Eve Ensler: Embrace your inner girl

I received the link to this talk by Eve Ensler from a Goddess list - thanks, Kathy! - and have to share it. Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues, and many other works, talks about the girl cell. A grouping of cells in women as well as men, that we have all learned to suppress; that patriarchy has done its best to suppress and eradicate.

I want you to imagine that the girl is a chip in the huge macrocosm of our collective consciousness, and it is essential to balance, to wisdom and to, actually, the future of all of us.

And then I want you to imagine that this girl cell is compassion, and it's empathy, and it's passion itself, and it's vulnerability, and it's openness, and it's intensity, and it's association, and it's relationship, and it is intuitive.

And then, next thing, how compassion informs wisdom, and that vulnerability is our greatest strength, and that emotions have inherent logic which lead to radical appropriate saving action.

And then let's remember that we've been taught the exact opposite by the powers that be:

That compassion clouds your thinking. That it gets in the way.

That vulnerability is weakness.

That emotions are not to be trusted and you're not supposed to take things personally.

Which is one of my favourites.

I think the whole world has essentially been brought up not to be a girl. How do we bring up boys? What does it mean to be a boy?

To be a boy really means not to be a girl.

To be a man means not to be a girl.

To be a woman means not to be a girl.

To be strong means not to be a girl.

To be a leader means not to be a girl.

I actually think that being a girl is so powerful that we've had to train everyone not to be that.

[...]

[T]he verb that's been enforced on girl is the verb "to please." Girls are trained to please. I want to change the verb. I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be "educate" or "activate" or "engage" or "confront" or "defy" or "create." If we teach girls to change the verb we will actually enforce the girl inside us and the girl inside them.

Yes. Many of us have been raised, trained and educated to deny and suppress the girl inside. I spent decades trying to do just that; thinking that it was the right way to go about life. No-one ever taught me any other way. I literally tried to annihilate myself in the hope that I might fit in, never knowing that I'm not meant to fit it. I break stereotypes, I defy the norm, and trying to be anything or anyone else will only mean that I diminish myself and my glow. And I'm not better off for it, am I? Are you better off for denying your inner girls? It's time we embrace her, embrace our inner girls and be who we were born to be.

Let's stop pleasing, and instead create, defy, break down barriers and just be the glorious emotional beings that we are.