazing,

and before I knew it,
every woman was telling me

I had to talk to somebody
about their vagina

because they had an amazing story,

and I was sucked down the vagina trail.

(Laughter)

And I really haven't gotten off of it.

I think if you had told me
when I was younger

that I was going to grow up,
and be in shoe stores,

and people would scream out,
"There she is, the Vagina Lady!"

I don't know that that would have
been my life ambition.

(Laughter)

But I want to talk a little bit
about happiness,

and the relationship
to this whole vagina journey,

because it has been
an extraordinary journey

that began eight years ago.

I think before I did
the "Vagina Monologues,"

I didn't really believe in happiness.

I thought that only idiots
were happy, to be honest.

I remember when I started
practicing Buddhism 14 years ago,

and I was told that the end
of this practice was to be happy,

I said, "How could you be happy
and live in this world of suffering

and live in this world of pain?"

I mistook happiness
for a lot of other things,

like numbness or decadence or selfishness.

And what happened through the course
of the "Vagina Monologues"

and this journey is,
I think I have come to understand

a little bit more about happiness.

There are three qualities
I want to talk about.

One is seeing what's
right in front of you,

and talking about it, and stating it.

I think what I learned
from talking about the vagina

and speaking about the vagina,
is it was the most obvious thing --

it was right in the center of my body
and the center of the world --

and yet it was the one thing
nobody talked about.

The second thing is that what talking
about the vagina did

is it opened this door
which allowed me to see

that there was a way to serve
the world to make it better.

And that's where the deepest happiness
has actually come from.

And the third principle of happiness,
which I've realized recently:

Eight years ago, this momentum
and this energy, this "V-wave" started --

and I can only describe it
as a "V-wave" because, to be honest,

I really don't understand it completely;
I feel at the service of it.

But this wave started,
and if I question the wave,

or try to stop the wave
or look back at the wave,

I often have the experience of whiplash

or the potential of my neck breaking.

But if I go with the wave,

and I trust the wave
and I move with the wave,

I go to the next place, and it happens
logically and organically and truthfully.

And I started this piece, particularly
with stories and narratives,

and I was talking to one woman
and that led to another woman

and that led to another woman.

And then I wrote those stories down,

and I put them out
in front of other people.

And every single time
I did the show at the beginning,

women would literally
line up after the show,

because they wanted
to tell me their stories.

And at first I thought, "Oh great,
I'll hear about wonderful orgasms,

and great sex lives, and how women
love their vaginas."

But in fact, that's not
what women lined up to tell me.

What women lined up to tell me
was how they were raped,

and how they were battered,
and how they were beaten,

and how they were gang-raped
in parking lots,

and how they were incested
by their uncles.

And I wanted to stop doing
the "Vagina Monologues,"

because it felt too daunting.

I felt like a war photographer
who takes pictures of terrible events,

but doesn't intervene on their behalf.

And so in 1997, I said,
"Let's get women together.

What could we do with this information

that all these women are being violated?"

And it turned out, after thinking
and investigating,

that I discovered -- and the UN
has actually said this recently --

that one out of every three
women on this planet

will be beaten or raped in her lifetime.

That's essentially a gender;

that's essentially the resource
of the planet, which is women.

So in 1997 we got all these incredible
women together and we said,

"How can we use the play, this energy,
to stop violence against women?"

And we put on one event
in New York City, in the theater,

and all these great actors
came -- from Susan Sarandon,

to Glenn Close, to Whoopi Goldberg --

and we did one performance on one evening,

and that catalyzed this wave, this energy.

And within five years,

this extraordinary thing began to happen.

One woman took that energy and she said,
"I want to bring this wave,

this energy, to college campuses,"

and so she took the play and she said,

"Let's use the play and have
performances once a year,

where we can raise money
to stop violence against women

in local communities
all around the world."

And in one year, it went to 50 colleges,
and then it expanded.

And over the course of the last six years,

it's spread and it's spread
and it's spread around the world.

What I have learned is two things:

one, that the epidemic of violence
towards women is shocking; it's global;

it is so profound
and it is so devastating,

and it is so in every little pocket
of every little crater,

of every little society
that we don't even recognize it,

because it's become ordinary.

This journey has taken me to Afghanistan,

where I had the extraordinary
honor and privilege

to go into parts of Afghanistan
under the Taliban.

I was dressed in a burqa and I went in
with an extraordinary group,

called the Revolutionary Association
of the Women of Afghanistan.

And I saw firsthand
how women had been stripped

of every single right that was possible
to strip women of --

from being educated, to being employed,

to being actually allowed
to eat ice cream.

For those of you who don't know,

it was illegal to eat ice cream
under the Taliban.

And I actually saw and met
women who had been flogged

for being caught eating vanilla ice cream.

I was taken to the secret ice cream-eating
place in a little town,

where we went to a back room,
and women were seated

and a curtain was pulled around us,
and they were served vanilla ice cream.

And women lifted their burqas
and ate this ice cream.

And I don't think I ever understood
pleasure until that moment,

and how women have found a way
to keep their pleasure alive.

It has taken me, this journey,
to Islamabad,

where I have witnessed and met women
with their faces melted off.

It has taken me to Juarez, Mexico,
where I was a week ago,

where I have literally been
there in parking lots,

where bones of women have washed up

and been dumped next to Coca-Cola bottles.

It has taken me to universities
all over this country,

where girls are date-raped and drugged.

I have seen terrible, terrible,
terrible violence.

But I have also recognized,
in the course of seeing that violence,

that being in the face of things
and seeing actually what's in front of us

is the antidote to depression,

and to a feeling that one
is worthless and has no value.

Because before the "Vagina Monologues,"

I will say that 80 percent
of my consciousness was closed off

to what was really going on
in this reality,

and that closing-off closed off
my vitality and my life energy.

What has also happened
is in the course of these travels --

and it's been an extraordinary thing --

is that every single place
that I have gone to in the world,

I have met a new species.

And I really love hearing about all
these species at the bottom of the sea.

And I was thinking about how being
with these extraordinary people

on this particular panel,

that it's beneath, beyond and between,

and the vagina kind of fits
into all those categories.

(Laughter)

But one of the things
I've seen is this species --

and it is a species,
and it is a new paradigm,

and it doesn't get reported
in the press or in the media

because I don't think
good news ever is news,

and I don't think people
who are transforming the planet

are what gets the ratings on TV shows.

But every single country I have been to --

and in the last six years,
I've been to about 45 countries,

and many tiny little villages
and cities and towns --

I have seen something what I've come
to call "vagina warriors."

A "vagina warrior" is a woman,
or a vagina-friendly man,

who has witnessed incredible
violence or suffered it,

and rather than getting an AK-47
or a weapon of mass destruction

or a machete,

they hold the violence in their bodies;

they grieve it; they experience it;
and then they go out

and devote their lives to making sure
it doesn't happen to anybody else.

I have met these women
everywhere on the planet,

and I want to tell a few stories,

because I believe that stories are the way
that we transmit information,

where it goes into our bodies.

And I think one of the things about being
at TED that's been very interesting

is that I live in my body a lot,

and I don't live in my head
very much anymore.

And this is a very heady place.

And it's been really interesting
to be in my head

for the last two days;
I've been very disoriented --

(Laughter)

because I think the world, the V-world,
is very much in your body.

It's a body world, and the species
really exists in the body.

And I think there's a real significance
in us attaching our bodies to our heads,

that that separation has created a divide

that is often separating
purpose from intent.

And the connection between body and head

often brings those things into union.

I want to talk about three
particular people that I've met,

vagina warriors, who really
transformed my understanding

of this whole principle and species,

and one is a woman named Marsha Lopez.

Marsha Lopez was a woman
I met in Guatemala.

She was 14 years old,
and she was in a marriage

and her husband was beating her
on a regular basis.

And she couldn't get out,

because she was addicted
to the relationship,

and she had no money.

Her sister was younger than her,
and she applied --

we had a "Stop Rape" contest
a few years ago in New York --

and she applied, hoping
that she would become a finalist

and she could bring her sister.

She did become a finalist;
she brought Marsha to New York.

And at that time,

we did this extraordinary V-Day
at Madison Square Garden,

where we sold out the entire
testosterone-filled dome --

18,000 people standing up
to say "Yes" to vaginas,

which was really a pretty
incredible transformation.

And she came, and she witnessed this,

and she decided that she would go back
and leave her husband,

and that she would bring
V-Day to Guatemala.

She was 21 years old.

I went to Guatemala and she had sold out
the National Theater of Guatemala.

And I watched her walk up on stage
in her red short dress and high heels,

and she stood there and said,
"My name is Marsha.

I was beaten by my husband for five years.
He almost murdered me.

I left and you can, too."

And the entire 2,000 people
went absolutely crazy.

There's a woman named Esther Chávez
who I met in Juarez, Mexico.

And Esther Chávez was
a brilliant accountant in Mexico City.

She was 72 years old
and she was planning to retire.

She went to Juarez
to take care of an ailing aunt,

and in the course of it, she began
to discover what was happening

to the murdered and disappeared
women of Juarez.

She gave up her life; she moved to Juarez.

She started to write the stories
which documented the disappeared women.

300 women have disappeared in a border
town because they're brown and poor.

There has been no response
to the disappearance,

and not one person
has been held accountable.

She began to document it.

She opened a center called
Casa Amiga, and in six years,

she has literally brought this
to the consciousness of the world.

We were there a week ago,

when there were 7,000 people
in the street, and it was truly a miracle.

And as we walked through the streets,

the people of Juarez, who normally
don't even come into the streets,

because the streets are so dangerous,

literally stood there and wept,

to see that other people
from the world had showed up

for that particular community.

There's another woman, named Agnes.

And Agnes, for me, epitomizes
what a vagina warrior is.

I met her three years ago in Kenya.

And Agnes was mutilated as a little girl;

she was circumcised against her will
when she was 10 years old,

and she really made a decision

that she didn't want this practice
to continue anymore in her community.

So when she got older,
she created this incredible thing:

it's an anatomical sculpture
of a woman's body, half a woman's body.

And she walked through the Rift Valley,

and she had vagina
and vagina replacement parts,

where she would teach girls
and parents and boys and girls

what a healthy vagina looks like,
and what a mutilated vagina looks like.

And in the course of her travel --

she walked literally for eight years
through the Rift Valley,

through dust, through sleeping
on the ground,

because the Maasai are nomads,

and she would have to find them,
and they would move,

and she would find them again --

she saved 1,500 girls from being cut.

And in that time, she created
an alternative ritual,

which involved girls
coming of age without the cut.

When we met her three years ago,

we said, "What could V-Day do for you?"

And she said, "Well, if you got me a jeep,
I could get around a lot faster."

(Laughter)

So we bought her a jeep.

And in the year that she had the jeep,
she saved 4,500 girls from being cut.

So we said to her,
"What else could we do for you?"

She said, "Well, Eve,
if you gave me some money,

I could open a house
and girls could run away,

and they could be saved."

And I want to tell this little story
about my own beginnings,

because it's very interrelated
to happiness and Agnes.

When I was a little girl --
I grew up in a wealthy community;

it was an upper-middle class
white community,

and it had all the trappings and the looks

of a perfectly nice,
wonderful, great life.

And everyone was supposed
to be happy in that community,

and, in fact, my life was hell.

I lived with an alcoholic father

who beat me and molested me,
and it was all inside that.

And always as a child I had this fantasy
that somebody would come and rescue me.

And I actually made up a little character
whose name was Mr. Alligator.

I would call him up
when things got really bad,

and say it was time
to come and pick me up.

And I would pack a little bag
and wait for Mr. Alligator to come.

Now, Mr. Alligator never did come,

but the idea of Mr. Alligator coming
actually saved my sanity

and made it OK for me to keep going,

because I believed, in the distance,

there would be someone
coming to rescue me.

Cut to 40-some odd years later,

we go to Kenya, and we're walking,

we arrive at the opening of this house.

And Agnes hadn't let me come
to the house for days,

because they were preparing
this whole ritual.

I want to tell you a great story.

When Agnes first started fighting

to stop female genital mutilation
in her community,

she had become an outcast,
and she was exiled and slandered,

and the whole community
turned against her.

But being a vagina warrior,
she kept going,

and she kept committing herself
to transforming consciousness.

And in the Maasai community,

goats and cows are the most
valued possession.

They're like the Mercedes-Benz
of the Rift Valley.

And she said two days
before the house opened,

two different people arrived
to give her a goat each,

and she said to me,

"I knew then that female genital
mutilation would end one day in Africa."

Anyway, we arrived, and when we arrived,

there were hundreds of girls
dressed in red homemade dresses --

which is the color of the Maasai
and the color of V-Day --

and they greeted us.

They had made up these songs
that they were singing,

about the end of suffering
and the end of mutilation,

and they walked us down the path.

It was a gorgeous day in the African sun,

and the dust was flying
and the girls were dancing,

and there was this house, and it said,
"V-Day Safe House for the Girls."

And it hit me in that moment
that it had taken 47 years,

but that Mr. Alligator
had finally shown up.

And he had shown up, obviously,

in a form that it took me
a long time to understand,

which is that when we give in the world
what we want the most,

we heal the broken part inside each of us.

And I feel, in the last eight years,

that this journey --
this miraculous vagina journey --

has taught me this really simple thing,

which is that happiness exists in action;

it exists in telling the truth
and saying what your truth is;

and it exists in giving away
what you want the most.

And I feel that knowledge and that journey

has been an extraordinary privilege,

and I feel really blessed

to have been here today
to communicate that to you.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)