The activist and writer of the Vagina Monologues has no intention of stopping her quest to end violence against women
During a recent trip to Brazil, I saw how Indigenous women activists there have completely changed the political landscape
The ex-president gaslights and diminishes his victims, and was given a platform by CNN. We can ensure he isn’t elected again
What happens when you start trusting women? We have the receipts
The playwright V (formerly Eve Ensler) and a group of activists started a global movement for women’s rights in 1998. On V-Day’s 25th anniversary, they tell us what happened in their communities after they took action
The Guardian releases an excerpt from Reckoning.
After the supreme court declared war on us a week ago, at first I wanted to weep and howl. But then I wrote – and then I revolted.
The supreme court draft ruling on abortion shows how desperate some are to control our bodies. But we are never going back.
A special issue on Women’s Bodies and the Body of the Earth in solidarity with One Billion Rising 2022: Rise for the Bodies of All Women and the Earth.
*Artwork by Ngadi Smart
‘The beloved community bell helped to create’ remembers a teacher, friend, mentor and the impact her work will continue to have.
There have been multiple allegations of sexual assault by Chris Noth, aka Mr. Big of “Sex and the City” fame, including two by restaurant and bar workers. These incidents are just the latest in a long string of news reports of violence against women working in restaurants, especially during the pandemic. How many more such incidents do we need to read about before we act to end the toxic power dynamic that exists between women who rely on tips and the male customers who feel they own them because they tip them.
As Covid-19 has swept the world there has been an explosion of violence against women, and a full-blown assault on their rights. It’s time to fight back against a system that allows women to be sacrificed, erased and violated.
She was a rock’n’roll powerhouse who electrified audiences worldwide. As Tina Turner releases a guide to happiness, she talks to playwright V (formerly Eve Ensler) about how she found the strength to overcome illness, abuse and tragedy.
Indigenous leader Célia Xakriabá and Vagina Monologues author V discuss the destruction of Brazil’s forests and why this is the century of the indigenous woman.
Stories and poems full of loss, longing and tenderness.
Touch is essential to our wellbeing, from the time we are babies. It’s how we transmit meaning, care, love and community. Our sudden loss of it has been agonising.
On Oct. 2, I watched the President of the United States mock a woman who had recounted the trauma of being sexually assaulted in front of the world, on live television. And as he did so, a recent poll rattled around my head.
With violence against women resurgent and the US president fuelling misogyny, this man is an inspiration. He deserves his Nobel prize.
20 years after The Vagina Monologues, I’d like to say that feminists have won. But patriarchy is a virus and we are in the midst of a massive outbreak.
The same forces that are crushing women are destroying the planet. They must be defeated, and the march is an important next step in that battle.
We are marching against Donald Trump, and to turn our fear and sorrow into power and imagination. Join us.
Hillary Clinton is not perfect, and we must push her. But if Trump is elected, permission is given to degrade, deny, diminish and destroy us and our rights.
If you are a woman in America or a man who cares about women, I urge you to read this carefully as you approach voting on November 8. Even if you have been able to ignore the fact that Trump is an incompetent, racist, Islamophobic bigot who doesn’t believe in climate change, will cut Planned Parenthood, and move us back to the dark ages with abortion, I deeply hope this will change your mind.
In April this year, I had the honor of writing a piece on Nadia Murad for the TIME 100 list of the most influential people of the year. Nadia is a member of the ethnic Kurdish minority Yazidi people, one of thousands who was brutally enslaved by ISIS in Iraq, who now bravely travels the world to raise awareness of the genocide.
Feigning ignorance or a lack of complicity is no longer acceptable – we must all work together to counter endemic prejudice in America.
This presidential election is America’s reckoning. What mighty love will we summon to ensure the ending of this violence, this hate?
I am thinking of the price list leaked out from the ISIS Sex Slave Market, that included women and girls on the same list as cattle. ISIS needed to impose price controls as they were worried about a down turn in their market.
Eve Ensler recently spoke with Yanar Mohammed about the impact of the U.S. military invasion and occupation of Iraq, the people’s uprisings in Tahrir Square, Baghdad, and the horrific violence, fear and trauma that Iraqi women face daily.
Transparent, Orange Is the New Black and Sense8 have brought transgender characters to wider TV audiences. But where are all the trans love stories? The author of The Vagina Monologues unveils the sexy new web series Her Story.
No one believed my father was a battering sex abuser. He was handsome, a corporate president. He was successful, charming, a man’s man. He wore tailored suits. He played golf. He drank martinis. He was celebrated at country clubs and knew the first names of head maitre d’s at the fanciest exclusive restaurants. He was arrogant and smug the way Bill Cosby is arrogant and smug.
Twenty years ago, when I wrote The Vagina Monologues, it was very difficult to say the word vagina anywhere. The public utterance of the word alone was explosive as so much of the truth about what happened to vaginas was repressed, denied, kept secret, and coated in shame and self-hatred.
There have been many victories, but still the violence continues. The refusal to hold perpetrators to account is a ‘global plague’ – and this year the campaign will focus on justice.
Playwright and activist Eve Ensler explains One Billion Rising, a global day of action – and dancing – in protest against violence against women.
Extreme acts of sexual violence seem to be everywhere. In response, a worldwide day of action has been called.
Eve Ensler, the writer of The Vagina Monologues, founded the City of Joy in Congo. She writes about Congolese gynaecologist Denis Mukwege.
One in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime; ending violence against women is as important as ending poverty, or Aids or global warming. That’s why I want you to join our campaign.
Dear Todd Akin,
I am writing to you tonight about rape. It is 2 AM and I am unable to sleep here in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am in Bukavu at the City of Joy to serve and support and work with hundreds, thousands of women who have been raped and violated and tortured from this ceaseless war for minerals fought on their bodies.
‘She taught me that the lives of women existed in the future and that language was the pathway to that future.’
It’s 14 years since we started V-Day. We made a determination that we were going to end violence against women and girls. It was an audacious and almost absurd idea, but we committed to it. We believed we could change human consciousness and make the world a place where women were safe, free, equal, with agency over their bodies and futures.
This 1960s radical was given 75 years for driving a getaway car. It’s time to accept that perpetrators can be transformed.
‘I have been clear of cancer for two years, so I have a hard time saying that a little bit of extra skin on my neck is problematic.’
I am over rape.
I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.
I am over the thousands of people who signed those pages with their real names without shame.
It was cold in Zuccotti Park this week for our Ambiguous Upsparkles group. Particularly late into it as the sun went down and a wet Autumn wind rose up in the yellow orange trees from the bottom of Manhattan. It was cold and so we huddled together on the concrete steps for warmth, to make it easier to hear, to allow the stories to pass amongst us and through us. We repeated each line of each person’s story and the repeating kept us warm.
This past Sunday we had our second Ambiguous UpSparkle Story group at Occupy Wall Street. This time there were hundreds of people who came to tell of what brought them to the park, and to listen and repeat the stories of the others. There was something Greek and theatrical about this huge group of people repeating every line of every story. It was a story chorus. It took time in a culture and city where there is no time. It took attention in a world where we are trained to not pay attention. It required people to listen when people have stopped listening.
I have been watching and listening to all kinds of views and takes on Occupy Wall Street. Some say it’s backed by the Democratic Party. Some say it’s the emergence of a third party. Some say the protesters have no goals, no demands, no stated call. Some say it’s too broad, taking on too much. Some say it is the Left’s version of the Tea Party. Some say its Communist, some say it’s class warfare. Some say it will burn out and add up to nothing. Some say it’s just a bunch of crazy hippies who may get violent.
The day DSK was dismissed I sent this out via Twitter: I am so OVER women being put on trial when they get raped, leaving their houses when they get beaten, quitting jobs after they get harassed.
The Strauss-Kahn case is not about winning or losing, but opening a dialogue on rape, violence and gender.
Here’s what I Am Over
400 thousand women getting raped a year in the Democratic Republic of Congo
48 women getting raped an hour
1,100 raped a day
On this, the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, I want to take a minute to honor grassroots women’s activists across the planet — women, like those working tirelessly in Haiti, who have inspired their communities, united their communities, and led their communities, holding them together and pushing them forward.
Women cannot be prevented from getting Aids without ending violence towards them.
Vagina is the most terrifying word, the most threatening word, in any language of any country I have ever been to. Even when the vagina is worshiped in theory, as the yoni is in India, it is denigrated in practice.
I have been back in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for two weeks now meeting with leaders, activists, social workers, therapists, recent survivors, business owners, UN officials. There is good news and bad news.
I gave this speech on Tuesday, October 26 at The Women’s Conference in Long Beach, CA.
Illness and treatment only reinforced my determination to shake global indifference to the terrible violence in Congo.
I love being a girl.
I can feel what you’re feeling
as you’re feeling it inside
the feeling
before.
I am an emotional creature.
Things do not come to me
as intellectual theories or hard-shaped ideas.
They pulse through my organs and legs
and burn up my ears.
So many women I saw at The Vagina Monologues were trying to overcome what was muted in them when they were young.
Having just been in the Congo for the last month, it is evident that the more than 12-year economic war in the Democratic Republic of Congo rages on. Almost 6 million dead. Almost 500 thousand raped. Here is what I propose.
When I saw the petition protesting the recent arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland was signed by some of my most cherished artists — the likes of Pedro Almodovar, Ariel Dorfman, Costa Gavras, Jonathan Demme, Sam Mendes — men who I believed to be champions of women’s and human rights, frankly, I was shocked.
In 1996, I was sitting with twenty thousand grieving women in a stadium in Tuzla, Bosnia. The women were holding photographs of husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and boyfriends who had been disappeared a year earlier in a place called Srebrenica, a UN enclave where Bosnian refugees had turned over their protection to UN peacekeepers who stood passively as ten thousand of their men were marched off to be slaughtered.
I write today on behalf of countless V-Day activists worldwide, and in solidarity with my many Congolese sisters and brothers who demand justice and an end to rape and war.
Despite an emerging women’s movement, the rape of women and girls continues as the UN looks the other way.
Just over a year ago, in answering whether sexual violence in conflict was an issue that the U.N. Security Council should take on, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proclaimed, “I am proud that, today, we respond to that lingering question with a resounding ‘yes!'”
I spent the last month in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), much of my time in Goma. There, I was privileged to be part of the first public testimonies where women survivors of rape and sexual torture came forward in front hundreds to bravely break the silence on the terrible atrocities done to their bodies and souls during the twelve-year conflict that has embroiled the DRC.
They were the perfect parents. I was 23. I was depressed and fragile and hardly here in this world. I was writing and writing as a way of survival. They took me under their wing. They pushed me and fed me and criticized my script with red pencils, they nurtured me and encouraged me to be funny. To always be funny. But mainly, they believed in me.
I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears.
In the Congo, where tens of thousands of women are brutally raped every year, Dr. Denis Mukwege repairs their broken bodies and souls.
She’s an Oscar winner, a philanthropist and a mother. Take a look back at how Jennifer Connelly made her way from a child actor to an Oscar-winning movie star.
Welcome to the next ten years where together we will raise the stakes, go further, go deeper, increase the power and change the story of women.
In my global travels on behalf of V-Day, I meet Vagina Warriors who have dedicated their lives to ending violence against women.
If we are truly interested in security, let’s begin with securing all people the basic human right to food, shelter, drinkable water, healthcare, a place to live, safety, and a livable earth.
Dear America: I am longing to reach you — crossing this river of indifference and consumption and denial. I am trying to find you, reaching out through the desperate limitations of words and descriptions, swimming through the rhetoric of terror and God.
In Afghanistan, members of a secret organization of women risk death to give other women education and hope. Eve Ensler took a harrowing undercover journey to chronicle their fight against the Taliban — one of the most repressive regimes in history.
Being hip almost killed me. I grew up in Scarsdale, a grotesquely wealthy suburb of New York City, and I failed at striving early on. I always had the wrong clothes, and I never had a car, a phone, social skills, a nose job, a Bat Mitzvah, or a dot of confidence.