Eve Ensler {TED India, 2009}

Eve Ensler's talk was recommended to me a few months back. I think it's only fair to warn you that it does not make for easy viewing, the examples of brutality against girls are hard to listen to, but they make the talk all the more powerful so please be brave and watch it.

As well as sharing stories which cannot be unheard, Eve Ensler puts forward the notion that society has forced the verb 'to please' onto girls everywhere and argues that we need to "change that verb to be 'educate' or 'activate' or 'engage' or 'confront' or 'defy' or 'create'." Eve includes examples of what happens when girls are allowed to be fully themselves - I'm not entirely sure that the example of a teenage girl who expresses herself by getting 56 star tattoos on the right side of her face is a particularly helpful example but maybe I'm missing something?

The most powerful part of the talk for me is the reading that Eve gives at the end. The words are from her book ('I Am An Emotional Creature') and the piece is called "I'm An Emotional Creature." Eve stands up to do the reading and suddenly her words are swirling around the auditorium in a way that can't fail to sweep you up:

"I am an emotional creature. Things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-pressed ideas. They pulse through my organs and legs and burn up my ears. [...] I know when a storm is coming. I can feel the invisible stirrings in the air."
[...]
"This is not extreme. It's a girl thing, what we would all be if the big door inside us flew open. Don't tell me not to cry, to calm it down, not to be so extreme, to be reasonable. I am an emotional creature."

Although Eve's talk is all about what it means to be a girl she's careful to make it clear from the start that the 'girl cell' is in all of us - it's the balanced, wise, compassionate, empathic, passionate, vulnerable, open, intense, intuitive part of us that is written off as being over-emotional and irrational. Eve puts forward the notion that the suppression of our collective 'girl-ship' is done at a societal level because it doesn't meet the needs of our patriarchal, empire-building world where emotions 'get in the way'.

... Thought provoking stuff ...