The Good Body

"In the midst of war, in a time of escalating global terrorism, when civil liberties are disappearing as fast as the ozone layer, when one out of three women in the world will be beaten or raped in her lifetime, why write a play about my stomach?

Maybe because my stomach is one thing I feel I have control over or because I hope that my stomach is something I could get control over. Maybe because I see how my stomach has come to occupy my attention, and I see that other women's stomachs or butts or thighs or hair or skin have come to occupy their minds so that we have very little left for war or anything else. When a group of ethnically diverse, economically disadvantaged women in the U.S. were recently asked about the one thing they would change in their lives if they could, the majority said, 'Lose weight.' Maybe I identify with these women because I've bought into this idea that if my stomach were flat, then I would be good, and I would be accepted, admired, important, loved.

I began writing The Good Body during my work on my first play, The Vagina Monologues, and it all started with me and my particular obsession with my 'imperfect' stomach.

I am certainly not alone. I have been to over 50 countries in the last six years as a result of The Vagina Monologues. I have talked with women in the surgical centers in Beverly Hills, on the beaches of Rio, in the gyms of Mumbai, New York and Moscow, in the hectic and crowded beauty salons in Istanbul, Johannesburg and Rome. Most of them loathed at least one part of their body. There was always one part that they longed to change, that they had a medicine cabinet full of products devoted to transforming or hiding or reducing or straightening. Just about every woman believed that if she could just get that part right, everything else would work out. It is an endless, heartbreaking campaign.

The Good Body is my prayer, my attempt to help women break free so that we may spend more time running the world than running away from it; so that we may be good in the true sense of good; so that we may be consumed by the sorrow of the world rather than consuming to avoid that sorrow and suffering. it is my hope, my desire, that we will all refuse to be Barbie, that we will say no to the loss of the particular and unconventional, whether it be a voluptuous woman in a silk sari or a woman with defining lines of character in her face or olive-tone skin or wild, curly hair.

Can you imagine the energy that could be unleashed if women stopped obsessing about their bodies? Tell the image makers and plastic surgeons that you are not afraid to age. That what you fear most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and love your body. Stop fixing it. It was never broken."

~Eve Ensler