The Good Body

Botox, bulimia, breast implants: Eve Ensler, author of the international sensation The Vagina Monologues, is back, this time to rock our view of what it means to have a "good body." In the 1950s, Eve writes, girls were "pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist-pinchers.... In recent years good girls join the army. They climb the corporate ladder. They go to the gym.... They wear painful pointy shoes. They don't eat too much. They... don't eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin." The Good Body starts with Eve's tortured relationship with her own "post-forties" stomach and her skirmishes with everything from Ab Rollers to fad diets and fascistic trainers in an attempt to get the "flabby badness" out. As Eve hungrily seeks self-acceptance, she is joined by the voices of women from L.A. to Kabul, whose obsessions are also laid bare: a young Latina who calls a stubborn layer of fat "a second pair of thighs," the wife of a plastic surgeon recounting being systematically reconstructed inch by inch by her "perfectionist" husband, and an aging magazine executive still haunted by her mother's long-ago criticism. Along the way, Eve introduces women who have found a hard-won peace with their bodies: an African mother who celebrates each individual body as a sign of nature's diversity, an Indian woman who transcends "treadmill mania" and delights in her plump cheeks and curves, and a veiled Afghani woman willing to risk imprisonment for a taste of ice cream. These inspiring stories are woven through Eve's global journey from obsession to enlightenment, a personal wake-up call to love the "good bodies" we inhabit. A benefit for North Coast Rape Crisis Team.