Eve Ensler has launched her V-Girls Movement with publication today of I am an Emotional Creature:  The Secret Life of Girls Around the World.  A V-Girls Advisory Circle is creating a curriculum to accompany the book.  In the meantime, the V-Girl web site provides social networking opportunities for teenage girls searching to find their authentic voices.  The graphics are hip and fabulous.  The message will empower girls of any age.

I Am an Emotional Creature is essentially a teenage version of Ms. Ensler’s iconic The Vagina Monologues.  It’s classic Eve Ensler.

Fans of The Vagina Monologues will recognize the book’s signature piece, “I Am an Emotional Creature:”

I am an emotional creature.

Things do not come to me

as intellectual theories or hard-shaped ideas. . .

I love that I do not take things lightly.

Everthing is intense to me. . .

These feelings make me better.

They make me ready.

They make me present.

They make me strong. . .

You don’t tell the Atlantic Ocean

to behave. . .

I am an emotional, devotional,

incandotional creature.

And I love, hear me,

love love love

being a girl.

We Silence Girl Power

When Ms. Ensler debuted her new idea at the TED India conference in November, 2009, she addressed how we silence girls’ authentic voices ~ tell them not to show their brilliance ~ tone it down ~ don’t be too intense.  We sell them and objectify them and turn them into commodities to be bought and sold.  In essence, we render them invisible.

She also shared how her violent father ordered her not to cry while she was being beaten because it exposed his brutality to him.  He didn’t want to see it ~ didn’t want to be reminded.

Girl Power is silenced by patriarchy power.  Girls are initiated into society via a process intended to crush, eradicate, annihilate, humiliate, belittle, censor, reduce, and kill off their voices.  Our compassion, empathy, passion, intensity, emotions, vulnerability, intuitive intelligence, and vision are silenced.

We forget that compassion informs wisdom and vulnerability is our greatest strength.

The need to please robs us of our power.

– Eve Ensler

Mandate to Please

Girls are conditioned to please ~ to do what someone else wants them to do rather than to be authentic.  Ms. Ensler told CBS’ Early Show this morning that she believes girls stay in violent relationships because that’s what their boyfriends want:

I think often when girls stay with boys, it isn’t always because they want to be beat up, it’s because they’re feeling their [boyfriend’s] sorrow, or they’re feeling their insecurity, or they’re feeling their grief, or they’re feeling something boys don’t feel.  So they’re overcompensating for that.

One of the monologues, “Dear Rihanna,” is devoted to teenage girls’ reaction to the dating abuse Rihanna experienced from Chris Brown.

V-Girls Revolution

Ms. Ensler is calling all girls to claim our emotions, break the silence, and unleash our feminine energy.  She wants to shift the focus from a mandate to please to a mandate to educate, activate, engage, confront, defy, and create.  She believes girl power can save the world.  In the book’s epilogue, she issues a Manifesta:

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. . .

Always fight back

Ask for it

Say you want it. . .

Why am I waiting

Whining

Pining

Fitting in?