The vagina monologues tour

Email address:. Not on TV. Not even at the gynecologist. So when I stood on-stage in a tiny theater in downtown Manhattan to deliver the monologues I had written about vaginas—after interviewing more than two hundred women—it felt as if I were pushing through an invisible barrier and breaching a very deep taboo. But I did not get shot. At the end of each show of The Vagina Monologues there would be long lines of women who wanted to talk to me. At first, I thought they would want to share stories of desire and sexual satisfaction—the focus of a big part of the show.

I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them. So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues. I talked with over two hundred women.

One woman shared traumatic childhood sexual experiences that she felt were ameliorated by an adolescent liaison with an older woman, and Ms Ensler shared an account of the birth of her granddaughter. The performance was clearly designed to provoke—riffing on the c-word and revelling in the discomfort generated by such a frank discussion—but it was also designed to amuse and move. After each performance, they would come up to Ms Ensler to share their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of strangers, boyfriends, husbands, fathers, and the feelings of shame and isolation that trailed that abuse. The show was even brought to an all-male prison in Queens, New York. On January 9th, an anniversary edition of the book was released, including six never-before-published monologues.