Eve Ensler: The good body

Eve Ensler means well. Remember her play The Vagina Monologues? Its popularity indicates repressed women everywhere were relieved they could finally " celebrate" their genitalia by singing the c-word to nursery tunes. Ensler's follow-up play is a similarly loose collection of monologues, this time about female stomachs; Ensler's in particular.

Where designer-fashion, trashy magazines and pin-up calendars collectively tell women they should watch their weight, Ensler is telling them they shouldn't. The Good Body is still body obsession, just not as we know it.

You might be tempted to think it's old-fashioned — wasn't Fat is a Feminist Issue 25 years ago? — until you remember the extreme makeover beauty pageant television programme The Swan. Somebody has to take on the prevailing "post-feminist" mindset that makes such a demeaning show popular around the world.

But the way Ensler tries to reclaim the minds of women by discussing their stomachs just doesn't have, well, legs. Equating women with yet another body part feels plain lazy; Ensler's even thrown in a spare vagina anecdote. You either think her writing is both cute and deep, or it has an unintended effect on the upheaval reflexes of your own stomach: "My piercings are about evolving multiple definitions of myself as a woman, as a lesbian" and "We have [botox] poison in our foreheads, in our chins, like the head of a snake" or "My stomach is America".

The "Eve" character in the play meets several women in America who don't like their bodies mainly because of their mothers' image concerns when they were growing up. There isn't much acknowledgement that today's vanity nightmare is mostly tied up with society's other obsession — sex.

Then Eve goes to India and Africa and meets women who do like their fat bodies, and to Afghanistan where women, at the time, could be executed by the Taleban for eating icecream. Eve eats icecream there, saying: "Finally, my being fat is clearly less important than being free."

Surely only someone with an eating disorder would think otherwise, even without going to Afghanistan. The argument that "a fat body is a good body because poorer populations see it as a sign of wealth" is no match for "a thin body will give you love and acceptance in the culture in which you actually live".

Ensler doesn't give enough credit to her audience's intelligence, nor conversely the propaganda that she's up against. All The Good Body will do is make any woman who obsesses about being size 10 feel guilty about that obsession.

* Janet McAllister is a canvas writer.

* William Heinemann, $29.95