 Hello, welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us a special guest. We have Eve Ensler who's come to a tour of India. Eve Ensler is the author of Vajana Monologues and her latest book The Apology which is making waves. She's going to answer just a few questions about writing the book and what words mean for women. It's a book which completely blows one away. What made you write it? I think there were two things that made me write it. You know, I was a child who was sexually abused by my father from the time I was five until I was ten and then afterwards physically battered by him almost murdering me twice. And I think I always thought when I got older my father would apologize, he'd wake up and he'd realize the error of his ways and how horrible he'd been and he'd say I'm sorry and guess what? He didn't and he died and he's been dead for 31 years and in 31 years I've worked 22 of those years to end violence against women and fight all women and fight for a world where women aren't treated the way I was treated by my father, aren't raped, aren't invaded, aren't occupied, aren't violated, aren't battered, aren't degraded, aren't demeaned. And our movement's been long. It's a 70-year-old movement that began with African-American women fighting off their white supremacist rapists and now with this recent iteration of Me Too, we've seen more and more women come out, more and more women tell their stories and break the silence which has been happening gradually in stages over these 70 years. Yet in all this time it occurred to me. Yes, a couple of men have lost some jobs, few have gone to prison, very few, few have been humiliated, but I have never ever heard a man make a public apology for sexual abuse or domestic abuse. As a matter of fact, in 16,000 years of patriarchy I haven't read an apology of a man ever who's come out and said this is what I've done and I'm not talking about I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm talking about a deep, sacred, omitted, thorough, self-interrogated apology. So it occurred to me that I have been yearning for an apology my whole life. I know many survivors who are yearning for that apology that maybe I should write it. Maybe I should write the apology I needed to hear and climb inside my father and let my father be inside me and say all the things to myself that I needed to hear and see what that might do. Might it create a blueprint for other men? Did it? Did it do that? I hope it did. I think one of the things I discovered is the anatomy or the architecture of an apology, what it really means. You know, we teach our children how to pray, right? We teach them the devotion of prayer, we teach them the constancy of prayer, the commitment of prayer, but we don't teach our boys particularly to apologize. Girls are very good at saying I'm sorry. We apologize for everything. But boys, they don't apologize. And what I realized is an apology is a very specific thing and I think it has four parts. I think the first part is a deep look at your own childhood and your own history. Who and what made you? What was your family's impact on you? What was the impact of a patriarchal culture of toxic masculinity? What were you told about yourself as a man? What was done to you as a man? Were you violated yourself? Were you child abused? Were you told that you couldn't cry? Were you told not to be tender? Were you told not to be curious? Was your humanity robbed? Were you told to shut it down and act like a man and man up? And then to really investigate both the personal and the cultural and the political origins of your being. And then secondly, to do a detailed, detailed accounting of what you have done to your victim because the liberation is in the details. You can't say I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm sorry I abused you. It's what did you do specifically? I took your head and I banged it against the wall. I came into your room at night and I pulled your panties down. It's the specifics of what you've done, the details that begins for your victim to be the liberation because when you say the details of what you've done it's clear you're owning what you've done. And then the second part of that is that second step is what was your intention? What did you mean to do? Did you mean to violate? Did you mean to hurt? Did you mean to see this beautiful being and an eviscerator beauty and eviscerator power? The third step is what did your victim feel? Getting inside your victim, what was the impact on your victim? Did it destroy her life? Did it ruin her body? Did she stop being able to think? Did she go crazy? Did she feel betrayed? To open your heart to feel what your victim felt. And then the fourth step is obviously making amends and taking responsibility for that. So having gone through all those steps would be an indication that you have changed and you wouldn't be capable of doing any of that or anything you've done ever again. And that's what you mean by making amends? Yes. Yes. That is a real apology and it's a process. It's a sacred commitment. It's something you have to do and spend time doing and really wrestling. It's how to change yourself. But then again here we have a template but it's a template written by a woman. Of course. As a very funny and brilliant writer said in Italy when she interviewed me, of course we get raped, we get destroyed and then we have to write their apologies too. But in fact, I will say for myself, writing this was a profoundly transformative healing experience because the imagination is so powerful. I was just asking you can other women write too? Will they feel better? And then what would be the political content in that if we can just go ahead and write our books and feel better? Then why fight? Well here's the deal. I wrote this so men will make their apologies. I wrote this to give men, look I have a good friend Tony Porter who says we've called men out. Now we need to call them in. Men need to join us in this struggle to end violence against women and girls and our mother earth. If men do not join us in this struggle we will be doing this over and over for maybe the eight years we have left with climate catastrophe, right? Men have to be with us. And I think we've done a lot of work to tell our stories. We've done a lot of work but we're stuck. I don't see men changing. I see men paused. I see men in the kind of what am I going to do now. But I don't see men doing the work that we had to do as feminists to change ourselves, to break out of a certain mentality, out of a certain paradigm, out of a certain training. So I wrote this book primarily so men would change. So men would have a blueprint that they could look at and work with their clergy, work with the therapist, work with a friend, to go work in a group of men, to go through a process to really change how they have been acculturated, change how they have behaved, change how they have acted, and change so that they can then bring these apologies to victims who can get free on the basis of their apologies. So that's number one. That's why I wrote this book. In the meantime it actually happened to be a very liberating experience. And how did it translate? How well did it translate across cultures? You know, in vagina monologues was global in its scope. It's really surprising. Well, it's not surprising and it is surprising. I mean, the book came out in May and it's the foreign rights have sold in many countries already. And I've already been to Canada, Italy, to France, to Taiwan. It turns out men don't apologize anywhere, right? Yes. So it seems to be a universal phenomena. And it turns out that familiar abuse and what happens to girls and families is pretty universal. I mean, I was just in Taiwan yesterday and in an event the night before last and I mean, there were lines of women coming up to tell me this was their experience and that was true in Italy and that's been true everywhere I've been so far. So I think it is a universal experience and I think we're all looking for a way out now. We're inviting men now. But they respond. Yeah, well, here's the good news. I have gotten so many letters from men as a result of this book who have thanked me, who said they're beginning to work on their apologies. We started an apology. It's called theapologybook.net website and men are beginning to send in apologies. It is slow beginning but it is starting. And I think, you know, my father says something to me very shocking in the book. He said that to be an apologist is to be a trader to men. And once one man admits he knows what he's doing is wrong, the whole story of patriarchy will begin to crumble. What we need now is for men, a few brave men, a few, just like there were a few brave women who became feminists in the early days, a few brave men to be gender traders, to come out and say, I'm going to start doing the work. I'm going to apologize. I'm going to be the ones who break the silence, the way we've broken the silence. I'm going to be the ones who take a risk, you know, to put myself on the line and to say, I've done bad things. And I want to look at why I've done those things. And I want to look at why I thought it was okay to demean women or put women down or assault women or abuse women. Because the truth of the matter is, unless that happens, we're going to be spinning and spinning in this maelstrom forever. Do you worry or do you think about how a book and an account like yours is also an individual account? And here, as an activist for decades, you've fought the system. So this is a sort of difficult question to ask also, because you know, I don't want to undermine what you've written, but it is an individual's account. And then, you know, unless it becomes what is called viral, unless everyone starts writing apologies, when you feel that your work isn't done. I will like that to happen. But here's what I feel. I feel like we can't look at the structure of the patriarchal family and think that is not part of the larger story of the society, right? I mean, remember reading Alice Miller when she looked at what how German families were structured and how the authority was always with the father and how punishment, punishment, punishment, allowed the German people to really be susceptible and willing to follow Hitler. There's no separation, in my opinion, between what happens in our little really kind of capitalist, patriarchal family structures, right? They're there to keep us in this structure. Will I feel badly if an apology movement doesn't start? Of course I will. I want us to move forward. And I was just in Taiwan where they've already started an apology initiative and they've started their own website. So I am beginning to see this happening and I'm seeing I'm getting letters from people who are using the book, you know, with groups of men to begin. So it's starting, but I also feel just the act of doing this is an act of imagination, right? And one thing I learned from doing this book is if you've been assaulted, if you've been abused, particularly violated in your body, whoever has violated you gets into your body. They occupy you. So for me, I was still in a relationship with my father after 60 some odd years and my rage towards him and my, you know, but it was his story I was in. It wasn't my story. When I wrote this book, I was able to move that person inside me from a monster to an apologist, from a terrifying entity to a broken little boy. So he no longer has agency over me. He is gone. He is done. And you did it without removing his humanity. Did you worry at some point that he would perhaps be a little too human, you know, a little too human in the sense that we tend to characterize a person who violates a woman as a monster? I think it was really important for me, even though the hardest part of the book was feeling my father's pain as a child. I didn't want to feel my father's pain for a very long time in my life. He didn't. He hadn't earned the right for me to feel his pain. But then I realized my anger at my father was keeping me caught in my father's world. You know, as he says in the book, anger is a poison you mix for a friend, but you drink yourself. I realized that when I started to feel his pain, ironically, that's when I was able to let him go because he became a human being to me. And he lost his power. He wasn't this monstrous entity that was towering above me. He was just another broken human being and he no longer had power. So I didn't want him. I didn't romanticize him, I don't think. And I don't think I demonized him. I think I let him be. I mean, look at the fascists right now, the Trumps and the Modi's and the people in the world who are just destroying the earth, destroying Muslims, destroying immigrants, destroying workers, destroying everything. But they're doing it with such ease and banality, right? I think that is often how that evil operates. And I think there's something about making that real that then gets you to see we can have an impact on changing it in ourselves and outside ourselves, that it's not behind us somehow. So where we don't get closure, we are capable of giving it to ourselves. I think we are. And I'll tell you something, it was very, very hard writing this book. It was like writing into the center of a wound, you know? But what I realized is when we sit outside the wound, the radiation of the wound just falls down on us. But when we go through the wound, we get to the other side. What does the word, after writing this book, what is the word father? And, you know, for other women, it could be brother, friend. What does the word father really signify for you? What has the meaning of the word? It's changed for me now. It doesn't have the power over me anymore. I actually think that my father was a very broken person, very not well person. And I think his humanity was rubbed from him in a very early point in his life. And his actions were, you know, I don't want to justify my father, but I do understand him. There's I think there's a big difference between explanation and justification. I think we do have to look to understand what is at the core of things. I don't want to believe that men are born rapists. I don't want to believe that they're born raging batterers and violent people. I think they are acculturated. I think that that their humanity is rubbed. When we tell boys, they can't cry. When we tell boys, they can't feel. When we tell boys, they have to act like they know what they're doing when they don't know what they're doing, you know, when we idolize boys. My father was idolized. Idolization is not the same as love. Idolization is a projection of yourself, idealized image onto someone and forcing them to live up to that. And when they're doing that, they have to absolutely erase their humanity. And we don't know how many boys have been sexually abused. We don't know how many boys who have been battered. We don't know what's really gone on with young boys because we're not allowed to even talk about that in the culture. So I have to believe until told differently that something has gone on with men that has turned them into violators. I don't believe they were born that way. And if I can change after being violated and I can wrestle down and find my humanity, they certainly can too. There's a short paragraph where you describe different kinds of men, generals, conmen, tyrants, thieves, exploiters of every kind, and fools. You know, tell me how does the book help not want to prove ourselves to these categories of men? They all seem, in some, except for the general, I guess they're all negative characters. Well, it was a description of my father stumbling into hell. And he found all these men there, you know, who had been locked into hell, you know? But I think if you look at, you know, what does patriarchy do to men? Who do they become? But not just to a certain kind of man or a category or profession of men, but it could be anyone. Yes, absolutely. That was just a description of hell. Who he found in hell. And he was actually happier in hell for a moment because he wasn't alone in limbo where he began. Also, he ended up with all the wounds he inflicted on you. Yes, he did. That was a shocking to me in writing the book, you know, that at the end of the book, he had everything done to his body and suddenly realized that he had become me. That is something almost, you know, very overtly spiritual also in the way you described it. So is there a very strong set of beliefs which lead you to think that wounds materialized like that or was it totally symbolic? It was symbolic, but you know, I have to say, the book taught me that we have a profound relationship with the dead. Like, I believe we're always in dialogue with them in some way or we should be. I think there's a lot of people who have crossed over who aren't able to cross over yet. They're stuck because of things they've done in this lifetime and if there's any reason for men to do this work, it's to get free. There's nobody in this lifetime who does an act of violence or an act of unkindness or cruelty against another person who doesn't carry that in their body and their being. And I really believe it will plague you in this lifetime and turn you into a bitter, more violent, more angry person and I'm convinced it will plague you in others. Nobody gets out of here. How do women become, like you say in your book, viable adversaries to the abusive men we meet? How does we do that? You know, when my father started after the sexual abuse stop, he then, and I was really the reason it did stop because I turned and I became defiant and belligerent and I wasn't a good girl anymore and I wasn't pretty anymore and I cut off all my hair and I just became surly and unresponsive and defiant. It saved my life. It really saved my life. And I think part of what we as women have to do for ourselves and for each other is believe each other. Believe each other. Believe our own experience. You know, a woman came up to me the other night in Taiwan and she broke down crying and she said, she was a journalist and she said, I was abused by my teacher for a whole year and I never let myself believe what happened to me was real and now I know it was real and I'm gonna have to go home and I'm gonna have to really come to terms with what happened to me. But meanwhile, it's been controlling her whole life on some level, right? So part of what we have, being a viable adversary is trusting your own experience, knowing your own experience and standing firm in the understanding that no one has a right to do that to you. You know, and so what we have to do for each other is stand with each other when we come to understanding what's been done to us and speak out about us so we're not alone. All right, so one of the most interesting things about Eve's book is that a lot of research in India points out that it is someone you know who abuses you. It is someone you know very well, a family member, a friend, a teacher. So that word, father, friend, family member, brother, sister, they have a certain potency and by reading Eve's book and by listening to the message she gives, maybe the potency of those words can give us back some power. Thanks very much for joining us. Wonderful to talk to you.