After I had done 'The Vagina Monologues' I was feeling pretty good about my vagina. I thought I was kind of home free, and then I looked down one day and discovered my not-so-flat post-40 [year old] stomach and I realized the self-hatred had moved up,

I couldn't believe how many hours a day I was obsessing on it. And I thought, this can't be true, because I'm a radical feminist. But it was. So I thought I'd better look at what was going on beneath this obsession.

Why are women immobile? Because so many feel like they're waiting for someone to say, 'You're good, you're pretty, I give you permission.'

It seems to me there's this tyranny that's not accidental or incidental, to make women feel compelled to look like somebody they're not. I think the effort is being made to get us to turn our time and attention to this instead of important political issues.

Doing this show is really painful each time I perform it. The degree to which women hate their bodies is profoundly sad. Let's just put off our self-hatred for 10 years, take over the world, and then we can obsess again.

We focus on fixing our bodies. We spend $40 billion a year on beauty products. What if we actually took that money, took that time, took that energy and started fixing the world. Women would actually be in power,