The House of Ash

Girl Power Can Save The World (from CNN): http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/02/02/ensler.TED.talk.girl.power/index.html?hpt=C2

Buying a girl is cheaper than buying a cow in many places.
--Eve Ensler

Editor's note: Eve Ensler wrote the play "The Vagina Monologues" and founded V-Day , a global movement to end violence against women and girls. V-Day has funded more than 11,000 community-based anti-violence programs and launched safe houses in the Congo, Haiti, Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt and Iraq. Ensler's book, "I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World," will be released February 9 by Villard/Random House. Ensler spoke at the TED India conference in November 2009. For more TED Talks, click here.

(CNN) -- The future is "girl." Imagine girl is a cell that each of us -- boys and girls -- are born with. Imagine this girl cell is central to the evolution of our species and an assurance of the continuation of the human race.

Now imagine that a few powerful people, invested in owning this world, understood that the oppression of this cell was key to retaining their power, so they reinterpreted this cell, undermining its value and making us believe that it is weak. They initiated a process to crush, eradicate, annihilate, humiliate, belittle, censor, reduce and kill off the girl cell.

This was called patriarchy.

Imagine girl is a chip in the huge microcosm of our collective consciousness, which is essential to the balance, wisdom and future of humanity.

Imagine that girl is the part of each of us that feels compassion, empathy, passion, intensity, association, relationship, emotion, play, resistance, vulnerability, intuitive intelligence, vision.

Imagine that compassion informs wisdom. That vulnerability is our greatest strength. That emotions have inherent logic and lead to radical saving action.

Now remember that those in power essentially taught us and conditioned us to believe the opposite:

Compassion clouds your thinking.

Vulnerability is weakness.

Emotions are not to be trusted.

Don't take things personally.

To be a boy means not to be a girl.

To be a man means not to be a girl.

To be strong means not to be a girl.

To be a woman means not to be a girl.

To be a leader means not to be a girl.

It must be very powerful to be a girl if everyone Is taught not to be one.

Having traveled the planet for 12 years, visiting more than 60 countries and living in the rape mines of the world, I have been with girls. I have witnessed their realities.

I have seen girls with knife wounds and cigarette burns, treated like garbage, beaten by their brothers and fathers and boyfriends and mothers, starving themselves to death to look the way they are supposed to look -- which is close to invisible.

We are so accustomed to prohibiting girls from being the subjects of their own life that we have turned them into objects: commodities in the marketplace, bodies to be bought and sold and plundered and married off or raped in war. Buying a girl is cheaper than buying a cow in many places.

I have been with boys as well, watched as they have been ridiculed, censored and abused for their tenderness, their doubts, their grief, their need for comfort and protection. I have seen how the tyranny of masculinity has forced boys and then men to cut off their hearts and cast them into a brutal, lonely state of disassociation and isolation.

The state of girl, the condition of girl -- in the world and in us -- will determine if this species survives.

I believe unleashing the intensity of girl, the outrage of girl, the passion of girl, is the only way to chip away the thick sludge of denial, oppression and indifference that has led to our insane acceptance of a world spinning us toward our end.

What I have witnessed across this planet is the wild natural resiliency, fierceness, grace and nobility of girl.

The girl cell is our greatest resource, a renewable, untapped energy field like the wind. It is there for us, if we activate it and allow it to resist, dare, challenge, feel and connect.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Eve Ensler.

The first must read of 2010...


I have been in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo for the month of December. Christmas at Panzi Hospital was overflowing with raped and tortured women. Many young girls, several under 14, carrying babies. Every day at least 13 new women arrive seeking care to repair the damage done to their bodies from the rapes and sexual torture.

Since Secretary Clinton's wildly publicized and celebrated visit in August, since the UN's report of success for the Kimia II military operation, since the international community in theory woke up to horrors of the merciless economic war in the Congo, the war rages on and takes its toll. I know because I sat with women who live in the bush, many of whom have now been raped two or three times. I sat holding them as their bodies shook uncontrollably, as they leaked urine from fistula, as they compulsively wrung their hands and hid their faces behind their panges and rocked and cried out to God as they told me their stories:

Ntalwinja, who is 50, from Kalehe was raped by the Interhamwe (former Rwandan Genocidaires) in front of her husband, tied to him and their goats and dragged for 12 hours, held as a sex slave for days on end, raped over and over. Left near dead in the bush, she finally returned to find her husband ill, his heart destroyed from what he had witnessed.

Masaura, who was selling fried fish and not a good runner, was grabbed and raped by three Interhamwe soldiers, taking turns and repeating. Finally crawling home, her husband, a gold miner, who had heard she was raped, expelled her and rejected his children because she was pregnant with her rapists' baby.

Mwamirindi was held as a sex slave and pieces of her flesh were cut every few days. She was raped for months and watched them rape her sister in law who they killed and cut open and served for dinner and then when Mwamirindi finally escaped and returned home, she was expelled by her husband who sold her land and house and threw her and her children into the street. Now she is three months pregnant with a baby from the rapes.

Julian, 45, was raped after the Interhamwe broke into her house in the middle of the night and shot her husband and tried to force her son to rape her. When he refused, they shot him, then took her two daughters into the night and she went screaming after them and has never found them and has lost her way. Ange who was 16 and grabbed by Rwandan soldiers and raped and raped, her insides destroyed...

These horrific acts and thousands more happened in the four months since Secretary Clinton promised action and money, the UN promised protection and claimed it delivered it, and the international community approved their plan. All this happened under the watch of an American President, a Nobel Peace Prize Winner, who has yet to make the destruction of the female species of the Congo anything more than a one-line reference in a speech. As this femicide is spreading to other countries and will continue to spread if he does not make this a front and center issue. In the months where the minerals of the Congo continue to be exploited by the world, where the surrounding countries of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi have yet to be held accountable for waging a regional war in the Congo for those minerals.

Over twelve years, this war, this brutally inconceivable violence has raged on. Almost six million dead. Almost 500 thousand raped. You tell the story of horror and atrocity one too many times and then you realize nothing is changing and that the world goes on getting its minerals, supporting its luxuries and the death, massacres rapes and tortures of millions do not matter. And then you can't find a real reason for wanting to live in humanity or be part of this world but you don't want to kill yourself so you start screaming out, screaming and screaming out and then you get called intense, angry and then mad. Because that is what people who have crossed over get called.

At what point are we all going to cross over?

I seriously have to get better at updating this thing... I've been very busy finishing up my MA Project, a documentary theatre piece on Academic Freedom, which has completely taken on a life of its own. We have a blog for the project ... http://www.academicfreedomtheatreproject.blogspot.com/ . We have managed to get interviews from Ward Churchill, David Horowitz (in the process) and everyone in between. It's truely been a pleasure working with Lauren, Molly, Shannon and Mike. I'm looking forward to seeing where this project will go post grad school. This coming week (on Tuesday) I have a meeting with Jessica Blank, author of "The Exonerated". I'm looking forward to speaking with her about her own experiences with documentary theatre and hearing her suggestions of where we should go next with the project. I have two upcoming public presentations of my piece coming up in April and May. We aren't done yet with the full manuscript but we'll be presenting a few scenes from the play, discussing the work and hearing audience feedback.

Here are several (long overdue) pictures from the Circle of Health V-DAY benefit, "A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer" by Eve Ensler. These pictures below were taken by a fantastic photographer, Mindy Tucker. A full list of her other theatre photography can be found on her website http://www.withreservation.com/concertmenu.html . All of her work is beautiful.