The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Eve Ensler
- Publish Date: December 26, 2007
- Language: English
- Genre: Playwriting
- Format: PDF
- Size: 2 MB
- Pages: 272
- Price: Free
- ISBN: 0345498607
For Ariel, who rocks my vagina and explodes my heart
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FOREWORD by Gloria Steinem
I come from the “down there” generation. That is, those were the words—spoken rarely and in a
hushed voice—that the women in my family used to refer to all female genitalia, internal or external. It
wasn’t that they were ignorant of terms like vagina, labia, vulva, or clitoris. On the contrary, they were
trained to be teachers and probably had more access to information than most. It wasn’t even that they
were unliberated, or “straitlaced,” as they would have put it. One grandmother earned money from her
strict Protestant church by ghostwriting sermons—of which she didn’t believe a word—and then earned
more by betting it on horse races.
The other was a suffragist, educator, and even an early political
candidate, all to the alarm of many in her Jewish community. As for my own mother, she had been a
pioneer newspaper reporter years before I was born, and continued to take pride in bringing up her two
daughters in a more enlightened way than she had been raised. I don’t remember her using any of the
slang words that made the female body seem dirty or shameful, and I’m grateful for that. As you’ll see in
these pages, many daughters grew up with a greater burden.
Nonetheless, I didn’t hear words that were
accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before
I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function other than to feel
pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear
about it—and what it would be used to justify?) Thus, whether I was learning to talk, to spell, or to take
care of my own body, I was told the name of each of its amazing parts—except in one unmentionable
area. This left me unprotected against the shaming words and dirty jokes of the school yard and, later,
against the popular belief that men, whether as lovers or physicians, knew more about women’s bodies
than women did.
I first glimpsed the spirit of self-knowledge and freedom that you will find in these pages
when I lived inIndiafor a couple of years after college. In Hindu temples and shrines I saw the lingam, an
abstract male genital symbol, but I also saw the yoni, a female genital symbol, for the first time: a
flowerlike shape, triangle, or double-pointed oval. I was told that thousands of years ago, this symbol
had been worshiped as more powerful than its male counterpart, a belief that carried over into Tantrism,
whose central tenet is man’s inability to reach spiritual fulfillment except through sexual and emotional
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