THE STORY: With THE GOOD BODY, Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues , turns her unique eye to the rest of the female form. Whether undergoing botox injections or living beneath burqas, women of all cultures and backgrounds feel compell

The Good Body is a triumphant blend of mordant humor and heartbreak. By turns hilarious and poignant, it’s the story of retired pro-hockey ruffian Bobby Bonaduce, who is stubbornly ignoring a disease that may be killing him. Bobby returns to his hometown and scams his way into university in a misguided attempt to redeem his messy past and lay emotional claim to a son he abandoned 20 years earlier. With this acclaimed novel, Bill Gaston demonstrates yet again that he is one of the best chroniclers of men and sports.

Discover a fresh approach to moving, fueling, and loving your good body well! So many of us feel as though accepting our bodies means abandoning any effort to improve. We look in the mirror and tell ourselves that we are going to love the skin we are in, but most days our inner self-critic is all we can hear. We constantly ask ourselves How can I have a healthy lifestyle that will keep me motivated and inspired? Why does it even matter how I think about my body? Can’t I just lose weight and be happy? What is it going to take for me to be content with the way I look, even if I’m not thin? But there is hope! Pursuing the healthiest version of you means learning to love the reflection in the mirror, and Jennifer Wagner understands this all too well. From looking at her today, you wouldn’t know that she used to weigh 336 pounds. During her 16-year health and wellness journey, she has felt the deep anguish of torment from peers and strangers, let the scale dictate her moods, and cried herself to sleep all because of her "imperfect" body. But ultimately, Jennifer realized that to overcome the overwhelming negative feelings about her body, she needed to start with her mind and let go of all the expectations of perfection that were keeping her from being the best version of herself. Embark on this journey with Jennifer as your guide and learn to live a life of healthy habits and positive motivation to take care of your good body.

Performed by an ensemble of young women, EMOTIONAL CREATURE is made up of original monologues—and irresistible songs—about and for girls. Placing their stories squarely center stage, it gives full expression to their secret voices and innermost thoughts, highlighting the diversity and commonality of the issues they face. EMOTIONAL CREATURE is a call, a reckoning, an education, an act of empowerment for girls, and an illumination for parents and for us all. Eve Ensler’s Emotional Creature is a vehicle to empower girls and inspire their activism. V-Girls is a global network of girl activists and advocates. In the same way The Vagina Monologues built a movement on college campuses and in communities, young girls will be able to participate in V-Day’s empowerment philanthropy model, igniting their activism through V-Girls. V-Girls is rooted in youth-driven activism. A V-Girls Action Guide provides service-learning curriculum for middle and high school youth based on issues covered in Emotional Creature, with an emphasis on activism. Organizers can start a V-Girls club or incorporate V-Girls resources into an existing youth program.

What are the reasons for the current epidemic of eating disorders, the increasing obsession with exercise, diet, and cosmetic surgery, the constant exhortations to look and feel good? This engrossing book examines our concern with the "good body" from a wide variety of perspectives, putting it in the contexts of contemporary culture and of ancient ascetic practices of self-denial. A range of experts—psychiatrists, psychologists, literary scholars, historians, a philosopher, a theologian, an anthropologist, and the former director of a center for abused women—join together to discuss why control of our bodies has become so important in contemporary culture and why society must provide its members with more positive ways to define and empower themselves. The authors discuss issues that shed light on current attitudes toward the body, such as the effects of sexual victimization on body image, a report defining the behavior of battered women as a form of maladaptive self-denial, the influence of science on predominant notions of the "good body" (for example, the "biomedical" version of premenstrual syndrome), the legal restrictions on diet pills and supplements, Flannery O'Connor's "celebration of embodiment" in her final novel, Parker's Back, the impact of cultural ideals of masculine beauty on men, and much more.

I have been exiled from my body. I was ejected at a very young age and I got lost. Playwright, author and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body - how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent many years disassociated from her own - a disconnection brought on by her father's sexual abuse and her mother's remoteness. While working in the Congo, Ensler is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of treatment she is forced to become first and foremost a body - pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully - and gratefully - joined to the body of the world.

Drawing on conversations with hundreds of women about their genitalia, the author presents a collection of performance pieces from her one-woman show of the same name.