V-Day: Reclaiming Peace 2007

I went to Atlanta's V-Day event at the Tabernacle on Thursday night, and it was fantastic! The performers were very impressive: hilarious, poignant, touching, tragic, all of it. As a volunteer, I got to hear Eve Ensler speak briefly at the VIP reception immediately preceding the show. Her message was clear and intentional that V-Day's goal of empowering women means sharing power with men, NOT dominating, eliminating, controlling, taking over, or oppressing men. I like the eight statements of the V-Day Mission.

V-Day is an organized response against violence toward women.

V-Day is a vision. We see a world where women live safely and freely.

V-Day is a demand: Rape, incest, battery, genital mutilation and sexual slavery must end now.

V-Day is a spirit: We believe women should spend their lives creating and thriving rather than surviving or recovering from terrible atrocities.

V-Day is a catalyst: By raising money and consciousness, it will unify and strengthen existing anti-violence efforts. Triggering far-reaching awareness, it will lay the groundwork for new educational, protective, and legislative endeavors throughout the world.

V-Day is a process: We will work as long as it takes. We will not stop until the violence stops.

V-Day is a day. We proclaim Valentine's Day as V-Day, to celebrate women and end the violence.

V-Day is a fierce, wild, upstoppable movement and community. Join us!

V-Day stands for Victory, Valentine, and Vagina. To date, the movement has raised over $40 million and educated millions about the issue of violence against woman and the efforts to end it. This is more than any other anti-violence campaign in the world.

Part of the process of empowering women is providing an opportunity, sometimes prodding women to speak, to tell their stories. Eve Ensler's book, The Vagina Monologues, was that platform: for many of the women, the first time they'd spoken of their trauma, shame, or disgust associated with their vagina. Ms. Ensler travelled the country interviewing women of all ages to hear and record their stories. When pain is experienced and then buried, the healing process is delayed, the scar deepens. On the flip side, when we see and hear others who have felt and experienced similar hurts, we understand that we aren't alone, the violence wasn't our fault, and it doesn't have to continue. Upon ourselves or others.

For me, that's what V-Day is about: raising awareness, so that someday soon, no woman feels trapped or silenced in a violent situation, and so that increasing numbers of men feel liberated to demonstrate to other men how to relate and behave toward women and all people in respectful, non-dominating, non-agressive manners. We all take rebuke more seriously when it comes from "one of our own kind."

Furthermore, violence includes more than just physical harm. Taken from the Men Stopping Violence website,

"You don't have to hit someone to batter that person. Many people think that battering is defined by how many times a man hits a woman. In fact, many men who complete our (MSV) six-month batterers program have never physically struck a woman. What they have done, however, is struck fear in a woman by using a wide range of controlling and abusive behaviors over a sustained period of time."