Article by: Alex Pearlman
While her world-famous Vagina Monologues may not be appropriate for pre-teen audiences, Eve Ensler’s new book of monologues and poetry, I am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World (Villard, 2010), is written just for that age group.
Targeting middle school and high school-aged girls, Ensler creates fictionalized personas that seem to vary in age from 13 to about 19, from all over the world, each with their own thoughts, feelings, anxieties and circumstances.
Each monologue and each character is prefaced by a short poem, each of which are formatted as though the girls were responding to a message board. For example, “Things I heard about Sex” lists responses such as, “It’s natural/it’s healthy/it’s evil” and “Ask questions/practice abstinence/get birth control.”
Then, the monologues, (some of which are actually dialogues, others of which are actually short stories in the form of diary entries) are classic Ensler. They read like peer-mentoring lectures. Ensler is the omniscient greater-than-thou presence, but she’s not at all superior. It’s clear that Ensler has a deep understanding of the neurosis and psychosis that come with being a teenage girl, no matter where that girl lives, and her objective here is not only to show that girls are all the same, everywhere, but that sometimes they are totally disgusting, wrong, devious, and awful, the same way they should be pitied, helped, counseled and supported, right or wrong, anorexic or fat.
“hunger blog” is a diary-esque entry in which a young American writes about her experiences with anorexia. “Blog 3: last night I ate cooked vegetables naked in front of the mirror. It grossed me out so much I haven’t been hungry in over 24 hrs.”
It’s this kind of shock and awe that Ensler excels at, but just like the rest of her work, Emotional Creature doesn’t shock just for the sake of shocking. There’s a deeper meaning here, meant to be garnered by girls, their moms and their friends – you are human, but I still love you.
Throughout the book are also “Girl Facts,” little bits of trivia about girls around the world that touch on whatever subject the following monologue will touch on. “I have 35 minutes before he comes looking for me” is about a 16-year-old sex slave in Bulgaria. The “Girl Fact” that precedes it reads, “Girls between thirteen and eighteen years of age constitute the largest group in the sex industry. It is estimated that half a million girls below the age of eighteen are victims of trafficking each year.”
What Ensler is trying to achieve here is two-fold: one, the activist in her is calling out to all people who know and love girls to help those who need it, from the Ohio suburbs to Dakar. And two, Ensler is writing to reassure all those confused and abused teenagers, letting them know that they aren’t alone in their struggles with themselves.
Emotional Creature is nothing less than what we expect from Ensler, that being literary and cerebral perfection, and we can only hope that with her help, a few girls will stop feeling like they need to be skinny, pretty, popular, perfect to be accepted for who they are.
