Tone in I am an Emotional Creature

In continuous motion after Eve Ensler’s other book The Vagina Monologues, we start I am an Emotional Creature. To be quite frank I do not like this book in the slightest. I feel as though Ensler lost her greatest strength, substance. I am an Emotional Creature has a great topic, in which it could be done in a very powerful well suited way, young teenage girls. But personally I don’t believe that the stories are unique enough or anything different then what the media consumes us with everyday.

             I feel as though the book takes a weaker tone. Yes of course young teenage girls are insecure and at times not very strong minded. But for what I have read already there has yet to be a text in which the young girl stands up for herself. Most of these girls are without will when it comes to their mothers and their own views. Ensler shows more or less that they are just rolling over to everyone else’s conceptions of them. When she should take this opportunity as a writer to create a book geared to young girls that empower them. Instead of making another teenage girl book that more or less just illustrates the already jagged view young girls have of themselves. In Bad Boys, “Mom wants me to be a model she weighs me every day she weighs herself twice a day. I started to make myself throw up just so my mother would leave me alone.” (Page 19) Being skinny maybe a societal expectation but this example just shows the girl just staying in the path, when Ensler should be making her empowered.  

            The tone of the book is really distracting to me. Ensler who had the past books’ characters be so strong and bold, now has a book in which the characters are lifeless. These young girls’ stories are sad and are important issues. But there is nothing distinctive that separates these stories from the thousands of others. There’s hundreds of books in which teenage girls are consumed with external and internal pressures but rarely any in which the consistent tone is empowerment. That is something revolutionary, which is something I was expecting from this book.