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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Eve Ensler, the vulva-friendly playwright, hosts a fundraiser in New York in the hopes of getting young women to vote with their ... well, you know.
Jun 10, 2004 | Playwright Eve Ensler was in New York on Monday night. And you know what that means.
Yup. The vaginas were flying.
The word, which Ensler has spent six years rehabilitating through her oft-performed show "The Vagina Monologues" and her V-Day campaign to end violence against women, traditionally centered around Valentine's Day, was plastered all over the Culture Project theater in Manhattan. It adorned posters and pamphlets and buttons and T-shirts worn by the hundred or so women who had gathered to help Ensler and her V-Day squad launch a "V Is for Vote" campaign. Their hope is to mobilize young women off of their Marc-Jacobs-encased butts and into the polling booths. And on Monday, the day after the 60th anniversary of D-Day, they were officially launching the program. If D-Day and V-Day got together, would we call it V-D Day?
Alliterative signs such as "Value Your Vagina: Vote" and "Vote to End Violence Against Women" adorned the stage, and a diverse group of young women milled around in "Value Your Vagina. Vote" T-shirts that had a list of words on the back: "Vulnerable Vintage Vision Vote Voluptuous Vibrant Velvet Vote Visceral Viva Vagina Vote Velocity Vehement Voice Vote Vessel Vexed Voice Vote Versatile Values Valid Vote Volcano Vent Verve Vote Volunteer Vigorous Village Vote Visible Vamp Variety Vote Voracious Verbal Vast Vote Venus Victory." It looked as if a concert T-shirt had mated with a game of Scattergories.
As the crowd settled into their seats (one of them marked with a hand-printed sign that said "Reserved: R. Goddess") a woman with a lilting Caribbean accent explained to a friend, "This is about valuing your vagina, making it powerful and praising its power to make a difference." I considered the fact that Ensler's campaign to get these women to vote might fall into the category of "preaching to the choir."
The program began with a brief video of young women talking about why voting is important. At one point, Ensler was shown urging a group of college students to shout, "with your heart and with your vaginas and with yourselves, 'V is for vote!'" The women did as instructed, complete with jazz hands.
Ensler took the stage and thanked all the "fierce, incredible vagina warriors here tonight. I feel like we are about to take off in this big vagina plane." (I wondered briefly: If a vagina were a plane, where would the wings be?) Ensler admitted that she had failed to vote in several elections, but that at some point she realized that "the only vote I could ever really wrap myself around was the vagina vote." It could only be her natural timidity that prevented Ensler from saying "wrap my vagina around."
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