[Day 14] V-Day & International
Two years ago rageprufrock began the first 14 Valentines and she spoke of how women are praised in song, worshipped in poetry, and derided in culture. She spoke beautifully and elegantly of women, compairing our bodies to luminous flowers. She spoke of the state of women, and the need to remember what we go through, what women throughout the world suffer.
We are daughters, sisters, mothers, and lovers. If we choose, we can bring life into world with our blood and nourish it with our bodies, but the world that we helped create, that women have bled for and fought for and cried for, doesn't recognize us. Our history is one of abuse. We are not safe.
Women suffer from domestic violence and rape. We are devalued. We are taught that we are lesser. There is still so much work to do, so much for us to accomplish.
It's 2008 and Hillary Rodham Clinton is, as I write this, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in the U.S. Yet, even as this is happening, women are being killed the world over, suffering from infanticide, dying from lack of medical care, killing themselves in the fight to be what society tells them they must. One in three women will still experience sexual assault in her lifetime. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same.
It's 2008 and we've come so far, but there is still more work to be done. We deserve better, and we can do more. We're strong. The next fourteen days is meant to remind us of that. It's our time to take back our bodies.
V can stand for vagina, like Eve Ensler's groundbreaking monologues. V can stand for violence, under whose auspices all women continue to make a home.
V can also stand for victory.
V-Day, International
V-Day is a response against violence toward women, it is a demand that calls for an end to rape, incest, battery, genital mutilation, and sexual slavery.
It is all of those things and more.
V-Day is about self-love, respect, and strength. To hurt one of us is to hurt all of us. As long as women are sexually abused, not one us can live without the knowledge that it is happening and it could happen to us. As long as women suffer from domestic violence, we cannot sleep in our homes without recognizing that there are those that cannot sleep safely in their own. As long as women can be cut and mutilated, none of us are free, none of us safe.
V stands for Victory and Vagina. Today is a celebration of love -- the love of women and the love of ourselves.
Over the years, many women have told Eve Ensler their stories. Some spoke to her of their vagina, of the beauty or strangeness of it, and some told her their stories of rape, incest, genital mutilation, and domestic violence. Women have opened to her like flowers, wanting to tell their stories, to be heard.
V-Day is about the end of shame. It's looking at your body with its imperfections, looking at your body and the past written on it and saying, "I'm not ashamed. I am proud and beautiful."
V-Day is about giving others hope.
14 Valentines has inspired women to write about academics and sexual abuse, about the greatness of women and the things we've accomplished. We've come a long way, but we're not done yet. We've still got a long way to go.
We women are the backbones of nations, performing two-thirds of all labor and producing over half of the world's food. We run businesses, raise children, work in the fields, care for the sick and the elderly, everything that men can do and more, yet nowhere in the world are we paid equally for comparable or equal work. Our contributions to the world's economies are vast and far reaching, yet often it goes unrecognized or uncounted.
We are raped, beaten, sexually harassed. We are singled out for "honor" killings, our genitals are mutilated, and our bodies reduced to a tool for warfare. We are denied control over our health and our bodies. Female infants are neglected in favor of boys, women lack access to basic health care, and sex education is abbreviated or nonexistent. We die by the millions of AIDS, in unattended childbirth, from malnutrition, and from unsafe abortions. We are the first to go hungry, and the last to be fed.
We make up fifty-one percent of the population, and yet we only account for a tiny fraction of political power, both on a national and international level. There has never been a woman as Secretary General of the United Nations. We are underrepresented in Parliaments and Senates, holding only 16% of those seats, and we hold precious few Head of State positions.
Every day for the last two weeks, we've highlighted an organization or group that are working towards a common goal: the betterment of women's lives. Our final group, the Global Fund for Women is committed to creating a world of equality and social justice. They make grants to seed, strengthen and link women's rights groups based outside the United States. In twenty years, they have awarded over $58 million to 3,450 women's organizations in 166 countries, supporting programs for women in every level of society, creating a vast network for change.
It doesn't have to be like this. We are strong and brave and brilliant. We are better than what we have accepted.
I'd like to thank all of you for your contributions to this community, for the dialog some of you have opened up in your LJs, for increasing awareness, telling your own stories, and sharing your unique gifts with us. I am so overwhelmed and proud to be a member of this community.
The heart is capable of sacrifice.
So is the vagina.
The heart is able to forgive and repair.
It can change its shape to let us in.
It can expand to let us out.
So can the vagina.
It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us
and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world.
So can the vagina.
I was there in the room.
I remember.
-- Eve Ensler.