Eve Ensler - Playwright and activist HARDtalk

Those are the headlines. Now on BBC News, it's time for HARDtalk.

Welcome to HARDtalk. Owned Stephen Sackur. Let me give you one of the

world's most depressing statistics. According to the UN, one third of

all when the next variant rate or some kind of physical assault in

their lifetime `` rape. My guests today is leading a campaign to end

that violence. Eve Ensler is best known for her plate The Vagina

Monologues, but what can this passionate New York feminist do to

change the lot of women around the world?

Eve Ensler, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you, happy to be here. You are

known as a writer and feminist activist but I wonder which comes

first for you. You are known as a writer and a feminist activist but I

wonder which comes first for you? Your art, your creativity, or your

campaigning, your activism? I don't know. For years, I think I have

struggled with which is before or ahead. Which drives which? I think

that they drive each other. I think that probably first, I am an artist

but I think that I have always had an activist passion and an activist

drive. I don't think that art is enough even though I do trust art.

Something about the combination of the two which is something that took

me a while to figure out early on, how to bring those worlds together.

It was a very deep struggle at the beginning because they are so

different. In terms of your creativity, you have been writing

for many years. Just about 20 years ago, you wrote the show which will

define you more than any other and that was The Vagina Monologues. For

those who have not yet seen it, describe for me the spirit behind

that. It grew out of curiosity. It began with a conversation with a

feminist, a forward thinker who was going through menopause and said

very despairing and negative things about her vagina. I was shocked. It

led me to thinking that I didn't know what women thought about their

vaginas and I began to ask friends and everyone would say either

amazing or bizarre or strange or mysterious things, so I was taking

notes. I had no intention of writing a play about vaginas. I then spoke

to an older woman who told me a very disturbing story that she had had an

early sexual experience which had humiliated her and as a result, she

had never had sex again. This absolutely threw me into despair. I

wrote a monologue about her and that was the beginning. I still did not

have intentions of writing a play but when I started to put a few of

these monologues out, the response was so immediate to what I was doing

that it encouraged me to go further. There are a lot of the questions

behind the show but one I had is this: Is it your contention and

belief, having spoken to women as you did 20 years ago, is it your

contention that there is something universal about women and their

sexuality, their experience of childbirth and their biology which

unites all women across the world or do you think that the play is very

specific to its time and place, written by a New York woman in the

late 20th century and defined by that experience? The play has led me

to understand the universality of it. I wrote it in New York and

performed it in a tiny theatre downtown. If you had told me 20

years ago that it would be being performed in 140 countries and 48

languages, I don't think I would have known that that was possible. I

have come to see that the story of the play is universal. I can sit in

Pakistan, or I can sit in Alabama, or I can sit... Can this show be put

on in Pakistan? It has been put on in Pakistan. It has been put on in

140 countries by women... I have never promoted it. Women have come

and found it and taken it to their countries. They have taken it into

Croatia or Serbia or Germany and it doesn't matter what the language is,

people laugh at the same places and cry at the same places and identify

with the experiences. I'm thinking of some countries, let's say Saudi

Arabia, countries where surely, officially, there is no way in the

world that such a play that is called The Vagina Monologues and is

about the most intimate aspects of female biology, there is no way that

they could be officially sanctioned. I hear rumours that underground

productions are beginning in Saudi Arabia. There are two in Iran. I

think in many places, it begins in an underground way and has

confidence builds and as people respond to the play, it becomes a

more public format. That is what happened in Pakistan. It began as an

underground production in Islamabad and then spread to other cities. It

is also interesting to see the number of men coming to see the

play. They are learning things and walk away from it with a better

understanding of sex, a better understanding of connection, with a

better understanding of violence. And what the impact is that violent

has upon the lives of women. There are humourous elements to it.

Hopefully, it is very funny. Some laugh out loud stuff. It is

interesting that over the years of putting it on, you have had many

celebrities who have wanted to take part. Meryl Streep, Oprah Winfrey, a

host of the most famous women in the world have performed monologues. Do

you think that that has diluted some of the sense of anger that underpins

a lot of... Not at all. At the beginning of this movement when we

began V`Day, the day to end violence against women, it grew from the

play. In the days when I first began to perform the play under a single

yellow globe and we thought that the police would arrive and I would hear

stories from women lining up at the end of every show to tell me their

story. At first I thought I would hear about pleasure and sexuality

but the majority of women were telling me about how they had been

beaten, raped, incested. That got to me. I started to feel like a war

photographer who was witnessing events and not able to intervene. We

eventually decided to launch launch V`Day and we launched the play to

bring attention to the issues and raise money for local groups. We had

no idea about 16 years ago that that production, that evening, would lead

to this explosion of a movement around the world. We are now in the

16th year. The play has raised $100 million. That has all gone into

grassroots groups and has been raised by grassroots groups and

self`directed, autonomously in the community. I want to talk more about

how you use that money and how this global movement which you have

foundered the lives that it can engineer change. Before I get on a

global perspective, I want to come very close to home. I'm struck by

you telling me that women have approached you to speak about their

experiences of rape and incest. I was wondering how the fact that you

personally had been through the most terrible experiences as a child and

young woman inside your own family, how about help you to understand

them. `` how that helped you. Is that experience in the way you have

become an artist? I think so. The way we become a human. If you grow

up in an environment of violence, even if it is within an

upper`middle`class context, your daily life is shaped by beatings and

incest or the threat of violence or being thrown against the wall... Are

you being literally accurate? Yes. Literally accurate. My childhood was

shaped by that violence. I was under daily siege and threat. From my

father. Yes, he was a business executive on the outside and another

thing inside. This is not uncommon from the stories I have heard over

the years. People live with parents and fathers with split personalities

and one thing in the world and another thing inside the family. My

daily existence was really a daily existence of terror. And threat. And

fear and self`hatred. And depression. I think that one of the

reasons I feel the commitment I feel to ending violence against women is

that I grew up in a white privileged, upper`middle`class

family where I had education and braces and that violence eviscerated

my confidence, eviscerated my self`esteem, eviscerated my sense of

worthiness in the world so that my whole life was really a struggle to

come out of our darkness. Was there anyone you could speak to at the

time? No, none at all. My family knew but... Did your mother know? My

mother knew. We were all under that same siege. A violent person is a

threat to the environment. And the family and the state, everywhere. I

think that one of the things which I learned at a young age and it is

probably why I started to write was because it was one of the ways I

could make sense of these periods and separate myself out and have a

view or a persona that was not being drowned in the experience. One thing

I see around the world is that most women and I have travelled to so

many countries in the last 16 years, most women have not told their

stories. Those secrets are eating women alive and they become health

issues and depression and suicidal issues and they become eating

issues. They become cutting issues. There is no space in the culture to

speak about these issues. There is usually nobody to whom they can tell

it. There is not an environment or a space where you can speak about it.

How do we break that silence? It is a crucial question. This raises in

my mind questions about feminism. What feminism is really for and

really about. So much feminism in the is now focused, you know, years

after the first struggles in the 50s and 60s, focused on specific issues

like getting women into the boardroom or getting the police to

handle sex abuse better. Very specific topics. You suggest to me

that in other parts of the world, the challenges may be greater than

it is now in Western society. I don't think so. The rate of violence

in Britain one out of five. It is one out of three in America. One out

of three in the US military are being raped by their own comrades.

It doesn't matter what country I have been to, I still believe that

violence... The problems of women are just the same and as bad in the

developed West as in...? I think so. Absolutely. College campuses have

one out of five girls assaulted every year. 300,000 girls are

assaulted on college campuses in America every year. To me, violence

against women is the mother issue. It is the methodology which sustains

patriarchy. Without it, things would change. If we don't get to the core

of why so many women are being violated, whether it is incest,

cuttings, bullying on the Internet, whether it is sexual harassment on

the job, whatever it is that undermines women and reduces women

and makes them unequal. That is, to me, the crucial work. Do you think

that some feminists get too hung up on some of the less important

issues? Everybody is working on a piece of the pie. We need all the

work that is being done. I don't see it as either/or. People know the

area to which they are drawn to bring about the quality and bring

about change. I am particularly moved and passionate about ending

violence against women because of the impact it had my own life and

see the impact that it has had on millions of women around the planet.

Why did you think that the women's movement in the West looks

fragmented and sometimes divided within itself? I think about leading

female writers, some of whom have looked at your work and accuse you

of caricaturing men as evil and suggested that in the late 20th and

early 21st century, that they became outdated and outmoded. Left behind.

I have never really done that. I would like to say that I think that

there is so many men now who are part of the V`Day movement and last

year when we did One Billion Rising, millions of men rose with us. I have

spoken of violence as a real thing and it turns out that men are

committing the violence. I do not think that I have demonised men. I

have called attention to a real problem. I have put out the idea

that unless men really join us in this struggle, to end violence

against women and become in solidarity with us, it will not

change. I can understand that message.

interesting. When you take your message around

the world, the way you have tried to bring out crowds and support around

the world, think about Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Do you really think

that your message and the style in which you work can have a resonance

through those sorts of societies? Let me be clear about the movement.

It's not me. I'm not bringing my play places, I've never done that.

The play has only gone where individual activists and women have

asked for it. You look at a place like Kenya, where the play has been

done. There was an activist there, a beautiful actress read the play and

said, can I bring it to Kenya? She brought it into her community and

did it in a way that worked for her community. She was already an

activist working on those issues, working against violence against

women. She used the play to support her work. I am not going anywhere,

the play exists as a tool. If people want to use it to have a theatrical

experience, to change consciences and help build a movement and

enforce a movement and amplify a movement...

In most performances, you might have a gathering of a few hundred women,

maybe a few men as well who watched the performance. I'm thinking about

mobilising a much bigger mass. Your One Billion Rising movement last

year... You had a lot of people around the world. It seemed to be

something strange about the message. You were telling women to go out and

dance to show they had risen above the endemic violence in their

societies. You said go and do it outside police stations and

municipal buildings, the very symbols of the power that has held

you down. But what difference will it make to a police force that is

endemically committed to misogyny, what difference is dancing going to

make? First of all, dancing has had an

enormous impact. It is one of those powerful forms of expression and

breaking free and allowing people to occupy public space. A lot of people

danced for hours. Let me tell you what it did. It was not just the

dancing, it was the organising for the dancing. Huge coalitions came

together. New individuals came into it. Laws were passed. I will tell

you an example about policemen. In Guatemala, a new law was passed. Any

girl who gets pregnant under 14, the perpetrator gets held accountable.

In Somalia, women have never occupied public space before. A

brave and amazing activist decided she was going to do One Billion

Rising on the streets, and after that, a case where a government

official had raped a woman, after One Billion Rising that man was held

accountable. I want to tell you a story about India, because I was

just in Mumbai. At the first event we did there, last year, and the

women who organised it, again, I just go to support that the people,

what they are doing. Last year, thousands of students came out,

because it was at the time of that famous rape and murder. This year,

at that same event, there were 90 policemen, who were gathered by the

chief of police, who were there to learn about sexual abuse and better

practices. They were looking at arrests and how to help people

accountable and how to treat women when they came in to press charges.

And they stood up and they talked and they asked for feedback. That

was a result of One Billion Rising occupying public space, bringing

violence against women to the forefront of public issues.

Deepening understanding of violence against women.

You say this is driven by local women, extraordinarily courageous

women, but the fact is, you are symbolic figurehead of this

movement. You are a highly educated, well connected, upper middle class,

white American woman. There are feminists who say that the danger is

that your campaign looks, in her words, insulting, neocolonial, to

many women in those countries. She talks about the disconnect between

your background, your message, your mentality, and women in the

Democratic Republic of Congo, for example. A country you know very

well. She says your message doesn't fly in countries like that.

All I can say to her is that I was in Congo last year for the rising.

Thousands of people. I have never tried to get anybody to dance. There

was a call put out last year. Activists responded. It was

self`directed. They have agency over their own lives and their own

determination, they chose to do those actions. I didn't go to 207

countries and make anybody do anything. There was a call and there

was an energy put out that people responded to. Let me finish saying

this. I believe that one of the things that ignites people and holds

people and allows people to move toward global solidarity. We should

not believe that violence against women is a national, local, tribal

religious problem. It is a global, universal issue. If we have global

solidarity around it, the chances are so much better that we can move

through it and begin to look at it as a pandemic, a true pandemic

across the planet. Are you not overestimating the

ability of the movement to engineer change? Mona Eltahawy, she told me

in the HARDtalk studio, that until the target of our rage shifts to the

oppressors on our streets and in our very homes, our revolution hasn't

even begun. So when you talk about Women's Spring, using the language

of the Arab Spring. Isn't it the case that it isn't really happening?

I don't agree with you. I was just in India for three weeks. Those

things are happening. Yes, there is enormous violence against women, but

we are also seeing uprisings, women speaking out, many men joining the

movement for the first time. Women are being punished for

speaking out as well. Look at Afghanistan, human rights movements

say violence against women is up 25% in the last year.

I am not saying we have ended violence against women. We have

created energy. We are fighting for laws. In the United States, the

Violence Against Women Act, we worked all last year with One

Billion Rising. Many activists who worked on that talk about the wind

and the energy of One Billion Rising fuelling the passage of that law. I

am not saying... There are many things needed to end violence

against women. But I do believe that if you get millions of women across

this planet rising against, in courthouses, speaking out against

injustices, for example, mines in the Philippines, where a One Billion

Rising was massive last year. Indigenous women are going to minds

`` mines to look at not only the militarisation of mines and the

takeover of mines and the loss of land but also the escalation of

violence wherever there is militarisation. That is something

bringing attention to those issues. They do what they do, we do what we

do, we escalate energy, we bring coalitions together, and people do

that in own countries. I am so struck, in the course of

this interview we have talked about the most traumatic personal

experiences you've had and your activism all over the world where

you spoke to women who experienced the most terrible things. As you've

been doing this for so long, are you not ever tempted to become deeply

cynical about the way the world works and in particular at the way

in which frequently men work? Of course. I have days when I come

back from spending two months in the Congo, where we have a place built

by women for women to heal the wounds... And every year a few

hundred women are truly helped by it but hundreds of thousands of women

in the same year... We have to start somewhere. If we go there, we will

give up and be defeated and do nothing. But I'm asking you, after

all this time, with the figures around the world being so bad, are

you never tempted to give up? Never. I get depressed. I feel very

bad, I have days when I weep over the violation that is happening to

women around the world. But give up? No, why would we give up? When you

see one woman change, one woman break through, become an activist,

it's worth it to continue. I'm sorry to cut you off, it is a

powerful thought but we have to finish. Thank you.

On Sunday, many places saw lots of dry weather with gorgeous