I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World by Eve Ensler
Authors: Eve Ensler
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FOREWORD
Carol Gilligan
Having broken a rather astonishing silence by encouraging women to say “vagina” in public, Eve Ensler has now written a new set of monologues, intended this time for girls. “Dear Emotional Creature,” she begins in an introduction that is at once a cri de coeur and a call to action. As a woman, she knows the pressures on girls to silence themselves, to act as if they have no feelings or their feelings do not matter, to please everyone except themselves. The simple statement “I am an emotional creature” becomes a challenge to the myriad ways in which girls are looked at but not seen, talked about but not listened to, used, discarded, violated, exploited, maimed, and even killed. Like a woman claiming her body, a girl claiming her emotions breaks a silence and unleashes a vast resource of clean energy, an energy that can inspire all of us to transform and heal the world.
In addition to the girl facts recorded in this book, there is another series of facts worth considering: throughout the years of childhood, girls are more psychologically robust and resilient than boys, less depressed, less likely to suffer from learning and speech disorders, less likely to harm themselves and other people. The initiation of young boys into a masculinity that requires them to cover their emotional natures, to sacrifice love for the sake of honor and wed themselves to a false story about themselves, has its parallel in the initiation of girls at adolescence into the division between good and bad women, the worshipped and the despised. As an honest voice comes to sound or seem stupid or crazy, as girls are pressed to internalize a misogyny built into the very structure of patriarchy, in which being a man means not being a woman and also being on top, a resistance wells up inside them, grounded in their human nature. Like the healthy body, the healthy psyche resists disease, and girls being adolescents at the time of their initiation are for this reason more lie-resistant. Hence the power of girls’ voices to expose, and by exposing disrupt what otherwise goes on for the most part in silence.
I remember the day I went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with a group of eleven-and twelve-year-old girls. We were spending a week together, doing writing and theater exercises as part of a project designed to strengthen girls’ healthy resistance and courage. In the coatroom of the museum, as the girls shed backpacks and raincoats, I said we were going to be investigative reporters: our assignment was to discover how women appear in this museum. “Naked,” Emma said, without hesitation. A current of recognition ran silently, swiftly, through the group. Later, when asked to write a conversation with one of the women in the museum, Emma chose a headless, armless Greek statue, weaving into the conventions of polite conversation her two burning questions: “Are you cold?” and “Do you want some clothes?” The statue’s response, “I have no money,” leads Emma to say that she knows a place where they give away clothes: “It’s right around the corner.” At which point, Emma and the statue leave the museum.
The monologues in this book are scripts for girls’ resistance. Traveling around the world on behalf of V-Day, the movement Eve founded to end violence against women and girls, she was drawn repeatedly to the teenage girls she met along the way. Captivated by an electric energy that was in danger of being hijacked, she turned her writer’s eye and ear to conserving this energy by transforming it into pieces for girls to perform. Wise, funny, irreverent, shocking, the monologues give voice to what girls know. We hear a girl’s pleasure in wearing a short skirt and feeling the wind against her legs, her fear of being fat or hungry, her terror in finding herself sold into sex slavery, her desire to escape from those who in one way or another, whether with the best or worst of intentions, would deny or
Carol Gilligan
Having broken a rather astonishing silence by encouraging women to say “vagina” in public, Eve Ensler has now written a new set of monologues, intended this time for girls. “Dear Emotional Creature,” she begins in an introduction that is at once a cri de coeur and a call to action. As a woman, she knows the pressures on girls to silence themselves, to act as if they have no feelings or their feelings do not matter, to please everyone except themselves. The simple statement “I am an emotional creature” becomes a challenge to the myriad ways in which girls are looked at but not seen, talked about but not listened to, used, discarded, violated, exploited, maimed, and even killed. Like a woman claiming her body, a girl claiming her emotions breaks a silence and unleashes a vast resource of clean energy, an energy that can inspire all of us to transform and heal the world.
In addition to the girl facts recorded in this book, there is another series of facts worth considering: throughout the years of childhood, girls are more psychologically robust and resilient than boys, less depressed, less likely to suffer from learning and speech disorders, less likely to harm themselves and other people. The initiation of young boys into a masculinity that requires them to cover their emotional natures, to sacrifice love for the sake of honor and wed themselves to a false story about themselves, has its parallel in the initiation of girls at adolescence into the division between good and bad women, the worshipped and the despised. As an honest voice comes to sound or seem stupid or crazy, as girls are pressed to internalize a misogyny built into the very structure of patriarchy, in which being a man means not being a woman and also being on top, a resistance wells up inside them, grounded in their human nature. Like the healthy body, the healthy psyche resists disease, and girls being adolescents at the time of their initiation are for this reason more lie-resistant. Hence the power of girls’ voices to expose, and by exposing disrupt what otherwise goes on for the most part in silence.
I remember the day I went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with a group of eleven-and twelve-year-old girls. We were spending a week together, doing writing and theater exercises as part of a project designed to strengthen girls’ healthy resistance and courage. In the coatroom of the museum, as the girls shed backpacks and raincoats, I said we were going to be investigative reporters: our assignment was to discover how women appear in this museum. “Naked,” Emma said, without hesitation. A current of recognition ran silently, swiftly, through the group. Later, when asked to write a conversation with one of the women in the museum, Emma chose a headless, armless Greek statue, weaving into the conventions of polite conversation her two burning questions: “Are you cold?” and “Do you want some clothes?” The statue’s response, “I have no money,” leads Emma to say that she knows a place where they give away clothes: “It’s right around the corner.” At which point, Emma and the statue leave the museum.
The monologues in this book are scripts for girls’ resistance. Traveling around the world on behalf of V-Day, the movement Eve founded to end violence against women and girls, she was drawn repeatedly to the teenage girls she met along the way. Captivated by an electric energy that was in danger of being hijacked, she turned her writer’s eye and ear to conserving this energy by transforming it into pieces for girls to perform. Wise, funny, irreverent, shocking, the monologues give voice to what girls know. We hear a girl’s pleasure in wearing a short skirt and feeling the wind against her legs, her fear of being fat or hungry, her terror in finding herself sold into sex slavery, her desire to escape from those who in one way or another, whether with the best or worst of intentions, would deny or
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