In the midst of a war in Iraq, in a time of escalating
global terrorism, when civil liberties are disappearing
as fast as the ozone layer, when one out of three
women in the world will be beaten or raped in her
lifetime, why write a play about my stomach?
Maybe because my stomach is one thing I feel I
have control over, or maybe because I have hoped
that my stomach is something I could get control
over. Maybe because I see how my stomach has come
to occupy my attention, I see how other women’s
stomachs or butts or thighs or hair or skin have come
to occupy their attention, so that we have very little
left for the war in Iraq—or much else, for that matter.
When a group of ethnically diverse, economically
disadvantaged women in the United States was
recently asked about the one thing they would
change in their lives if they could, the majority of
these women said they would lose weight. Maybe I
identify with these women because I have bought
into the idea that if my stomach were flat, then I
would be good, and I would be safe. I would be protected.
I would be accepted, admired, important,
loved. Maybe because for most of my life I have felt
wrong, dirty, guilty, and bad, and my stomach is
the carrier, the pouch for all that self-hatred. Maybe
because my stomach has become the repository for
my sorrow, my childhood scars, my unfulfilled ambition,
my unexpressed rage. Like a toxic dump, it is
where the explosive trajectories collide—the Judeo-
Christian imperative to be good; the patriarchal mandate that women be quiet, be less; the consumer-state
imperative to be better, which is based on the assumption
that you are born wrong and bad, and that
being better always involves spending money, lots of
money. Maybe because, as the world rapidly divides
into fundamentalist camps, reductive sound bites, and
polarizing platitudes, an exploration of my stomach
and the life therein has the potential to shatter these
dangerous constraints.
This journey has been different from the one I
undertook in The Vagina Monologues. I was worried
about vaginas when I began that play. I was worried
about the shame associated with vaginas and I was
worried about what was happening to vaginas, in the
dark. As I talked about vaginas and to vaginas, I became
even more worried about the onslaught of violence
done to women and their vaginas around the
world.
There was, of course, the great celebration of vaginas
as well. Pleasure, discovery, sex, moans, power.
I suppose I had this fantasy that after finally coming
home into my vagina, I could relax, get on with life.
This was not the case. The deadly self-hatred simply
moved into another part of my body.
The Good Body began with me and my particular
obsession with my “imperfect” stomach. I
have charted this self-hatred, recorded it, tried to
follow it back to its source. Here, unlike the women
in The Vagina Monologues, I am my own victim,
my own perpetrator. Of course, the tools of my selfvictimization
have been made readily available. The
pattern of the perfect body has been programmed
into me since birth. But whatever the cultural influences and pressures, my preoccupation with my
flab, my constant dieting, exercising, worrying, is selfimposed.
I pick up the magazines. I buy into the
ideal. I believe that blond, flat girls have the secret.
What is far more frightening than narcissism is the
zeal for self-mutilation that is spreading, infecting
the world.
I have been to more than forty countries in the
last six years. I have seen the rampant and insidious
poisoning: skin-lightening creams sell as fast as tooth
paste in Africa and Asia; the mothers of eight-year-olds
in America remove their daughters’ ribs so they
will not have to worry about dieting; five-year-olds in
Manhattan do strict asanas so they won’t embarrass
their parents in public by being chubby; girls vomit
and starve themselves in China and Fiji and everywhere;
Korean women remove Asia from their eyelids
. . . the list goes on and on.
I have been in a dialogue with my stomach for
the past three years. I have entered my belly—the
dark wet underworld—to get at the secrets there. I
have talked with women in surgical centers in Beverly
Hills; on the sensual beaches of Rio de Janeiro;
in the gyms of Mumbai, New York, Moscow; in the
hectic and crowded beauty salons of Istanbul, South
Africa, and Rome. Except for a rare few, the women
I met loathed at least one part of their body. There
was almost always one part that they longed to
change, that they had a medicine cabinet full of
products devoted to transforming or hiding or reducing
or straightening or lightening. Just about every
woman believed that if she could just get that part
right, everything else would work out. Of course, it is
an endless heartbreaking campaign.
Some of the monologues in The Good Body are
based on well-known women like Helen Gurley
Brown and Isabella Rossellini. Those monologues,
which grew out of a series of conversations with each
of these fascinating women, are not recorded interviews,
but interpretations of the lives they offered
me. Some of the other characters are based on real
lives, real stories. Many are invented.
This play is my prayer, my attempt to analyze the
mechanisms of our imprisonment, to break free so
that we may spend more time running the world
than running away from it; so that we may be consumed
by the sorrow of the world rather than consuming
to avoid that sorrow and suffering. This play
is an expression of my hope, my desire, that we will
all refuse to be Barbie, that we will say no to the loss
of the particular, whether it be to a voluptuous woman
in a silk sari, or a woman with defining lines of character
in her face, or a distinguishing nose, or olivetoned
skin, or wild curly hair.
I am stepping off the capitalist treadmill. I am
going to take a deep breath and find a way to survive
not being flat or perfect. I am inviting you to join me,
to stop trying to be anything, anyone other than who
you are. I was moved by women in Africa who lived
close to the earth and didn’t understand what it meant
to not love their body. I was lifted by older women in
India who celebrated their roundness. I was inspired
by Marion Woodman, a great Jungian analyst, who
gave me confidence to trust what I know. She has
said that “instead of transcending ourselves, we must
move into ourselves.”
Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and
the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That
what you fear the most is the death of imagination
and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be
bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It
was never broken.
EVE ENSLER is an internationally acclaimed playwright whose previous works for the stage include Floating Rhonda and the Glue Man, Lemonade, Necessary Targets, and The Vagina Monologues, for which she received an Obie Award. Ensler is the founder and artistic director of V-Day (