Through childhood and her adult life Eve had experienced a lot. At a very young age she was raped and abused by her father from the age 5-10, so she grew up angry, sad etc. Years later Eve attended Middlebury College in Vermont, where she became known as a militant feminist. After graduating she was in a abusive relationship and got addicted to drugs and alcohol. Then around 2010 she had uterine cancer. So everything she has been through had a purpose so thats why Eve Ensler wrote the first draft of the monologues in 1996 (many other versions). She wanted women to know they’re not alone and aren’t the only ones that’s been through different situations.
After talking to her family and friends about women, she decided to have an interview with 200 women, different ages, size and race then asked about their views on sex, relationships, and violence against women. She had a bond with fiminie experiences, on how as women we suffered from the lack of love, rape, abuse, female genital mutilation etc. The audience she attracted was those women who were full of pain and didn’t know how to express themselves. She attracted strong women that could bare everything they was going through. Eve used her story as a platform to help those who were too quiet or scared to open up about childhood problems, recent problems etc. She made sure everyone was heard when speaking about how she changed hundreds and thousands of lives.
One of the most provoking thing in the book, the Vagina Monologue: The main reason why vagina’s are beautiful. In the book they had a specific word they use to explain the importance of vagina so they came up with V-Day which was discovered on valentines day. V-Day was created in 1998 to raise money and awareness to stop violence against women. While reading this quote from the book, it made a lot of sense to me, “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. It can expand to let us out. 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”.
That quote shows how powerful women are, we can be broken down, torn apart but still find a way to get through the pain. Women are mighty warriors that don’t get recognized for what they do and it is time for that recognition. V-Day was a great strategy, to get people who wouldn’t even think about what women went/go through on daily basis, to leave with a different perspective and understanding. Another subject I found interesting in the book is when Eve talked about being comfortable with your Vagina and how it looks. Eve asked women questions like ” If your vagina could talk, what would it say, in two words?” “If your vagna got dressed, what would it wear?” What does a vgina smell like?” she wanted to see if people was going to answer her question with an honest reply which they all did. Being able to express your vagina the way you want was a problem in the beginning of the book. Everyone was either ashamed, embarrassed etc. because of events that happened during their childhood. As individuals talked about their history with there vaginas I found one interview intriguing.
A seventy-two year old lady had a story to tell. When she was younger, she had an accident when she over “flooded” and got too excited that the guy she like couldnt take it because he said her come was a weird smell and became the “weird stinky girl.” After that altercation with the dude she liked she never used her vagina again, she went many years without any orgasms, touching herself and other things that were pleasurable. “My vagina is a shell, a round pink tender shell, opening and closing, closing and opening. My vagina is a flower, an eccentric tulip, the center acute and deep, the scent delicate, the petals gentle but sturdy”. Is the book based on scientific evidence or the author’s opinions, and how do you know? I feel as though this book is based off the authors opinions and evidence.
There is nothing better than a woman knowing her own body and how it works. Some women knew their bodies weren’t the same. There’s this woman in the book who actually studied vaginas. She know everything there’s to know about vaginas. She explains how there are different moans when being pleased by the partner your having sexual intercourse with. She stated that “There’s the clit moan (a soft, in-the-mouth sound), the vaginal moan (a deep, in-the-throat sound), the combo clit-vaginal moan. There’s the pre-moan (a hint of sound), the almost moan (a circling sound), the right-on-it moan (a deeper, definite sound), the elegant moan (a sophisticated laughing sound), the Grace Slick moan (a rock-singing sound), the WASP moan (no sound)” etc. The mysterious woman has proven herself around the world with groups and individuals that she loved to please other women.
She knows what it takes to reach that next level during sexual intercourse. So that’s scientific evidence when you can go around the world and please every single woman that asked for her help with their body. Another fact was that 20,000-70,000 women were being raped during the 1993 war in Europe and 500,000 women were raped in the United States. The last supported scientific evidence I have is that in the nineteenth century girls learned to have orgasms and were regarded as medical problems.
So to fix that problem young girls vaginal lips were sewed up together to put the clitoris out of reach. Genital mutilation has affected 80 to 100 million girls and young women in mostly Africa. The book should have covered more about transgenders. I personally believe they go through just as much as women especially when transforming. Transgenders are raped, assaulted, killed, harassed etc. and no one seems to be informed about these things. Help talking about their problems would help them just as much as it help the women to overcome the obstacles they have been through. Showing that remorse could help hundreds of people.
The world is a scary place when being a transgender whether your open about it or not. Support from the Vagina Monologues would not only have made people feel good about themselves but maybe even help them find new friends, people they can trust, help to feel safe and maybe love. The short introduction in the book was foreword by Gloria Steinem who didn’t really start school until she was eleven years of age. She then attended smith college and later became an social activist, writer, editor and became engaged in women’s movement and feminism. She first started to work for Independent Research Service. She helped create both New York and Ms. Magazine, she also helped with National Women’s Political Caucus and became an author for many books and essays. She also received a fellowship to study in India. This lady was well known around the world for helping out on many successful feminist activist.
