Karen Bartlett is a writer, journalist and film maker.
Karen writes for The Times, The Sunday Times,The Guardian, WIRED and Newsweek. In broadcast Karen has made documentaries for the BBC World Service, and directed a series on the economic meltdown.
Karen’s book 'Architects of Death' about Topf and Sons will be published in March 2018. She is also the author of 'After Auschwitz', a critically acclaimed biography about Dusty Springfield, and a book about disease eradication in the Twentieth Century.
Growing Up X
Fifty years after he was killed, the daughter of Malcolm X wants to make sure her father isn't written out of history Half way down a winding country road in New York’s wealthy Westchester County, one of America’s most famous revolutionaries lies buried under three feet of crisp white snow. I...
Newsweek
How one man gave Congo’s women hope
Life is hell for women caught up in the conflict in the Congo. But one remarkable doctor helps survivors to build a future Why are the lives of African women worthless? It’s a question that Denis Mukwege asks every day that he works with the raped and mutilated women of the Democratic Republic...
The Times - World
‘If they gave me a house, I’d take it tomorrow’
All I want is to die under this mountain.” Noor Ebrahim, a slightly-built former messenger for Reader’s Digest, has returned to the area where he grew up. Now retired, he likes to remember the old days; he can point out his school — “it was tough” — the mosque where his family prayed and the spot...
The Times - World
Momma D: Dionne Warwick, the Grande Dame of Divas
She learnt her stagecraft from Marlene Dietrich; 50 years on, she’s mentor to Whitney Houston and P. Diddy Dionne Warwick opens up her arms in a stage bow: “I’m looking pretty good, don’t you think,” she says. The singer seems slightly surprised to be turning 70, and, with pearly white teeth a...
The Times - Arts
India's Barefoot Revolution
What would it be like if women ran the world? In some parts of India, it’s already happening If all revolutions begin in unlikely locations, few could be as unpromising as Borda. It’s a poor village in the poorest district of one of the poorest states in India. Only the blasting from a nearby ...
The Times - World
It’s murder on your mobile, says The Killing’s Sarah Lund
Hit crime drama The Killing is back for a second series, and Karen Bartlett talks mobile phone forensics with actress Sofie Gråbøl Detective Sarah Lund is a Luddite. The loner heroine of Denmark’s hit crime drama The Killing is as much of a 70s relic as her Faroe sweaters: She makes notes by h...
Technology
Skateistan: How skateboarding took off with Afghan kids
It’s no surprise that in a world full of rules most kids want to do something with no organisation, and no adults. “This country has more restrictions than just about any other,” Oliver Percovich says, explaining how his own passion for freedom and fun led to groups of boys and girls flying acros...
The Times - World
Life and Love with 'The Greatest': Muhammad Ali
When Yolanda “Lonnie” Williams was six years old she looked out of her front door in Louisville, Kentucky, and saw an energetic young man holding court to a wide-eyed gaggle of neighbourhood boys, including her brother. “Who’s that big man?” she asked her mother, not knowing that the answer wo...
The Times - Arts
Polio's Last Stand
Eradicating the Last 1% of Polio Is Deadly But Essential When 40-year-old Liberian civil servant Patrick Sawyer died of Ebola earlier this year in hospital in Lagos, having carried the disease from his home country to Nigeria, global health workers feared the epidemic would spread in West Af...
Newsweek
Bringing Anne Frank Home – to Germany
Like many people in their seventies and eighties, Buddy Elias and his wife Gertie are downsizing – clearing out the attic and getting rid of several generations’ worth of papers, clutter and possessions from their family home in Basel, Switzerland. Unlike most other pensioners, however, Elias is ...
Newsweek
A Race Apart: the beauty queens of the apartheid era
The Miss World finalists are now at the World Cup, but the women who represented South Africa in its past have divided memories So far the game has not been beautiful for the World Cup’s “33rd official team”. They have gone largely unnoticed in South Africa’s impressive new stadiums, despite d...
The Times - World
Maki Mandela: “As Nelson's child, I can say I am proud of him”
In the week that London marks the statesman's 90th birthday, his daughter reveals how she overcame her resentment that he was a father to the world, but not to her Nelson Mandela arrives in London today for what is likely to be his last major public appearance; a 90th birthday charity concert ...
The Times - World
The Vagina Monologues turns ten
Eve Ensler transformed the New Orleans Superdome into ‘Superlove' for a celebrity-studded event to campaign against violence towards women Few people know that New Orleans is the vagina of America. Few would suggest it. “It is fertile. It's a delta. And everyone wants to party there,” explains...
The Times - Arts
How did a play about gynaecology, rape and genital mutilation become a worldwide smash hit? Karen Bartlett on the rise of a phenomenon and the unique pulling power of its originator
Eve Ensler stands on stage, a tiny figure in the huge arena that is Madison Square Garden, usually home to America’s biggest and most masculine sporting triumphs. It is February 2001 and she has just finished a benefit performance of her play The Vagina Monologues. Around her, stacked to the roof, are 18,000 people, mostly women. Taking part that night are Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, Isabella Rossellini and Gloria Steinem.
The Vagina Monologues has run its usual course. Everyone has laughed at the funny anecdotes about trips to the gynaecologist and about what, if your vagina got dressed, it might wear. Most have been shocked at the monologue about female genital mutilation; some cried at the parts about women who have, for many reasons, been shamed. A monologue about a woman from Bosnia who has been raped as an act of war brings about such a sense of pain and desecration that somebody in the audience collapses.
“But haven’t we heard it all before?” asks a wizened veteran of the feminist movement. Vaginas, clitoris empowerment workshops, long earnest group sessions involving lying on yoga mats and trying to peer at yourself with a hand mirror. Listened to the lecture, read the article in Cosmo, don’t need the bad trip back to the 1970s. And yet, just this month, MPs including Joan Ruddock, Caroline Spelman, Sandra Gidley and Oona King, as well as the Home Office minister Caroline Flint, were performing in Monologues alongside Jerry Hall, before a packed audience at the Criterion Theatre, London, that included Meera Syal and Anita Roddick. It was the third British “V-Day” benefit performance – and this time, even Cherie Blair sent a message of support.
What is different about The Vagina Monologues? Is it the wit of the old lady who went swimming in a vaginal flood with Burt Reynolds? The way it has of creeping inside you with the little girl whose “coochie snorcher” got hurt by a lot of men but then redeemed, in very politically incorrect fashion, by an older woman? Is it the simple joy of the repressed eccentric who came to realise that her vagina was “better than the Grand Canyon”?
Or is it that, at the end of it all, that night in Madison Square Garden, Ensler asks everyone to stand up who has ever been beaten or abused? It’s a huge leap of faith, and she knows it. A huge empty space in which the first heads bob up, then more. Then more. Then many. And that’s the moment when you understand why The Vagina Monologues is such a phenomenon.
It wasn’t always clear that The Vagina Monologues would be a runaway hit. Yet the obscure play performed off-Broadway had women flocking to Ensler’s dressing room night after night to share their experiences – often terrible. So many came, in fact, that Ensler founded a movement, “V-Day”, on the back of her play, to campaign for an end to violence against women. The campaign, unlikely and unexpected, started to sweep across the world, taking in every country, attracting millions of women, speaking the unspeakable. Banned in China, attacked by various private religious colleges in the United States, but always compelling and wildly popular, the play raised more money to stop violence against women than almost every other project run by women.
Eight years ago, Ensler was 43, a middle-class Jewish woman from suburban Scarsdale, New York, with a bad childhood behind her; a writer who had not found her niche; a political activist who had spent anonymous years chaining herself to railings in support of the usual liberal causes – homeless women, minorities, the poor. Today, Ensler is a heroine of college campuses everywhere, invited to the White House, handed numerous awards, including an honorary degree by her alma mater, Middlebury.
There is something undeniably more emotive in hearing the bad news about violence against women from Ensler, up there on stage – angry and direct – rather than in a dry, soft-spoken presentation from some female junior minister. With Ensler, you feel it’s personal. Other groups may have worked tirelessly against the abuse of women in Afghanistan, but it was Ensler’s relationship with Rawa (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) that brought it to public attention. It was V-Day that recently took the leader of an Iraqi women’s group to the US to talk about the effect of the war there, and V-Day, with Amnesty International, that organised last month’s well-publicised march on Juarez to protest the mass murder of women there. Other films may have been made and articles written, but it was V-Day that pulled off the half-page photo in the Guardian of Jane Fonda defiantly marching for justice in Mexico.
Even though she is often to be found in the midst of world celebrities such as Fonda or Oprah, Ensler always draws your gaze: there is an angry energy there, a determination to make the most of the moment; it is easy to imagine her, young in 1970s New York, all politics, outrage and hustle. But there is also something despairing about her, this woman who once said she had watched the film Looking for Mr Goodbar, in which Diane Keaton struggles with her demons only to end up murdered by a man she picks up in a singles bar, and thought “lucky her”, to be out of the misery, and the world.
In The Vagina Monologues Ensler talks without hesitation about being sexually abused as a child, refuses to be labelled by acknowledging that in her life she has been attracted to men and women, and is first to admit to troubled years of drinking and drug-taking in her past. This vulnerable openness, which, together with anger and allure, fills The Vagina Monologues, saves Ensler from being swallowed up in the frenzy of becoming an icon and being turned into a monster.
The question about V-Day as a movement is whether, for all its razzmatazz, it can translate the passion it generates into real political change. It can draw celebrity, but can it draw power?
At a grass-roots level, where V-Day channels most of its funding, it can claim considerable success. Among other achievements, V-Day built a safe house for women fleeing female genital mutilation in Kenya, and supplied the camera to film the Taliban’s execution of an Afghan woman – footage now infamous across the world.
On the broader canvas the transition has been more patchy. The “1 per cent campaign” to devote 1 per cent of US defence spending to stopping violence against women has – not surprisingly – found little favour on Capitol Hill, nor has it attracted much wider attention in the US at large. Equally, there has yet to be a woman taking part of whom real political achievement is expected. The line-up at the London event on 8 March was impressive, but would have been more so with an Yvette Cooper, a Beverley Hughes or a Patricia Hewitt. Extracts from The Vagina Monologues were performed by some female MPs at the Labour Party conference in 2002, but it was Eve Ensler’s impassioned speech afterwards that captivated the audience.
Without a doubt, it has been Ensler’s force of personality that accounts for V-Day’s meteoric rise. Does it make sense that a political movement should be based on a play full of fake orgasms and vaginas dressed up in feather boas? No, but Ensler never speaks from her head to ours: rather, she is all heart and passion, past hurt and future hope. To a generation desperate for a respite from managerial politics, this proves an electrifying message. No wonder so many of the women who file into a performance of Monologues sign up to its campaign as they file out.
Warmer and funnier than a Gloria Steinem or a Germaine Greer – and definitely more attractive in every sense than a Betty Friedan or Andrea Dworkin – Eve Ensler speaks to the big picture. It is the longer-term challenge for V-Day to prove that it is both bigger than Ensler, and capable of not living and dying in the light of the celebrities who currently flock to it.
Welcome to my website. I hope these pages give you a flavour of some of my work in books, print, onl…
Last week I was in Istanbul attending a Youth Forum for teenagers from around the world. But not eve…
When Nelson Mandela retired after serving one five-year term as President of South Africa in 1999 he…
I’ve just returned from China, after a gap of about 16 years, and I met these undergraduates – comin…
Eradicating the Last 1% of Polio Is Deadly But Essential
When 40-year-old Liberian civil servan…
When Yolanda “Lonnie” Williams was six years old she looked out of her front door in Louisville,…
She learnt her stagecraft from Marlene Dietrich; 50 years on, she’s mentor to Whitney Houston and …
What would it be like if women ran the world? In some parts of India, it’s already happening
If…
*Life is hell for women caught up in the conflict in the Congo. But one remarkable doctor helps surv…
All I want is to die under this mountain.” Noor Ebrahim, a slightly-built former messenger for Rea…
Hit crime drama The Killing is back for a second series, and Karen Bartlett talks mobile phone foren…
It’s no surprise that in a world full of rules most kids want to do something with no organisation…
Fifty years after he was killed, the daughter of Malcolm X wants to make sure her father isn’t writt…
Like many people in their seventies and eighties, Buddy Elias and his wife Gertie are downsizing –…
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