Ensler, who is on the South Beach Diet, prescribes a No-Self Hatred Diet for today’s young women. “Women are spending all of their time fixing their bodies, and men are running the world. It’s much more interesting to create foreign policy,” she says.
Ensler warns that women cannot do important and outstanding things in this society without being disliked. “You have to make a decision about whether you want to be good or great. You can’t be great and still be good.” Ensler worked hard to stop caring about what other people think of her and her work. “It’s taken me 50 years to find my own moral compass,” she says.
It was only after The Vagina Monologues, after saying vagina 128 times a performance, 8 performances a week, that she really began to feel comfortable with herself.
“I landed in my vagina after that,” she says. “And I was home.”
—Staff writer Jessica E. Gould can be reached at gould@fas.harvard.edu.