Episode 38: The Vagina Monologues – with author V

The Discussion

Amy Allebest: In 1994, New York-based playwright, performer, and activist Eve Ensler, now known as V, wrote an honest, heartbreaking, and humorous fictional play based on more than 200 interviews she conducted with a wide variety of women. The play, The Vagina Monologues, was first performed in 1996 by V herself, and received instant acclaim playing to sold-out houses. V performed the show for six months in New York, then took it on the road. After every performance, she was met by countless women who shared their own stories of surviving violence at the hands of relatives, lovers, and strangers. 

Overwhelmed by the number of women and girls who had experienced violence, and compelled to do something about it, she began to envision The Vagina Monologues as more than a provocative work of art. It could be a mechanism for moving people to act to end violence. V, together with a group of New York City-based volunteers, founded V-Day on Valentine’s Day, 1998. Three years later, a benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues sold out 18,000 seats at Madison Square Garden, raising $1 million. The Vagina Monologues continues to be an essential foundational text, and I am beyond honored to welcome V, the author formerly known as Eve Ensler, who wrote this world-changing work. Welcome, V!

V: Thank you. I’m thrilled to be here, Amy, particularly with anybody who is breaking down patriarchy. 

AA: Yay, I love it! Well, this is such an honor for me. I’m so excited about this conversation. I remember the first time I heard about the Vagina Monologues was in 2001, and I was at a point in my life where I felt a little bit, this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I felt a little bit scandalized by the title. That will tell you a lot about the environment I was raised in, but I was really intrigued and it kind of stayed in the back of my mind, like, “I need to look into this.” And then I watched every TED Talk you’ve ever done, came back to The Vagina Monologues later, and I’m so thrilled to be able to talk about it with you today. 

V: Me too, me too. Particularly since we’re in the middle of what I can only describe as late-stage psychotic patriarchy, where we’re seeing such a huge, huge, massive pushback against women’s rights under this far-right regime that’s rising in this country. I think that we need to talk about vaginas and women’s reproductive rights and women’s health and women’s rights in general now, more than ever, because they have a plan and they are methodically step by step instituting that plan. We have to have a better plan. 

AA: That’s such a good point. Well, let’s get into that. Let’s make sure that we circle back around to that and talk about some practical strategies that we can take. Maybe we can get to that after we talk about the book. The very first thing I’d love is for you to introduce yourself. Tell us where you’re from, your education, maybe religion, if that’s relevant, and some things that have contributed to making you who you are today and the work that you’ve done in the world.

V: Well, I was born in Manhattan. I was raised in the suburbs and then I came back to Manhattan after various stops in college and California. I lived in New York for many, many years, in the city for 40 years, and then I moved upstate and now I live with the trees in the woods. In terms of my religion, since I moved here 10 years ago, I’m a devotee of Mother Earth. She is what I serve, and the energy of Gaia, the energy of life force, the energy of possibility, the energy of renewal, that’s where my heart and my spirituality comes from today. 

One of the things that one could know about me is that I, on the outside, I came from what appeared to be a very ordinary, white picket fence – we literally had a white picket fence around our house – but inside it was drastically different. It was actually a very, very violent, terrifying place. My father really controlled that environment and determined it. He was a raging alcoholic and a very scary person who violated me sexually for a long time, and then that turned to domestic battery and abuse. And I think that for so long I was just a consequence of that violence. I was an outcome of it, I was a person determined by it. And I think that one of the reasons why I ended up devoting my life to ending violence against women and girls and trans and non-binary people is because I know what violence does. I know how long it takes to recover from it. I know all the implications of it and how it affects your life in so many directions. I think that when we think about women and the fact that one third of the women on this planet, which is one billion women, and I’m sure it’s more, have suffered rape or have suffered battery, it means that this powerful, energetic life force has been curtailed and has been suppressed and has been undermined, which we desperately need if we’re going to survive in the world.

AA: That’s incredibly inspiring to hear your story, starting out with tragedy, but then how you’ve kind of alchemized that tragedy and created such an incredible force for good in the world. I find that incredibly moving and inspiring. Let’s talk about The Vagina Monologues first. It sounds like what you’re saying is that the idea for this, or maybe just the engine behind it, comes from your own personal lived experience. Is that right? Where would you say the idea came from? 

V: To be honest with you, it was really an accident. I was already a way, way downtown playwright. I was writing plays about nuclear war and homeless women, and things that nobody wanted to think about, you know? So I wasn’t like, “I’m going to go write a play about vaginas.” That would have secured my downtown status forever. What happened is that I was talking to an older woman who was going through menopause, and she was talking about menopause, and then she started talking about her vagina as this dried-up prune, like a thing that was disgusting. And I was shocked. I was shocked to hear the way she was talking about her vagina. I was shocked that she was a feminist and she had such disrespect for her vagina. 

So I started asking women, “What do you think about your vagina?” Because I actually had no idea. Everything that each woman said was so amazing. The first woman said, “My mother used to tell me, ‘Don’t wear panties underneath your pajamas, you need to air out your pussycat.’” And I was like, “Okay, this is amazing.” Setting off on this journey where I just wanted to hear stories and I wanted to know what women were thinking, I had no intention of writing a play or anything like that. And then I spoke to this woman who had an experience when she was very young where she’d been humiliated sexually, and she’d never had sex again. She’d never had an orgasm. And I just could not bear the idea that there were women who had stopped having sex, who did not have orgasms, who didn’t have pleasure, who didn’t fulfill their desires. And I said, “I’m going to write a play about this.” Then it was like, I’m going to do this because what I’m learning, what I’m seeing, I need to turn into a literary piece. I need to turn to fiction and I need to create something where women can see themselves reflected and women can begin to feel like their stories matter and they exist and they’re real and put it out there in the world, you know?

I always joke that you can say “scud missile” or “plutonium” or “nuclear war” on the front pages of any newspaper, but if you say “vagina”, the place where we all come from, in theory, unless somebody’s had a different kind of birth, it’s the most horrifying word. And you start to think about that, how insane that is, that our vaginas, the place of birth, the place of pleasure, the place that’s in the center of a woman’s body – and I want to be very clear that I am not saying that to have a vagina makes you a woman, or that if you don’t have a vagina you’re not a woman. The piece is really about people and women who have vaginas. I never made a determination that to have one is to be a woman, but I do think that for those of us who have them and who are living as women, it’s really a profound notion that we can’t talk about them. We can’t name it, we can’t see it, we can’t experience it, we can’t share our experiences. That the word for it is dirty and sinful and shameful, and it has all this surrounding it, which means that’s all that’s surrounding us, right? And my desire was to break that taboo and say, “No, actually, vaginas are beautiful, vaginas are powerful, vaginas are necessary, vaginas are a pathway, are a garden, are an opening, are an intrinsic part of us and can’t be denied.” 

AA: That’s really beautiful. It reminds me of one short quote that I wrote down from the book. You write, “I had lived my life without my motor, center, second heart.” That really struck me. Your motor. 

V: For many of us who have been sexually abused when we’re young, or even just abused, but particularly if our vaginas are invaded in any way, we leave our bodies. We separate from ourselves, and it’s a way of surviving so that being inside our bodies – they carry the memories, they carry the pain, they carry the betrayal, they carry all those things. For me, I left my body at five years old. And I remember the night when I was performing The Vagina Monologues, when I came back into my vagina, I remember the feeling. I remember it was like I had returned to myself. I’d come into my motor. I’d come into my power, but not my power over my energetic life force power that I’d been very separated from. 

And I think, to be honest with you, violence is the methodology that sustains patriarchy. Without it, women would be as powerful and equal as we’re meant to be. So, the attempt of patriarchy to undermine women and degrade women and debase women and devalue women comes from that violence. It comes from rape, it comes from cutting women, it comes from beating women, it comes from incest. It comes from all those forms which make women unable then to connect with their bodies and connect with their deepest selves. Part of what The Vagina Monologues was about was saying, “No, no, no, we’re going to connect with that part of our bodies.” We’re going to feel it. We’re going to know it. We’re going to move into it. We’re going to celebrate it. We’re going to shout it out. We’re going to have orgasms publicly. We’re going to talk about the abuse you’ve been doing to us, and we’re going to release that abuse in these performances. You know, for 30 years, the play has been running everywhere in the world. I think it’s up to almost 140 countries now and 50 languages and it’s raised $120 million. It’s like it’s The Vagina That Could, you know?

AA: Hahaha. 

V: What I’ve seen over and over and over again is that when you can say it, you can own it, you can be it, and you can be free. You can come into your liberation, which is why they are trying to shut down our bodies again and own them and possess them and determine what we can and cannot do with them. And it’s not theirs to decide. 

AA: Yeah. It strikes me that that’s another form of violence. The ones that you describe, you know, rape and incest and the physical violence I think is on the spectrum, of course, the most severe and the most damaging. It strikes me too, though, that even listeners who maybe haven’t experienced that physical violence against their bodies, still growing up in a society where, like you said, you can say all the violent terminology of war, but you can’t even name your own body. It’s not as severe, but it’s a form of violence, too, that you’re describing. It separates us from our own selves. The violence of a patriarchal purity culture that makes you internalize shame about your body part, about part of who you are. That’s a form of violence that is really, really hard to dig out of the self also. 

V: Totally. And also, if you don’t know how to pleasure yourself, know what gives you pleasure. If you don’t know how to have an orgasm, like to me, masturbation is the highest form of prayer. For me it is where I connect with the divine, where I connect with what is holy. I believe that sexuality is holy. And the fact that many of the religions turned sex and turned women’s sexuality into something sinful and something that should be banished, it wasn’t accidental. It was to banish our power. It was to banish our pleasure. It was to banish our essential being in the world. I think that to know how your vagina and vulva and clitoris operate, to know how you have orgasm, to know what feels good so that you can teach someone else what feels good to you, as opposed to never knowing and having sex that is miserable, which happens for so many people. All of their lives, they don’t know what gives them pleasure. 

And I think it’s a pathway to power. It’s a pathway to self knowledge. If you know how to pleasure yourself, you can begin to figure out: What do I want to do with my life? Who am I? What do I want to see? It’s all connected. It’s your body, it’s your mind, your brain, your heart, these are all your spirit. They’re one entity. And the world tries to keep us cut off in silos, even fragmented inside ourselves, which keeps us very dislocated and disassociated and unable to gather ourselves into a powerful, essential woman. 

AA: Wow, this is powerful. And these are words that have never yet been spoken on this podcast, and I am loving it! Love it. This is fantastic. Let’s dig in a little bit to the play itself. Maybe you can talk first about some of the contributors whose voices you highlight in the play, maybe some of the ones that really stand out to you. I’d love to hear how you found these contributors. It sounds like organically you started talking with people and that kind of led to expansion, but how did you find people? Who were they, and what did they say in the work? 

V: Well, let me be very clear. There are no real monologues that reflect one person. Okay?

AA: Okay. 

V: These are not testimonies. What I did, and I do this for a lot of pieces, I just do research. I interview and I talk to tons of people just to get a lay of the land. For example, I talk to 200 women and 50 of them tell me that they were humiliated sexually by various things. So humiliation is an issue. Fifty of them tell me that pubic hair is a big problem and they don’t know what to do about it. I find that out of those 200 women, a hundred of them were raped. A hundred of them. I begin to get themes, I begin to get ideas, I begin to see that this is a problem. At the time, there was this amazing woman named Betty Dodson, who was doing these incredible sexual workshops for women, teaching them how to have orgasms, and I actually interviewed several women who had taken her workshop. So I went and interviewed Betty and I began to learn what she was doing. Now, it’s not an interview that’s based on Betty. It’s not her interview, but there are elements of what I learned there. 

I think it ranges from my own granddaughter’s birth, which I was present for, and I realized I had finished the piece but there was no piece in it about birth, which was bizarre. Even though I once was interviewed by a male journalist and he was like, “What’s the connection?” I was like, “Oh my God.” Haha. So I knew that that’s how the piece had to end, with the birth of my granddaughter. But there were sex workers that I interviewed who had a whole different relationship to sex. I think I was very involved. I went to Bosnia during the war where women were being held in rape camps and I spent months there talking to women. And that monologue is not based on any woman’s story, but their stories and the reality of that war enthused me, and I created a character out of which I wrote that rape piece, because it was in me at that moment. I worked in a homeless shelter and I interviewed a woman there who had an amazing lesbian affair which turned her whole life around, so I decided I’d write a piece about that, you know? It was really more getting a lay of the land and feeling what women were feeling, and then letting my imagination go and creating these monologues. 

AA: Okay, that makes sense. Coming back to that amalgam piece of the women in Bosnia, that one really stuck with me. And the edition that I have has some supplemental things about how The Vagina Monologues was received, and I remember reading that when that was performed, I think it was pretty soon after the war, is that right? And people were just wailing in the audience in grief. 

V: It was really interesting. It was performed by Bosnian women in Mostar, a town which had been destroyed, and there were Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian women in the audience. And it was unbelievably powerful where people were just wailing, but it was also very healing because people could tell the stories and then afterwards could talk about it and they could bring it to the fore. I really believe that what we don’t remember, what we don’t talk about, what we don’t reckon with, what we don’t apologize for, controls us for eternity. And I think that piece has allowed a lot of people who’ve been raped, and there are a lot of women who have been raped. I mean, I can’t even tell you how many people come up to me after shows, lines of women to tell me they’ve been raped or battered or incested or cut, I mean, I thought those women were going to be telling me about their great orgasms and their wonderful sex lives and no, not at all. 

And look, I sadly don’t think it’s ended. I think that the more we move into this kind of psychotic patriarchy – it’s the only thing I can call it because I think it’s getting more and more separated from reality. And the punishments coming up for women, like the abortion punishments, do you know what I mean? That you have to wait until your baby’s dead inside you, you have to wait until you have sepsis but you’re in the last three minutes of it before you’ll be given an abortion. I mean, what are we talking about? Are people getting arrested or getting the death penalty? This is just hatred of women. This is punitive, really vicious, cruel misogyny. And we all have to have the tools and the ability to speak about things without shame and without embarrassment and without fear if we’re going to rebut what’s going on. 

AA: Yeah, thank you for that. I couldn’t agree more. Speaking of this gender-based violence and patriarchal abuse of all kinds, and this patriarchal psychosis that you’re talking about, I was really moved by your TED Talk on apologies. You just mentioned apologies, that if we don’t have an apology or make an apology when we’ve wronged someone, that that keeps us stuck. Can you talk about that notion of the power of apologies? 

V: Yes, and I’m really happy you asked me about that. Let me go back to my book, The Apology, because that’s where all this really began and I began to understand the power of apology. You know, for so many years, I really believed my father was going to get old and then he’d come to his senses and he’d wake up and realize he loved me and he needed to make amends and apologize to me. And it didn’t happen. He died. And even after he died, for like 31 years, I kept thinking, “I’m going to go to the mailbox and there’s going to be an apology.” It wasn’t logical. It was like this childlike idea that he would wake up and send it from the ethers to me, and it didn’t happen. And then, as our movement progresses, the next phase of our movement was #MeToo, and all these men were being called out and I just kept waiting for one man to come forward and apologize publicly and it didn’t happen. All these men, I didn’t see one public apology. And then I started to research in history and books and couldn’t find any man who’d ever apologized for raping anyone. And I started to think that this is really extreme. This must be a fundamental column of patriarchy, the non-apology. 

AA: Wow. 

V: And if you don’t apologize, you keep your power. You don’t become vulnerable. You don’t show your weakness. You don’t show anyone you’re wrong. And I realized that my father wasn’t going to apologize to me, but that I, in fact, could write his apology. But what it would require is that I climb inside my father’s psyche, which was a place I never wanted to go because I never really wanted to understand him. I just wanted to monsterize him. I decided that I had been living in my father’s narrative for so many years, even when I was fighting him, even when I was raging at him, even when I was resisting him, it was still his story, right? And so I made the decision that I was going to climb into him and try to figure out why he had done what he had done to his daughter and what were the things that went into making that happen.

The first part of the book was an inquiry about who was my father, what happened in his life that made him into a man that was capable of beating and raping his daughter? And then what had he actually done? The details, because there’s no apology without details. If someone says to you, “I’m sorry I raped you, I’m sorry I hurt you,” that is not it. People have to say exactly what they’ve done to you so that you know and they know, you both know what has happened. Because so many women have been gaslighted and made to believe they’re crazy and made to believe that they’ve made it up and made to believe that they’re completely insane, when in fact we know that’s not true. And then the third piece is looking at what did  that rape do? What did that battery do? What were the long-term impacts of that on this person’s life, on my life, which I’m still recovering from at 71. And rape isn’t a moment, battery isn’t a moment, it’s your life. It affects your body, it affects disease, it affects your health, it affects your confidence, it affects your memory, it affects your ability to function, it affects your ability to be in intimate relationships, it affects every single thing that happens to you. And we don’t talk about the long-term consequences, because what happens to women doesn’t matter to people.

Then the last part, of course, is then making the apology after doing that. And the book was the hardest thing I ever wrote. I had to climb into my father’s psyche, I had to live there, but he really began to talk to me and I really feel that he came and he was with me through the writing of the book. As an ancestor, he was with me and he would wake me up at four in the morning and say, “Go to your office, I have a story to tell you.” And I would go and I would just write. Anyway, the last line of the book is, “Old man, be gone.” And I don’t know if I wrote it or my father wrote it, but after it was like, “Shhh!” You know at the end of Peter Pan when Tinkerbell just goes, “Shhh!” It was like my father went, “Shhh!” and he’s gone. And he’s truly gone, he hasn’t been back. 

I feel like one of the reasons why I changed my name is that I had no more rancor towards my father, I had no more bitterness. The story was over. That story between us was over, but I didn’t want his name. I didn’t want anything connected to it. I wanted the last part of my life to be mine, to be my name, to be my time, to be my energy. And look, V is just a beautiful letter: vaginas and vulvas and victory and voluptuous and there are so many great words with Vs. They’re openings, right? They’re openings, they are invitations. But I think that really what I learned in that process is that we can write our perpetrator’s apology. We shouldn’t do it alone. We should do it with therapists and go through a process, but we can free ourselves. 

And I would say also that I’ve heard now that the book is being used in group therapy, in groups of men coming out of prison who are beginning to make amends and to write apologies, deep apologies to the people they have brutalized or hurt or raped. And this is the process we have to undergo. I think that #MeToo was the beginning of calling men out, but we have to call them in now, as my friend Tony Porter says, we have to call them in. And they have to be called into a process of accountability where they look into themselves and change themselves by that self-reflection so that they’re not capable of doing it again, and so they don’t bring up sons who are capable of doing it. And I’m just really excited about this notion. You know, we teach our children how to pray, right? We teach our children how to meditate. Apology is as elaborate and depthful and important as any of those two things. Because it’s how we humble ourselves, it’s how we own our human flaws. And all of us have human flaws because all of us are human. We make mistakes, we’re in a process of evolution and learning, and the mechanism we have to keep going is apology. But if men don’t apologize, it stops the process of human evolution. It makes women wrong and men right, and we’re just frozen in this incredibly stuck place.

AA: Yeah. Wow. This is really powerful and something that I agree with wholeheartedly and I’m sometimes criticized for on Breaking Down Patriarchy. Some people will say I do reach out to men too much. So I’m always thinking about that, like, am I overly contorting myself to be palatable to men? Am I courting their approval too much? This is something that I think about a lot. But at the heart of it, the ethos that I really believe in is what you described. I believe in redemption. I have to. I believe in forgiveness, the ability to change. That has to be my goal. We talk about patriarchy as systemic, and it is, but it is also individual. It’s enacted by people, real people, who were babies once. I’m always trying to figure out how to be hard on systems but soft on people and see that human being, and think, what happened to them? How can I reach them so that they could possibly rehabilitate and repent, to use religious language, and then be an ally? That is my goal. 

V: Part of it has to be that men have to take that responsibility. 

AA: Yes. 

if men don’t apologize, it stops the process of human evolution. It makes women wrong and men right, and we’re just frozen

V: I don’t want to do that work for men. Men have to be willing to step up and do that work. And I want to make a distinction between understanding and justifying. I came to understand my father, why he did what he did, and that was very helpful to me because I realized that none of it had anything to do with me, it was on my father. But that didn’t justify what my father did. My father had to take responsibility in the writing that I did for what he did. And in a way, I’m very wary about forgiveness, if I can just talk about that a little bit. 

AA: Please, please do. 

V: Sometimes I feel like it’s imposed on us by religion that we have to forgive. We have to forgive. It’s not up to me to forgive anybody. I’m not a higher power, I’m not mother nature, I’m not that. It’s up to you to do the work on yourself. What I can do as a person, is I can do the best I can to go into my soul, to go into myself, to make the best apology I can make to you. And I think that when someone does that, there’s this alchemy of disillusion where the wound goes away, where the pain goes away, where resentment that you’ve been holding, it dissipates. Because when the apology is true, it is a releaser. It is a dissolver. And that, I think, is the closest we get to what people call forgiveness. But I think that sometimes when women have been raped or beaten, the onus gets put on them to have to forgive. And I don’t think it’s our responsibility. It’s not my job, it’s your job if you’ve been a predator, if you’ve done something horrible, to really go into your soul and your psyche and do the work of self-examination. 

I worked in a woman’s federal prison for eight years with amazing women who were in there for doing violent crimes, and just about all of them had been responsible for a murder. I worked with them for eight years, and we did this writing group over and over and over, and each week they went deeply into their crimes, deeply into why they had done them, what they had done. It was an unbelievable process and it went on for eight years. But I will tell you that at the end of those years, all but one of those women is out of prison and she’s doing unbelievably well. She did a process of self-review and apology and reckoning that freed her, but also allowed her to understand why she had done what she had done. What had led her to do what she had done, what didn’t she know, what didn’t she see? And in many cases, women were just outcomes. They weren’t making choices, they were just reacting. They were just responding to terrible circumstances they had lived through that had built and built to a critical violent moment. 

So, I think that in some ways, we need to establish places where these processes of self-reflection and apology can occur, and treat them like the critically important alchemic transformational work that needs to happen in a society that has more people in prison than in a small country, right? Our prisons are so full of people who have suffered poverty, have suffered neglect, have been terribly abused, have been terribly sexually violated, and there’s no process through which people can come to terms with what they’ve done and why they’ve done it and change that, and I think my life is devoted to that process, to how we do that. And that doesn’t mean people aren’t responsible, and it doesn’t mean that the victim or survivor has to ever be responsible for forgiving anybody. 

AA: Yeah, thank you so much for clarifying that. And even thinking about your experience and your choosing to go into your father’s psyche, how incredibly brave that is, what it reminds me of is the principles and values of the civil rights movement: the principles of nonviolence, to be able to hold someone to account and also to be willing to do that work. Also, it brings to mind how unfair it is that the person who is the victim of a crime, that you were left with that burden. I’m so glad that you said how important it is for victims to not take on that burden unnecessarily for the redemption of that other person, but to think, well, what can I do to heal myself? Is that kind of what you’re saying? You did the exercise for you. 

V: Exactly. You can’t forgive anybody, in my opinion. They have to do the work of taking responsibility and doing deep, deep, reflective, agonizing, emotional work of getting to the core of what they’ve done, feeling the pain of their victim, going to those extremes, which release them. That is their release. It’s not somebody coming and going, “I forgive you.” I don’t think that will change it. What changes things is that inner work. And people say to me, “Why would men or why would perpetrators want to go through that process?” I can only say that I don’t think you get away with anything. I think you go to zones, you are caught, you are always stuck where you haven’t worked out what you’ve done to other people.

AA: Oh, that’s incredibly illuminating and thought-provoking. I’ll be thinking about that for a long time, so thank you for sharing it. The next topic that I want to talk about is V-Day and the actual work that V-Day and other initiatives are doing in the world. I’m curious to hear about the original vision of V-Day and what it’s doing now to end gender-based violence.

V: Well, I think that when I discovered, after all the shows, how many women were coming up to me to talk to me about violence, that I felt that either I’m going to stop doing the play because this is too much, or I’m going to do something to change it. And you know how all great movements start, you invite people to your living room and kitchen and you sit around a table and you say, “We’ve got this play. How could we use this play to end violence against all women, genderfluid people, and the earth? What could we do?” And I think that we began to say, well, let’s first do this gigantic performance in New York with all these amazing actors, and let’s raise money for local groups and spread the money around New York. And we had 1,500 people show up to this amazing performance, everyone from Whoopi Goldberg to Glenn Close to Susan Sarandon, it was amazing. It just kind of blew the roof off the theater, and we realized that we could use the play. So for years, the play was given away free at a certain period of the year. Everyone would do the play in their own communities and whatever money they raised from the show would go to their local rape centers, safe houses, rape hotlines, whatever it was that they wanted. And that was amazing. 

Then that gave birth to us opening safe houses in Kenya and in Iraq to stop FGM, where girls could run away and save their clitoris and not be cut and go to school. That’s been going on now for almost 20 years, and we’ve saved thousands of girls. And the woman who ran the house is now a member of parliament, so we’ve just seen incredible progression. And then we opened City of Joy, which is one of our most glorious projects in the Congo, where there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of women who have been raped in an economic war where people come into villages, militias who work for multinationals who are stealing the resources of the Congo that go into our cell phones and our computers, and they rape women. They have husbands rape daughters and they have sons rape their mothers, and they just destroy the community so that the community flees and they take over the mines. 

Twelve years ago we opened City of Joy, which is this amazing sanctuary and revolutionary center for women. Ninety women come for six months for free. They’re healed, they’re educated, they’re loved. We have a gorgeous farm, a 350 hectare farm where women learn permaculture and where they go to learn how to become farmers and how to manage and grow their own lands. And we’ve graduated, I think, over 2,000 women and they are now leaders in their communities. They’ve gone from being victims to survivors to leaders. And they’re actually now bringing women to City of Joy, vetting women, and they’re part of our whole network of women in the Congo who have turned their pain to power and turned their pain to planting. We have all kinds of projects like that. 

And then after 15 years, of course, we were doing beautiful work, but we hadn’t ended violence. So I was like, we need to up the stakes. We need to do something else. I was at City of Joy and I looked at these women who had suffered the worst brutalities in the world and they were dancing, but they were dancing in a way I can’t even tell you the power, the magic, the extraordinary energy of their dancing. And I thought, “Wow, what if one billion women on the planet and all the men who love them danced on the same day? It would just kick up energy.” So thirteen years ago, we started One Billion Rising. We thought it was going to be one year. In the first year, 200 countries rose, and now we’re in year thirteen and it’s just growing and growing. And, you know, dancing has led to so much amazing change, because each year we have a theme. We dance for freedom or we dance for justice or we dance for the earth. Then people go to where they want to make change, and they do uprisings there. We have seen laws change and mindsets change and culture change. 

This year we’re rising against fascism, because it’s very clear that fascism is everywhere and spreading madly. And in my opinion, it’s a very extreme form of patriarchy, where the strongman, the domination of one strongman and the state begin to get totalitarian power over the people. And we’re on the verge of it in this country. We’re in a very, very dangerous place right now with Trump and Project 2025 bringing in a time that would demolish democracy, we can’t even imagine, where the rights of women and LGBTQ people… The fact that we won’t be able to teach history or Black history or know what’s happened, where white supremacy will be ushered in on a plate, where there will be no more Medicare, where they’ll tax working people and take taxes away from the rich. If you read Project 2025, it looks like an SNL skit. It actually does. You can’t even believe they would think up this stuff. No more climate change, more drilling. It feels like a manifesto for suicide, you know? 

And this is what fascism looks like: The unraveling of respect and a multicultural world of people and where only a certain group of people matter. They’re rich and they’re white and they’re men and some women who get included and who play along. And I think that we all have to really do everything in our power right now to wake up and wake up everybody else, and understand that we’re on the verge of something very apocalyptic, in my opinion. And I don’t think that’s extreme. I have seen Trump now, I have been a person living in New York. I lived in New York for a long time and I spent a lot of my life protesting Trump, whether it was the gentrification of New York and the absolute expelling of poor people and making so many people homeless, or whether it’s all the cons and the scams. Or whether it’s rape, and the fact that 50 women have come out to say he sexually abused them or assaulted them. He’s been convicted in a civil court of rape and having to pay for that. So now we have a rapist who has 34 felonies, who incited an insurrection, who is running for president. 

And it seems to be okay with a lot of people. In my opinion, there is a kind of cult-like mentality around him, which is deluding working people into believing that Trump cares about him when nothing in his history has ever shown us that is true. Talk to the workers who work for Trump, talk to anybody. He has no respect for working people. He has no respect for poor people. He’s called them losers and he treats them like losers. So, to see all these people who have so little lining up behind a man who has none of their interests or care at heart is very, very upsetting to me. But what we must do now is we must come together. Women, LGBTQ people, Black people, Latina people, Asian people, every single person in this country who is not rich, who is not a privileged white man. And we need to say, “This is our country and we are not turning it over so that we can be oppressed.” And also let’s look at the ban on Muslims and not letting migrants in. This is a country of immigrants. Every one of us, except for the indigenous people here, are immigrants. So to say that only some people can come is not what this country was founded on. So part of it is to read Project 2025. Look at it and then be outraged and get out there and fight to make sure that Trump and the surrounding far right that want to push us back to the dark ages do not get into power.

AA: Yep. Hear, hear to all of that. I just read your book Reckoning, and you write about “disaster patriarchy” as one of the things that you’re focusing on now at this point in your career. And this is before the most recent developments in the political landscape, and it’s just gotten worse, I think, from probably the time that you wrote the book. But yeah, thanks for outlining all of that. Tell us more about the specific initiative, it’s called One Billion Rising, is that right? How do we get involved in that? 

We have to fight for the rights of Black people in this country who are still under siege, whether it’s police killings, whether it’s lack of equality, whether it’s always being threatened, whether it’s never feeling safe. We are each other. We are responsible to each other. None of us are free until all of us are free. And that means we can’t support the killing of people and murdering of children and babies in Gaza. And we can’t support people being destroyed in the Congo for our benefit. We have to understand that we are one world and we are utterly interconnected and interdependent, and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s not a bad thing. I just think that so often I have the privilege of being in a worldwide movement where I have sisters in India and Congo and Swaziland and Afghanistan and I’ve been working with those sisters for some 20-25 years to build a world where women are safe and free and where we can walk the streets anywhere in the world and feel safe, right? Where we can speak out and know that our voices will be respected, where we can get paid the same amount that men get paid for the same jobs, where we can do anything and that’s just an assumption and it’s not special, right? And I think that we have to stand for our trans and non-binary brothers and sisters who are so bravely being themselves in a world where they have been so horribly uninvited and where they’re suffering so much violence for being exactly who they were meant to be. 

How do we stand with each other? How do we not make limits on who matters and who doesn’t, that we all matter equally and that we all deserve love and we all deserve the right to exist as we are. We all deserve to live in a world that is not constantly threatening us with gun violence and horrible hate. That’s the world I want to live in, where we’re here for each other, and that’s a non-patriarchal world. We have to dismantle patriarchy once and for all, because I think it’s really the head of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism. It’s this thing of the dominance of the father. It’s this thing that there is this person or this being who has privilege at the top, who matters, and everybody else doesn’t matter. That notion has to end. That time’s over. It’s just over. And all of us have to fight for it in a way that brings out our grace, it brings out our humor, brings out our joy, brings out our love, and not our violence, and not our hate.

AA: Well, through this whole conversation, V, I have to say, I think it’s present in all of your TED Talks, it’s present in The Vagina Monologues and in Reckoning and all the work that you do, the words that came to my mind is that quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, where he says, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hatred cannot drive out hatred. Only love can do that.” You’ve so bravely brought to light the real human darkness that exists in the world, and it’s really hard to read. I recommend to all listeners and people who are watching this that you do read The Vagina Monologues and that you do confront it. It’s so critical to confront what it really is. But then what you do also, again, is say, and now what are we going to do about it? We’re going to fight it with light, with love, with dancing, telling the truth and joy! 

V: And orgasms! Connection and that feeling that our lives are worth something. So many people in this country right now are so lonely. They’re so lonely and they’re so alone and they don’t believe they have a reason to be anymore. They’re either poor and they don’t know what to do, they’re sick and they don’t know who to turn to, they’re feeling so depressed and despaired. And we have to create a country where when you sit down next to somebody, you know that that person is your family, whoever that person is. And you reach out to that person and you love that person and you lift up that person. 

You know, I have a rule that I have to do one act of extreme generosity a day that I shock myself doing. And it’s so much fun because it’s so much fun to shock yourself and it’s also fun to shock other people. It really begins to get you into the habit of generosity and the habit of gratitude. We are so fortunate, many of us, to live in a country at this point where– I can only speak for myself. I get up every morning and I look at trees and I look at the woods and I look at sky and I hear birds and I hear water. And I think, “I am so blessed to be on this earth.” And we need to cherish her because if we do not start cherishing this earth, if we do not start protecting her, if we do not start honoring her, we are not going to be here anymore. She is already beginning to throw us off. She does not feel respected. She does not feel cherished. She feels used and discarded and raped and just the way women are. It’s the same mentality of tame, undermine, have, take what you want, don’t think about the future, grab it, bite it, cut it, chop it, drill it. That’s how we treat women and that’s how we treat the earth. And, to some degree, that’s how capitalism and this whole ongoing madness has taught us to treat each other. 

And we have to make a determination that we’re going to do something else. We’re going to love the earth. We’re going to protect her. We’re going to see all the ways we can change our behavior and change our way of life so that we have a future as human beings and we don’t self-destruct. And I look at some of these leaders that we have whose egos and idea of themselves is more important in preserving than millions and millions of people and the earth herself. And that is what I mean by diabolical or psychotic patriarchy, where it becomes one person’s self-image or self-perception or ego becomes more important than the billions. And that we have to reverse. We have to. 

AA: We do. We do. We are at kind of an inflection point, I feel we’re at a crossroads as a species across the planet. Wow. Well, I feel really uplifted and heartened. And again, I just want to thank you, V, for being here. I want to thank you for your lifetime of work and the effect that it’s had on me personally and on our world. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and thank you for being here today. It was just a joy to talk to you. 

V: Thanks for this wonderful show you’re doing. Bravo, Bravo. 

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