Eve Ensler: ‘Violence against the planet explains violence against women’

Fracking & drilling = rape? Mountain-top removal = Female genital mutilation? Eve Ensler = Fool?

From an interview at Grist.org:

Q. I was interested to read a piece you published in The Guardian last month comparing climate change and violence against women. You wrote, “Like climate change, only the patriarchs with power seem to be blind to the magnitude of the horrors,” and you wrote about “the raping of the Earth through ecological destruction by the corporate powerful.” Can you talk more about those common threads?

A. It really occurred to me recently on a night where I went to a Bill McKibben event and I was listening to him talk about his 350 tour around the world, where he was seeing the impact of cutting off mountaintops and fracking and drilling. And I was thinking to myself, why does this feel so familiar? And I realized that I’m travelling around the world and I’m looking at the impact of violence against women and in each place it manifests itself differently — you know, you have honor killings, and you have gang rape, and you have sexual assault, and you have harassment, and you have female genital mutilation — but really, it’s the same fundamental idea. You’re destroying women and undermining women and raping women and disempowering women. He was talking about looking at the earth in the same way — there seems to be a pressing rape mentality, which has to do with the powerful getting what they want at the expense of the person they’re taking it from, without an awareness of reciprocity or mutuality. And that seems to be how we’re treating women, as well as how we’re treating the earth. It’s the same mindset.