I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World
Where to buy I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World books online?
- ISBN13: 9781400061044
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In this daring, provocative, and insightful book, bestselling leader and internationally acclaimed playwright Eve Ensler writes fictional monologues and tales inspired by girls around the globe. Moving through a world of topics and emotions, these voices are fierce, alive, tender, intricate, imaginative, and smart. Girls today regularly find themselves in a struggle between remaining strong and right to themselves and conforming to society’s expectations in an attempt to please. They are taught not to be too intense, too passionate, too smart, too caring, too open. They are encouraged to shut down their instincts, their outrage, their desires and their dreams, to be polite, to obey the rules. I Am an Emotional Creature is a celebration of the authentic voice inside every girl and an inspiring call to action for girls everywhere to speak up, follow their dreams, and become the women they were permanently meant to be.
Among the girls Ensler makes are an American who struggles with peer pressure in a suburban high school; an anorexic blogging as she eats less and less; a Masai girl from Kenya unwilling to suffer female genital mutilation; a Bulgarian sex slave, no more than fifteen, a Chinese factory worker building Barbies; an Iranian student who is tricked into a nose job; a pregnant girl trying to choose if she should keep her baby.
Through rants, poetry, questions, and facts, we come to know the universality of girls everywhere: their resiliency, their wildness, their pain, their fears, their secrets, and their triumphs. I Am an Emotional Creature is a call, a reckoning, an education, an act of empowerment for girls, and an illumination for parents and for us all.
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The stereotype that has permanently plagued teen girls is that they live in and react from their feelings and emotions and are not logical, or even capable of logic. Certainly teens, both male and female, can be emotional. The transition from childhood through individuation and into adulthood is a bumpy road. One of the “poems” in this book includes the following lines:
“I am an emotional creature.
Things do not come to me
as intellectual theories or hard-shaped thoughts.
They pulse through my organs and legs
and burn up my ears.
I know when your girlfriend’s really pissed off
even though she appears to give you what
you want.
I know when a storm is coming.
I can feel the invisible stirrings in the air.
I can tell you he won’t call back.
It’s a vibe I share.”
Things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-shaped thoughts?
So we are telling teen girls that it is not normal or usual for them to reflect rationally, or to be intellectual rather than constantly emotional? Well geez, why don’t we just go back to the stereotypes of the 1950’s and tell them that science and mathematics, that the life of mind, is not really for them, that they are well, just too emotional for that.
There may be additional parts of the book that are healthy and healing and promote positive things for girls. The message in this particular “poem” is insulting, patronizing, denigrating, stereotypical and seeks to limit the horizons and minds of fine young women… Fine young women everywhere who need to judge that they are intellectually capable, and that they need to renovate their gifts of intellect as well as of feeling to share with the world.
Alternatively, perhaps we could say:
The feelings in my heart
which speak to me with such passion-
are mine.
The gifts of a questioning mind
language of logic,
the beauty of
mathematics,
of science-
these things too
are my heritage…
Being woman
Being human
I bring into the world the gifts of my spirit
I bring into the world the keenness of my mind
I bring into the world my passion, my feelings
because all these things
are alive within
me.
In a form of psychiatric help used with teens called Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), the thought of “wise mind” is talked about. Wise mind is a combination of our emotional thinking and responses, along with our logical and analytical thinking. When we bring both these sides of our mind, our being, to a choice building process, we make better decisions. Decisions that reflect both our capacity for logic and for feeling. Why would we want to rob girls of this ability by language to them only of feeling?
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Eve is a sane voice, crying out in a world where violence, injustice, cruelty, and insensitivity are oft considered normal. It takes a weep from the soul, such as Eve’s to start to respond to the madness around us.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I Am an Emotional Creature is, reasonably simply, a book of diverse monologues, told by young girls all around the world. Whether these girls’ tales are familiar or foreign to you, they all are confronting the complex issue of defining oneself in a world full of contradictions, where girls are told they must be polite and pretty and perfect to fit in, yet are encouraged to be strong and independent and to dream huge at the same time. Every girl’s tale is unique and equally jarring, from the simple confrontation of peer pressure in the average high school to tales of girls sold for sex miles and oceans away. This book is filled with girl tales: persons forced to undergo unwanted plastic surgery, effective in far-away factories building Barbies, pregnant girls, anorexic girls, and girls just talking. Each tale is surprising and alive.
I Am an Emotional Creature is a hybrid in the style in which it is told. Though most of the monologues are straightforward prose, poems and scripts are sprinkled throughout these fictional tales, made even more realistic by the many “Girl Facts” interspersed throughout the book. Ensler captures the essence of being a girl and being human lacking being trite or even touching on clichés, and the result is a bold, sharp, emotional, and achingly real tribute to teen girls and their power and verve. This book will not only make you reflect, but also reasonably possibly change the way you reflect about teen girls today.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I LOVE Eve Ensler and The Vagina Monologues and have very high expectations for her work. She did not disappoint! Even though this book is proposed for teenage girls, women of all ages will like it, and will read it over and over again. Read either as an entire book or as pieces, it’s incredibly moving and motivational. I would certainly recommend buying it and copies for all the women in your life!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I will admit that this is the first book of Eve Ensler’s I have read so I do not have anything to compare it to in terms of her writting ability. I have seen her on t.v. and I have seen The Vagina Monologues three times over the years and establish the play to be extremely powerful and moving each time.
So, I reflect I was expecting the book to be that powerful also and it just isn’t. I reflect it falls flat. For most of the monolgues, there is no real depth and that might just be because of how fleeting they are. There are a few where you really get a sense of who these girls are but then there are some that really miss the boat. For instance, the monologue of the child prostitute is a moving monologue. The monologue of the child soldier misses the boat. It is more about rape than being “drafted” as a child soldier. There just could have been more done with it.
Finally, rumor has it that, there are no excellent fathers or men in the world if one is to go by Eve’s book. With one very, very brief exception, all the men/fathers are abusive, dismissive, or cruel. It would have been nice to have at least one monologue by a “daddy’s girl.” Just one, that’s all.
Also, there is a strong, negative anti-Catholic/Christian bias in this book. Lacking exception, every mention of Catholicism or Christianity is negative.
There are better books out there about our girls. I would skip this one and look for more indepth ones.
Dena
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5