by Eve Ensler

In the midst of war, in a time of escalating global terrorism, when civil liberties are disappearing as fast as the ozone layer, when one out of three women in the world will be beaten or raped in her lifetime, why write a play about my stomach?
Maybe because my stomach is something I feel I have control over, or because I hope my stomach is something I could get control over. Maybe because I see how my stomach has come to occupy my attention, and I see that other women's stomachs or butts or thighs or hair or skin have come to occupy their minds, so that we have very little left for war or anything else. When a group of ethnically diverse, economically disadvantaged women in the US were asked about the one thing they would change in their lives if they could, the majority said they would "lose weight." Maybe I identify with these women because I've bought into the idea that if my stomach were flat then I would be good, and I would be accepted, admired, important, loved.
Maybe because for most of my life I have felt wrong, dirty, guilty and bad, and my stomach is the carrier, the pouch for all that self-hatred. Maybe because my stomach has become the repository for my sorrow, my childhood scars, my unfulfilled ambition, my unexpressed rage. Like a toxic dump, it is where the explosive trajectories collide -- the Judeo-Christian imperative to be good; the patriarchal mandate that women be quiet, be less; the consumer-state imperative to be better, which is based on the assumption that we are born wrong and bad, and that being better always involves spending money, lots of money. I began writing The Good Body during my work on my first play The Vagina Monologues, and it all started with me and my particular obsession with my "imperfect" stomach.
I am certainly not alone. I have been to over 50 countries in the past six years as a result of The Vagina Monologues,. I have talked with women in surgical centres in Beverly Hills, on the beaches of Rio, in the gyms of Mumbai, New York and Moscow, in the crowded and hectic beauty salons in Istanbul, Johannesburg and Rome. Most of them loathed at least one part of their body. There was always one part that they longed to change, that they had a medicine cabinet full of products devoted to transforming or hiding or reducing or straightening. Just about every woman believed that if she could just get that part right, everything else would work out. It is an endless, heartbreaking campaign.
The Good Body is my prayer, my attempt to help women break free so that we may spend more time running the world rather than running away from it; so that we can become good in the true sense of good; so that we may be consumed by the sorrow of the world, rather than consuming to avoid the sorrow and suffering. It is my hope, my desire, that we will all refuse to be Barbie, that we will say no to the loss of the particular and unconventional, whether it be a voluptuous woman in a silk blouse, or a woman with defining lines of character in their face, or olive-tone skin or wild, curly hair.
I am stepping off the capitalist treadmill. I am going to take a deep breath and find a way to survive not being flat or perfect. I am inviting you to join me, to stop trying to be anything, anyone other than who you are. I was moved by women in Africa who lived close to the Earth and didn't understand what it meant to not love their body. Can you imagine the energy that would be unleashed if women stopped obsessing about their bodies? Tell the image-makers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid to age. That what you fear most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and love your body. Stop fixing it.
It was never broken.
From the introduction to The Good Body by Eve Ensler (Willard 2004).