Training | 2010.03.23
Girls, ignore adults who wish you to be less than you are | Eve Ensler
So many women I saw at The Vagina Monologues were trying to overcome what was muted in them when they were young
These last few months I have been on the road with V-Day , the global movement to end violence against women and girls. I have visited colleges, safe houses, after-school programmes and orphanages. I have been in war zones, cities and in the fields – the whole time listening to girls.
In Mumbai I meet Priya, 18, who stands up and asks, in a college hall full of men and women: "Why are boys heroes when they have sex with different girls, and girls who do the same thing considered sluts?" Her bravery allows other girls to speak out, and a fiery discourse follows that unleashes secrets, anger and desire for liberation.
I meet JD, 15, in the Lower East Side in New York City, who was raped when she was 11, and has been cutting herself – and who decides, in the course of a rehearsal for a play, that words might be a better way to direct her sorrow and rage. Suddenly she is writing poems that fly off the page.
In Rawalpindi, Punjab, there is Abaaz, who was forced to marry at 13 and had a baby at 14. After her husband had abused her for several years, he took another wife and kicked her out into the streets. To survive, she decided to live as a man, changing her clothes, deepening her voice and opening a vegetable stand. She is now able to support herself and her child. When I meet her, she and her son are wearing matching grey suits. She says she longs one day to wear her beloved scarf and live as a woman.
There is Helene, 17, who was raped by the militias in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, after they killed her brothers and sisters and raped her mother. She gave birth to a girl, who is a daily reminder of the rape. But she defies that story with the love and kindness she pours into her daughter, who is smart as a whip and, in spite of their difficult circumstances, beaming with happiness.
Each of these girls lives in a culture or a family that has robbed her of choice, control over her body, and power. Each girl has been humiliated or shamed or defiled. Each girl has been made to feel less, and alone. And each girl has dug into herself and found her resilience, her inventiveness, her brilliance, her bravery and her kindness.
For more than a decade, I have had the good fortune to travel around the world. Everywhere I have met teenage girls, circles of girls, packs of girls, arm in arm, laughing, giggling, screaming. Electric girls, defying the odds. I have seen how their lives are hijacked, how their opinions and desires are denied and undone. I see too how this later comes to determine so much of our lives as adults. So many of the women I have met through The Vagina Monologues and V-Day are still trying to overcome what was muted or undone in them when they were young. They are struggling late into their lives to know their desires, to find their power and their way.
So the call to girls is to question, rather than to please. To provoke, to challenge, to dare, to satisfy their own imagination and appetite. To take responsibility for who they are, to engage. It\'s a call to their original girl self, to their emotional creature self, to move at their own speed, to walk with their step, to wear their colour. It is an invitation to heed their instinct to resist war, or draw snakes, or to speak to the stars.
In Tim Burton\'s current film Alice in Wonderland , I think it is the Mad Hatter who tells Alice that when she was younger she had more of her "muchness". I think whatever country or town or village girls physically live in they inhabit a similar emotional landscape. They all come from girl land. There, they get born with this "muchness" or awakeness, this open-hearted have to eat it, taste it, know it, defy it. Then the "grown-ups" come with their rules, their directions. They convince girls that they are too much – too intense, too emotional, too dramatic, too alive, too, too too. They teach girls how to make themselves less so that everyone feels more comfortable. They get girls to obey and behave.
Here, from The Manifesta to Young Women and Girls in my book, is what I\'m telling you:
Everyone\'s making everything up / There is no one in charge except for those / Who pretend to be / No one is coming / No one is going to / Rescue you / Mind read your needs / Know your body better than you / Always fight back.
Ask for it / Say you want it / Cherish your solitude / Take trains by yourself to places / You have never been / Sleep out alone under the stars / Learn how to drive a stick shift / Go so far away that you stop being afraid of / Not coming back.
Say no when you don\'t want to do something / Say yes if your instincts are strong / Even if everyone around you disagrees / Decide whether you want to be liked or admired / Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out / What you\'re doing here / Believe in kissing.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]girls-vday-oppression-violence
