About halfway through Jane Fonda’s new autobiography, she recounts a 1988 meeting with a group of furious Vietnam veterans trying to bar her from coming to Waterbury, Conn., to shoot the movie “Stanley & Iris.” The group has burned Fonda in effigy, so she suggests a group-therapy session to heal the wounds. She writes that one of the angry vets told her afterward, “‘You walked in, and I said to myself, Oh, she’s so little. Just one little woman.’”
Jane Fonda may be one little woman, but she has written a big book. Her autobiography, uninspiringly titled “My Life So Far,” chronicles her experiences as poor little rich girl in Hollywood, student at Vassar, space-age sex object in France, and activist in Southeast Asia. Involved in the feminist, civil rights and antiwar movements, Fonda has also won two Oscars. She revolutionized the exercise industry before marrying a mogul and giving up her professional life. She’s suffered from bulimia, anorexia and a Dexedrine addiction. She has found God and runs a teen pregnancy-prevention program. Married to three wildly different men (French filmmaker Roger Vadim, politician Tom Hayden, CNN magnate Ted Turner), Fonda is biological mother to two children, adoptive mother and stepmother to a passel of others, including the daughter of a couple of Black Panthers. She has been an equestrian, learned to fly-fish, studied ballet, had fake breasts implanted and removed, and accumulated a hefty FBI file. It would not be a stretch to say that Jane Fonda has embodied a good deal of American women’s history from 1937 to the present. Her 600-page autobiography — which she wrote so that she could “own” her story, whatever that means — is more personal revelation than cultural analysis, making it unclear how well Fonda understands the role she’s played in history, or the way that history has played with her.
Fonda’s series of timely transformations combined with her bumbling, slightly daffy attitude make her a Forrest Gump-ian figure. If something was happening in culture or politics, count on Fonda to have been nearby — if not to have participated in it or created it herself. As the plane carrying her to Las Vegas for her 1965 wedding to Vadim rises out of Los Angeles, she happens to notice that Watts is on fire. While making “Barefoot in the Park” in 1967, her costar Robert Redford kvells about the little A-frame house he’s just built in Utah. The house will become the Sundance Institute. In 1982, home-video magnate Stuart Karl suggests that Fonda turn her nascent exercise franchise — founded to fund Hayden’s political interests — into a series of tapes. Fonda writes, “Home video? What’s that? Like most people back then, I didn’t own a VCR.” “Jane Fonda’s Workout” is, today, still the biggest-selling video of all time.
Fonda’s book begins with disquieting recollections of her mother, a social butterfly named Frances Ford Seymour. By the time Jane (born “Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda”) and her brother, Peter, are old enough to remember, Seymour has lapsed into periods of mental illness exacerbated by the fact that her husband, the actor Henry Fonda, has lost interest in their marriage. At 9, Fonda remembers watching her mother try desperately to get her father’s attention by walking around naked. “She was probably still very beautiful, but — oh, how I hate myself for this betrayal of her — I saw her through my father’s judgmental eyes,” writes Fonda. “She wasn’t doing the right things to make him love her. And what it said to me was that unless you were perfect and very careful, it was not safe to be a woman. Side with the man if you want to be a survivor.” Fonda also recalls her disgust at seeing Seymour’s mangled breast after an augmentation went awry. When Fonda is 11, her mother dies; Jane is told it was a heart attack. Soon after, she reads in a movie magazine that Seymour slit her own throat with a razor.
It’s Fonda’s guilt about her relationships with her parents that provides the foundation for much of her story: In trying to please her often-absent dad and not be like her mom, she winds up in three unfulfilling marriages to men as emotionally chilly as her father and repeats her mother’s quest for physical perfection (including her own breast augmentation). She enters her father’s profession, appearing in classics like “Klute,” “The China Syndrome,” “Barbarella,” “Coming Home,” “The Morning After” and “On Golden Pond.” Having absorbed Henry’s quiet, left-leaning politics, Fonda becomes a loud activist, and gets labeled “Hanoi Jane” after her 1972 trip to North Vietnam.
Fonda wrote her book on her own, without the help of a ghostwriter, and there are many places where it shows. Her chronology is often confusing: looping back and jumping forward, sometimes by decades. She doesn’t seem to have much of a head for numbers, either; ages and dates don’t always match up, and are often left out completely. Fonda’s tone is conversational, and she dots many of her paragraphs with comic-book exclamations: “Wow!” “Weird!” “Ouch!” Her tenses jump from present to past so often that eventually they all blend together, and the text is riddled with emotionally emphatic italics, especially in chapters about politics — “What are involved, informed citizens to do when presidents, vice-presidents, and secretaries of state give the public falsified evidence to justify war?” — and her love life: “[Hayden was a] respected movement leader, passionate organizer, and strategist par excellence, who was even into American Indians.” (Fonda has a thing for American Indians, and recalls praying to god, as a little girl, to make her brother, Peter, an Indian. She also likes men who are into bison. Seriously.) Fonda reports that “the Nixon Justice Department freaked” after the publication of the Pentagon Papers. At one point she disconcertingly asks readers: “Did you ever see the movie “Scent of a Woman” starring Al Pacino?” She is often “twitter-pated,” experiences several “tectonic shifts” and sees many events as “germinal.”
“My Life So Far” is also larded with the self-help-y assertions of a woman who has spent many years in therapy and a lot of time with Eve Ensler, as indeed Fonda has. There is a lot of talk about how she’s been “disembodied” and needs to “own” her leadership, her voice, her sexuality, etc. Fonda apparently has never met a popular self-diagnosis she hasn’t liked, so pages at a time are gunked up with Oprah-isms about “the disease to please” and Robin Morgan’s “nictitating membrane” (the milky lid that cats have over their eyes) that Fonda writes “would settle over my being.” To make use of Fonda’s italics: What does that mean? The moments in which Fonda indulges in this sort of self-analysis are the weakest and dullest parts of the book.
But they are most frustrating because they distract from the deeply weird ride that Fonda takes us on. Her ability to absorb the ideas of those around her isn’t always gag-inducing; it can also be pretty comical. Fonda claims to be a rapacious reader, and scatters quotations from other texts throughout her book. Of course she may have written her life story with a Bartlett’s close at hand, but she deploys her references with an enthusiasm that suggests she has probably read most of the works she’s drawing on. Among her favored sages are Rainer Maria Rilke, Carrie Fisher, Mary McCarthy, Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Brontë, Rumi, Philip Lopate, Carolyn Heilbrun, Quincy Jones, Thomas Edison, Katharine Graham, Joseph Campbell, Robert Heinlein and Howell Raines (“Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis”).
Fonda is not shy about showing readers how her consciousness has evolved, and how little she knew to begin with. She recalls how when her first husband, Roger Vadim, exclaimed in 1964 that America will never win a war in Vietnam, “I wanted to ask ‘Where is Vietnam?’ but I was too ashamed.” A 1970 journal entry that Fonda reprints in the book reads: “Don’t understand the women’s liberation movement. There are more important things to have a movement for, it seems to me.” “Did I write that? Whew!” is her present-day self-chastisement. Fonda scolds herself repeatedly throughout her autobiography. At times it feels as if every other sentence is about her anger at herself for having been so weak.
Her self-punishment makes a reader feel sad for this woman who is so much harder on herself than anyone else (except for a few thousand angry veterans) could ever be. There is something depressing — if sort of charming — about Fonda’s aspirations to better herself. When she has a daughter, she names her Vanessa, partly in tribute to actress Vanessa Redgrave, whom she doesn’t even know well at the time. But Fonda is fascinated by her because “she is strong and sure of herself and was the only actress I knew who was a political activist.” True, Fonda admits, she “didn’t know the particulars of her politics” back then. But she had once read in a magazine that Redgrave “went to bed studying Keynesian economic theory!”
Fonda’s multiple and varied incarnations make for moments of vertiginous absurdity, especially during the 1960s when she is getting her consciousness raised while living in France with Vadim and making Hollywood movies. Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis teaches her about the Black Panther Party on the set of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” And to satisfy her curiosity about what exactly is going on in Vietnam, she visits her mentor Simone Signoret, a leftist actress married to Yves Montand, at the couple’s home outside of Paris. “Bringing a bottle of fine cabernet and a platter of cheeses, she took me out to the back porch, where we ensconced ourselves in an arbor,” writes Fonda. Signoret fills Fonda in on the history of French colonialism, and how Ho Chi Minh petitioned Truman for help and was ignored. “She stopped to sip her wine,” writes Fonda. “I took notes.”
In the same vein is her awakening to the civil rights movement in America, which takes place while she is floating in an inflatable raft off the shores of St. Tropez, reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” “It rocked me to my core …” she writes. “I began to search my soul to see which kind of white person I was. While theoretically I didn’t think I was racist, I hadn’t had enough contact with black people to know with certainty … Malcolm had allowed me for the first time to have a glimpse into what racism feels like to a black man. What I was not ready to acknowledge was how the black women in his life were viewed as mostly irrelevant, voiceless, subservient.” There you have it: major contradictions presented by the social movements of the mid-20th century, as considered by young Jane Fonda floating on her raft in St. Tropez.
Fonda’s political thinking inevitably becomes more rigorous with age, and by the time she gets to the chapters about Vietnam and activism, she relies heavily on — and footnotes — documents like the Pentagon Papers and her own FBI files, which she has obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. At one point, she quotes transcripts of conversation between Nixon, H.R. Haldeman and Henry Kissinger as evidence that despite public denials by the government, the U.S. was bombing dikes in North Vietnam, leaving Vietnamese civilians vulnerable to drowning and starvation. This was ostensibly the reason she visited the country in 1972, enraging veterans by meeting with POWs, addressing troops on Radio Hanoi, and sitting on an anti-aircraft gun that had been used to shoot at American planes. It earned her the nickname Hanoi Jane, and her story about the trip will surely be the centerpiece of most of the press about her book.
Though her explanation of the trip is being billed as “an apology” for her actions, it’s a vast overstatement. “I do not regret that I went,” she writes. “My only regret about the trip was that I was photographed sitting in a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun site.” In the chapter, she claims that she was led by guides to the gun, and didn’t realize how it looked until minutes after she stepped away, when she became horrified about how the image could be read. Now, she writes, “I realize that it is not just a U.S. citizen laughing and clapping on a Vietnamese antiaircraft gun: I am Henry Fonda’s privileged daughter who appears to be thumbing my nose at the country that has provided me these privileges … And I am a woman who is seen as Barbarella, a character existing on some subliminal level as an embodiment of men’s fantasies: Barbarella has become their enemy … I carry this heavy in my heart. I always will.”
Gender ambivalence undergirds Fonda’s entire narrative. It connects her childhood traumas, when she became obsessed with transsexual Christine Jorgensen because she herself wanted to be a boy, to her adult sexual relationships, in which she admits she gets subsumed in her male partners. She writes about women in politics, women in business, and women’s health issues. During her marriage to Ted Turner, Fonda becomes interested in Christianity, but is concerned about her place in its patriarchal structure. There is a lot of Ensler-inspired writing about her vagina, and even a few pages in which she frets about the connections between gender inequity and overpopulation.
It’s an impressive examination of how being a woman seeps into every corner of a personal, political, professional and physical life. But as fraught as she admits her relationship to her own womanhood is, there are complications that show up in the book that she doesn’t even seem conscious of. At times it feels as though she gets as far as sex-positive therapy-heavy diagnoses but can move no further in her own analysis: She felt she had to be perfect, she sought out uncommunicative men, she needed to move her feminism from her head to her body. But there is a lot more going on in her story than she seems to understand.
Throughout, Fonda castigates herself for being the kind of woman who lives to please a man, starting with her willingness to place worms on a fish hook to impress her father while her brother is too grossed-out to do so. These impulses certainly play themselves out in her marriages. She allows Vadim to bring other women into their bed for threesomes she now claims to have hated. She stays with Hayden who, obviously threatened by her success, makes her feel insignificant and stupid. (Hayden comes off as the biggest loser in the bunch.) By the time she meets Turner, whose comically energetic desire for her can’t mask the fact that he has no interest in what she has to say and that he insists she quit her jobs, it’s tempting to shake a fist at Fonda and ask her why she can’t just stand up to a man, already! It’s not only a question for readers. Fonda reports that when she asks her grown daughter Vanessa to help make a movie about her life, Vanessa spits back, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?” Fonda admits that maybe she “simply become[s] whatever the man I’m with wants me to be: ‘sex kitten,’ ‘controversial activist,’ ‘ladylike wife on the arm of corporate mogul.’”
But all the self-flagellation leaves something out: Fonda’s obsession with women. Whatever she may say, Fonda simply cannot convince a reader that she prizes male over female every time. She may not have liked her mother much, but the rest of her story is full of respect and admiration — both intellectual and physical — for other women, and much of it sounds more authentic than her affection for men. As a teenager Fonda notices Greta Garbo’s “healthy and athletic” body; she comments that friend Elisabeth Vaillard “was handsome in a Georgia O’Keeffe way,” and describes her producing partner Paula Weinstein as “a tall brunette with sexy brown eyes.” She is full of love for her onetime stepmother Susan Blanchard, for friend Brooke Hayward, for Signoret, and for Dot, her daughter’s nanny. She mysteriously points out to Hayden that a baby sitter is sexy (he promptly initiates an affair). And hilariously, in the chapters about the unwanted threesomes with Vadim, Fonda writes: “I’ll tell you what I did enjoy: the mornings after, when Vadim was gone and the woman and I would linger over our coffee and talk.” Whether or not Fonda has lesbian impulses — she denies the rumors that she and Vaillard were lovers — her obvious desire to surround herself with beautiful, compelling women belies her claim that she played only to the guys. Fonda may have seen herself as a man-pleaser, but her story makes it clear that it was often other women who pleased her best.
The confusions about gender are nowhere clearer than in the book’s chapter about the making of “On Golden Pond.” Fonda was a producer and supporting actress in the film, which starred Katharine Hepburn and her father. “On Golden Pond” has always been read as a cathartic coming-together of Jane and Henry Fonda, since the fictional relationship between Chelsea and Norman Thayer so closely mirrored the frosty bond between the real-life daughter and father.
When shooting the pivotal scene in which Chelsea (Jane) tells Norman (Henry) she’d like them to be friends, Fonda makes her father’s eyes well up by touching his arm unexpectedly. She describes it as a very moving moment. But when it’s time for her close-up on the same scene, she finds herself unable to cry. Fonda spies Hepburn — who comes across in this book as a whacked-out, crotchety Yoda figure — in the bushes, clenched fists in the air, cheering her on. “Katharine Hepburn to Jane Fonda; mother to daughter,” writes Fonda, “she literally gave me the scene.”
Hepburn also goads Fonda into performing her own back-flip in the film, another of the major turning points in the fictional father-daughter relationship. Afraid of Hepburn’s disapproval, Fonda forgoes a body double and spends all summer practicing the difficult dive herself. One day, she gets it. “As I crawled, battered and bruised, onto the shore, out of the nearby bushes appeared Ms. Hepburn. She must have been hiding there, watching me practice. She walked over to where I was standing and said in her shaky, nasal, God-is-a-New-Englander voice, ‘Don’t you feel good?’” Fonda acknowledges that the dynamic was skewed. “It was odd,” she writes. “In the film the back-flip was to prove myself to my father. In real life I had proved myself to Ms. Hepburn. Dad probably couldn’t have cared less if I’d done the dive myself or used a stunt double.” Fonda may think she spent her life looking for her daddy’s approval; scenes like this suggest that her dead mother may have left an even deeper scar.
Fonda’s story, complete with its parenting “issues,” its messy marriages and divorces, and of course its historical backdrop, is a peculiarly American document. Fonda spends a lot of time in her discussion of Vietnam insisting that she is a patriot, but her patriotism is perfectly evident throughout her life: in her obsession with her father’s portrayals of Abraham Lincoln and Tom Joad and Clarence Darrow, in her examination of several presidential administrations, in her interest in social justice. But it’s also clear in her unexpected fascination with the country’s landscape. There are the lichen-covered stone walls of Connecticut and smoggy valleys of Southern California, sure. But what’s surprising are Fonda’s detours, like a too-good-to-be-true early-1980s bus trip she makes to the Ozark and Smoky mountains with her own personal spirit guide, Dolly Parton, in which she cooks and eats a possum. Fonda also writes rapturously of rowing through South Carolina swamps on an early-morning quail hunt with Turner. And then there’s the chapter section she begins, “One day around the time I turned 59, I was participating in the annual bison round-up on one of Ted’s New Mexico ranches.”
There’s an awful lot of personal terrain that Fonda only touches on in her book. Readers might have appreciated a clearer and more thorough discussion of her religious epiphanies, a longer look at what happened to her children and brother. Only a few sentences are spent on her own drug and alcohol use, and she declines to name several of the men with whom she had important affairs or go into detail on why her marriage to Turner ended. Of course, many memoirists could have woven individual books from each thread of Fonda’s personal tapestry: Vietnam, eating disorders, growing up with a famous father, marriage to famous men, exercise dynasty …
Fonda somehow mashes it all into one book. Does she contradict herself? Sure she does. She contains multitudes.
A young woman sleeps in her bed, in the embrace of someone who has a leg draped over her thigh and an arm comfortingly around her middle. When the alarm clock buzzes, jolting this spooning pair to consciousness, we realize that they’re not a romantic couple; they are best friends and roommates, Hannah and Marnie.
It’s an early, lovely moment in “Girls,” the new HBO series created, directed, written, produced and, really, detonated onto the pop landscape by 25-year-old Lena Dunham. Dunham stars as Hannah, who is joined in bed by Marnie because Marnie is avoiding having to be touched by her over-kind swain, and because both girls like to stay up late watching reruns of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
These details, along with the image of two friends snoozing happily entwined, make the moment emblematic of a dynamic central to “Girls’” appeal and its importance. Despite Dunham’s protestations about not wanting to be some symbolic emissary from the land of young ladies (Sorry, kid, you’re it!), this is what she’s telling us about Women Right Now: that the lives of contemporary Mary Richardses and Rhoda Morgensterns are not based on pursuit or enjoyment of hetero congress; rather, they are often most firmly and warmly wrapped around each other.
You have likely already read something about the sex on “Girls,” which in early episodes, at least, all takes place between straight, sort-of-realistically-bodied young people. What you’ve read is true: the show’s abundant sex – as experienced by its four female leads – is either boring and unsatisfying, porn-fantasy-driven and unsatisfying, nonexistent and unsatisfying, or performed as conquest (Jessa says after bagging an ex, “That was me showing that I cannot be smoted. I am unsmoteable”) and yet … unsatisfying. Sex for these young women is an awkward element in their lives, and whether you think that this characterization is hilariously awful, worryingly awful, or whether it prompts you to reflect, once again, on how everyone else but you is a prude, there is no question that “Girls” features some awful, awful sex.
But part of the point of “Girls” is that the sex, and the guys with whom the sex happens, are not the point. Instead, as titularly advertised, “Girls” is about girls, and the fact that they do make connections – emotional, intimate, irritating, satisfying, pleasurable, lasting. Just not, so far anyway, with men. The show, among many other things, is crucial and corrective testament to the ways in which women’s friendships with each other have flourished and changed during the same period in which their liberties and status have increased.
Minutes into the first episode, Hannah sits naked in a bathtub eating a cupcake, laughing pityingly with a betoweled Marnie about Marnie’s emasculated boyfriend. When the boyfriend accidentally comes into the room, it’s clear he has no place in this room of unclothed communion. A similarly awkward entrance occurs later, during one of several scenes in which one of the four lead characters sits on the toilet, making serious confessions (of pregnancy, for instance) to a girlfriend while peeing. The bodily closeness depicted on “Girls” makes flesh the role these women play in each other’s lives: They are the non-sexual lovers of each other.
It’s the girlfriends who provide the physical affirmations usually associated with boyfriends. “You are beautiful, shut up,” Marnie tells self-deprecating Hannah. “Your skin is, like, hauntingly beautiful,” Long Island girl Shoshanna says to her worldly cousin Jessa. “When I look at both of you, a Coldplay song plays in my heart,” Hannah tells Marnie and Jessa, kidding but serious. In one scene, having been meanly rejected by a boy because of her virginity, Shoshanna desperately asks her friends if they would have sex with a virgin, meaning her. “Oh Shosh,” Jessa says kindly, “if I had a cock, it’s all I’d do.” You get the feeling that she means it; if they could provide that kind of fulfillment for each other, they would.
This same-sex affinity feels extremely contemporary, part of what has prompted critics to write about the show as revolutionary. But noting female friendship as a (or the) primary source of emotional sustenance only feels strange in the context of relatively recent history; in fact it’s a dynamic that is very old.
For the many centuries during which marriage was regarded as an economic and a socially ratifying necessity, rather than as an institution from which women could reasonably hope to derive emotional or sexual pleasure, intense social and physical bonds between women were an accepted part of life. From Celia and Rosalind in “As You Like It” to Hermia and Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” whom we’re told were as close as “two lovely berries, moulded on one stem,” Shakespeare regularly used the assumed closeness (and sometimes the bed-fellowship) of women as a plot device. Much of what we learn of the fate of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe is from letters to her best friend, Anna Howe. Then there’s Lucy Montgomery’s Anne Shirley, who meets her “bosom friend” and “kindred spirit” in Diana Barry.
The term “Boston marriage” was used during the late 19thcentury to describe unmarried women who lived together in long-term partnerships. In “Bachelor Girl,” a history of single female life in the United States, Betsy Israel writes that around the same period, near-romantic female bonds were encouraged by parents. Two girls, meeting perhaps in school, would be “‘smashed’ – think of best friends going steady – and once smashed, they’d learn trust, loyalty, tolerance, patience.” Of course, all that social growth was supposed to be in service of marriage. “Once they’d mastered these skills,” Israel writes, “they would be able … to transfer them onto a marital relationship. Even if those who wed never felt quite the same about their husbands.” For a long time, there was no questioning the sexuality of women who held hands, slept side-by-side, confided in each other or wrote long love letters to one another.
It wasn’t until the early 20th century, as marriage came to be treated as a union based on love and sex, that same-sex friendships began to be seen as competitive to the closeness a woman was supposed to feel to her husband, and thus as sexually suspect. Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz has described how, by the end of the 1920s, American psychoanalyists “were warning that one of the most common ‘perversions of the libido’ was the tendency of teenage girls to fix their ‘affections on members of the same sex.’ Such perversions, they claimed, were a serious threat to normal development and to marriage.” The fix, Coontz writes, was to discourage social unions between women and encourage more early sexual experimentation between the sexes. Networks based on female camaraderie, trust and dependence began to break down.
These mid-20th-century decades are the ones on which most of us have drawn, until recently, our understanding of how a woman’s life is supposed to proceed. They were years in which women made stupendous social, economic and professional strides, yet during which they were still told to pursue, and mark their graduation to adulthood with a “traditional” marriage, in which a man is lover, confidant, provider, partner and companion. These were also years in which messages about women’s behavior toward women were nasty; girls were hair-pullers, back-stabbers and bitches, always after each other’s jobs, wardrobes and men.
Now, it seems, we are coming out on the other side of the looking glass. The median age of first marriage for women has been rising steadily since the late 1980s. Marriage – while still widely fetishized as some kind of goal – is no longer the only acceptable marker of maturity. The idea of young adult women living, working, earning, spending and having sex on their own, outside of marriage, is, in many parts of this nation, not aberrant, but an expected phase of life, a norm.
These are Dunham’s “Girls,” and while the privileged Oberlin grads depicted on the show are members of the demographic statistically most likely to eventually marry – and to enjoy successful companionate marriages – their walks down aisles might well not take place for a decade or more. During that period, the people with whom they are likely to form their most intense emotional partnerships are, like the smashes of old, other young women. Except now, the smashes are happening not in anticipation of unfulfilling marital futures, but in advance of potentially happy marriages; they’re not a reflection of the powerless quandary of women compelled to marry practical strangers for money and social acceptance, but rather of a generation of women who, even if they don’t yet have real power, experience historically unprecedented autonomy and freedom.
Yes, we’ve seen friends on television before. From Mary and Rhoda to Laverne and Shirley to, yes, the show that must not be named but to which “Girls” is always compared. But Carrie and her brightly colored cadre made history in almost cartoonish fashion, in which material consumption was supposed to be symbolic of social liberty (until it just became material consumption), in which friendship was a public performance enacted in expansive shiny clubs over jewel-colored cocktails. Those flamboyantly drawn expressions have given way to Hannah and Marnie, who breakfast in their grim apartment kitchen, Marnie listening with irritation as Hannah slurps her cereal milk and talks with her mouth full, like regular best friends, not fabulously implausible best friends.
Their life is not one of aspirational adornment, but of the quotidian realities of (even privileged) young adult life, in which the people you trust and argue with and talk to at the end of the day about your job, whom you share beers and breakfasts with, are your girlfriends.
It’s hard to talk about the role of female friendships without making them sound like placeholders for marriage. But it sells female friendship very short to regard it as some kind of training ground for later, committed heterosexual (or homosexual) partnership. These relationships take place not in some liminal state, as women are waiting for “real” life to begin; marital partnership no longer defines “real” life. Young women, older women, unmarried women – they are simply living their actual lives, not dress rehearsals for them, and the bonds they form with each other are as real, as varied, as complex and often as long-lasting as the ones they may or may not form with romantic and sexual partners, and as fraught and as true as the love they may or may not feel for their kids.
These women are, make no mistake, partners, spouses, family to each other. They get mad at each other for being late for dinner, for sleeping with the wrong people. They are jealous, possessive, dismissive of and bored by each other, sometimes in the emotionally manipulative style associated with lovers. Fighting over that too-adoring boyfriend, Marnie tells Hannah that she can’t understand because “you’ve never been loved this much.” She pauses. “Except by me. I love you that much.” While Jessa at one point turns to Hannah and issues a line that could have been taken from either romantic comedy or drama: “I am not a character for one of your novels. Stop staring at my face so hard.”
The bad stuff – the fighting – is as much a part of adult connection as the good stuff, and the good stuff – the love – is there in abundance in “Girls.”
At the end of an early episode, Hannah, recovering from a series of life’s traumas, dances by herself in her bedroom to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” Marnie arrives home; they laugh at the day’s indignities, and then, before you know it, they’re dancing – happily, freely, satisfyingly – together.
The startling intensity that we saw this week in response to Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s decision to pull its grants from Planned Parenthood — an intensity that prompted the Komen foundation to reverse its decision today — may be the best thing that’s happened to the conversation about reproductive rights in this country for decades. It certainly should be.
Practically since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, reproductive rights activists have been left to play stilted defense against ideological opponents who grabbed the language of morality, life, love and family as their own, always deploying it with reference to the fetus. The rhetoric around reproductive rights, which has more recently begun to creep into arguments over contraception, has become suffocating in its emotional self-righteousness, but too muscular, too ubiquitous to effectively combat.
But the overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency — armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they’ve been lacking for too long.
That this week’s blow against Planned Parenthood came not directly from John Boehner’s House of Representatives – which, ever since taking power a year ago promising to focus on jobs, has manfully focused on the single task of attacking women’s reproductive rights – but instead from a popular, officially nonpartisan organization dedicated wholly to women’s healthcare somehow brought this argument into the open.
The response to Komen was surely so tinderbox explosive because it had been building with every politically theatrical investigation launched by Cliff Stearns and every grisly abortion scene enacted on the House floor by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith. But it was not just Washington wonkery, and was not ginned up or amplified by professional political cranks. It was the reflexive kick of a shin hit just below the knee, and the visceral anger spilled everywhere, from a Planned Parenthood Saved Me tumblr and onto Facebook, where people posted images of Komen’s pink ribbon cut in half. It poured from bank accounts, including that of New York Mayor and former Republican Michael Bloomberg.
It came from often dispassionate media figures like Andrea Mitchell, was tweeted by novelists like Judy Blume, Terry McMillan and William Gibson, actors Ellen Barkin and Martha Plimpton, politicos like Donna Brazile, Reps. Gwen Moore and Jackie Speiers, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and from 22 senators including Frank Lautenberg, Al Franken and Kirsten Gillibrand, who signed a letter urging Komen to reverse its decision. It came from callers to radio programs, announcing their intentions to drop out of Komen races, and from the American Association of University Women, which canceled a scheduled service event with Komen. In the three days after Komen’s announcement of its Planned Parenthood break, Planned Parenthood received more than $3 million in donations, said PPFA president Cecile Richards in a press call on Friday.
More than that, though: The starkly observable attack against something as crucial and basic as breast exams for poor women, as well as the fact that so many divergent voices were pulled into it, meant that the conversation was not about partisan politics; it was about women. For the first time in what feels like forever, passion and fury were being loudly, proudly given in a full-throated voice, on behalf of women – women as moral actors; women as citizens with rights, health, bodies, freedoms; women as people with families and economic concerns.
Taken together, these factors mark this as a watershed moment in the contemporary conversation about reproductive rights. This is a story in which we see the possibility of a turned tide, a new way to gauge how the public actually feels about women’s rights and health, and a new way to talk about it, as well. Because what we saw this week was big. It was mass. It was emotional. This was so different from the various polls activists on both sides of the abortion question are always throwing around, polls that depend so much on how a question is asked; polls that offer far less clarity than head-banging confusion about where America stands on the issue of reproductive heath. This was not a poll. This was America announcing that it cared about women’s health, and more specifically, that it cared about Planned Parenthood.
In many ways, the activism that forced Komen to backtrack was ignited by Boehner’s House Republicans a year ago, when they voted to cut off all funding to Planned Parenthood because it provides abortion services. This despite the fact that since 1976’s Hyde Amendment, no federal money has been able to be used to provide abortion services. The organization Republicans want to squash provides more than 800,000 women a year with breast exams, more than 4 million Americans with testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and 2.5 million people with contraception, which prevents unintended pregnancy and thus abortion. But playing to what they must imagine is overriding public sentiment, Republicans have worked tirelessly to lodge the image of Planned Parenthood as an abortion factory deep in the American imagination.
A year ago, some of the anger at this strategy began to bubble over. In response to Smith’s description of a second trimester abortion, read on the House floor, Democratic U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier went to the House well and described her own painful second trimester abortion. “For you to stand on this floor and suggest that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought, is preposterous,” Speier said, directing her comments at Smith. “Planned Parenthood has a right to operate. Planned Parenthood has a right to provide services for family planning. Planned Parenthood has a right to offer abortions. The last time I checked, abortions were legal in this country … I would suggest to you that it would serve us all very well if we moved on with this process and started focusing on creating jobs for the Americans who desperately want them.”
It was around this time that a viral “Thank You Planned Parenthood” meme cropped up online. With participants noting the instances in which they had relied on PPFA for birth control, breast exams, gynelogical care, and yes, abortions. Twitter, Facebook and blogs began to be dotted with “I stand with Planned Parenthood” emblems. Comedian Lizz Winstead kicked off a tour called “Planned Parenthood, I am here for you.”
But this recent wave of defense of Planned Parenthood has remained broad, ambient. The politics of the congressional witch hunt have been so labyrinthine, so convoluted, that it has been difficult to know how to effectively harness an angry response. When, last fall, Rep. Cliff Stearns launched an investigation into PPFA’s bookkeeping, the move was so needless, such a trumped-up piece of political stagecraft (since PPFA does receive federal funds, it must scrupulously account for every dime it spends, no special investigation required) that it was hard to even know how to make sense of it, let alone respond. This week, a caller to WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show” professed her belief that the Stearns investigation centered on whether Planned Parenthood was performing late-term abortions.
The demonization of Planned Parenthood should have awakened the country to the radicalism of the right, and how far it has pushed the political conversation. It’s been hard to measure the degree of the radicalism, so slowly and unceasingly has it crept across our consciousness and the political discourse. But it’s important to remember how mainstream Planned Parenthood used to be. It was the respectable, even Republican, advocate for women’s health, including reproductive services; the leaders of the National Abortion Rights Action League were the activist agitators. Sen. Prescott Bush, the father of President George H.W. Bush, served as treasurer of Planned Parenthood’s first national fundraising campaign. Richard Nixon signed the family planning legislation in 1970 that authorized its federal funding.
As a congressman, George Bush and his wife, Barbara, were reliable friends of the organization. Barry Goldwater’s wife, Betty, was a founding member of Arizona Planned Parenthood; President Gerald Ford’s wife, Betty, was a high-profile supporter of the group. More recently, Ann Romney, wife of the 2012 GOP presidential front-runner, donated $150 to Planned Parenthood in 1994. And when a Romney relative died of a botched abortion in 1963, the family asked that memorial donations go to Planned Parenthood.
But what happened this week was a clarifying moment. Right-wing extremism, coming this time not from the partisan mill but from a mainstream women’s organization, was put in a direct and unflattering spotlight. Suddenly, so much was clear, and finally, the response was unified and thunderous. Right-wing overreach — and the backlash it inspired — feels a lot like the way other radical GOP power grabs in the last year have galvanized the public to fight back. Attacks on collective bargaining, public workers and unions by Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana have produced mass mobilization in those states, the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. Public workers – cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers, paramedics, sanitation workers – once were the proud backbone of the middle class. Now they find themselves derided by the GOP as the new welfare queens who are taking more than their fair share. Ohio voters repealed a law that abolished collective bargaining in November, and pro-union organizers in Wisconsin have forced a recall election for Gov. Scott Walker.
Efforts to restrict voting rights are likewise waking up the citizenry; Maine repealed a law that banned same-day voting and registration in November, and Ohio blocked a voter photo ID bill. Even on the issue of reproductive rights, a draconian “personhood” amendment to the state constitution failed to pass in Mississippi, one of the reddest of the red states. Overreach by the right has re-inspired movements – unions, voting rights, women’s rights — that have too long been dormant and too easily dismissed by their ideological opponents as outside the mainstream of American values, when in fact, they used to represent the most American of values.
For defenders of Planned Parenthood, and more broadly for reproductive rights activists, this moment of repositioning is a valuable one. Until now, it has proven very difficult for advocates to resuscitate their side with language anywhere near as powerful as that used by antiabortion forces. Instead they have relied too heavily on the fungible, limp, endlessly open-ended language of “choice.” (Even among “pro-choice” advocates, the “I choose my choice!” joke from “Sex and the City” has become a ubiquitous critique.)
But what happened this week was powerful. It was mass. It was direct. It was emotional. And it restores women as the moral center of this conversation — which is where they belong.
When will Barack Obama learn how to talk thoughtfully about women, women’s health and women’s rights?
Apparently, not today.
On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius unexpectedly overruled the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation that emergency contraception be sold on drugstore shelves and made available without a prescription to women under the age of 17. The move came as a surprise blow to healthcare and women’s rights activists, the kinds of people regularly counted as supporters of the Obama administration.
Today, Obama doubled down on his disregard for the concerns of these groups, claiming that while Sebelius made her decision without his counsel, he agreed with it. Obama pooh-poohed the findings of the FDA, which had concluded that Plan B pills posed no medical hazard and supported Sebelius’ official argument, citing a lack of confidence that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.” The logic expressed today by the president, and yesterday by Sebelius, is ludicrous: Medicines like Tylenol – which have been proven to have adverse effects in high doses – are available by the truckload on drugstore shelves, at prices far cheaper than the $30 to $50 it would cost a preteen to purchase just one dose of Plan B, let alone go wild with it.
But part of what was most disturbing about Obama’s statement was his reliance on language that reveals his paternalistic approach to women and their health.
“As the father of two daughters,” Obama told reporters, “I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.”
First of all, the president was not talking about “various rules.” He was supporting a very specific rule, one that prevents young women from easily obtaining a drug that can help them control their reproductive lives, at an age when their economic, educational, familial and professional futures are perhaps most at risk of being derailed by an unplanned pregnancy. “As the father of two daughters,” Obama might want to reconsider his position on preventing young women from being able to exercise this form of responsibility over their own bodies and lives.
But as an American, I think it is important for my president not to turn to paternalistic claptrap and enfeebling references to the imagined ineptitude and irresponsibility of his daughters – and young women around the country – to justify a curtailment of access to medically safe contraceptives. The notion that in aggressively conscribing women’s abilities to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy Obama is just laying down some Olde Fashioned Dad Sense diminishes an issue of gender equality, sexual health and medical access. Recasting this debate as an episode of “Father Knows Best” reaffirms hoary attitudes about young women and sex that had their repressive heyday in the era whence that program sprang.
A question of who should be allowed access to a safe form of contraception is at its root a question of how badly we want to, or believe that we can, police young women’s sexuality. When Obama is talking about his daughters, we know he’s not really basing his opinion on an anxiety that they might suffer the adverse effects of drinking a whole jug of Pepto-Bismol or swallowing 50 Advil, things that any 11-year-old who walks into a CVS with a wad of cash could theoretically do. When he says that he wants to “apply common sense” to questions of young women’s access to emergency contraception, he is telegraphing his discomfort with the idea of young women’s sexual agency, or more simply, with the idea of them having sex lives at all. This discomfort might be comprehensible from an emotional, parental point of view. But these are not familial discussions; this is a public-health policy debate, and at a time when “16 and Pregnant” airs on MTV, the fact that a daddy feels funny about his little girls becoming grown-ups has no place in a discussion of healthcare options for America’s young women. It is also nearly impossible to imagine a similar use of language or logic to justify a ban of condom sales.
Moreover, Obama’s invocation of his role as a father is an insult to the commitments and priorities of those on the other side of this issue. Are we to believe that those who support the increased availability of emergency contraception do not have daughters? That if they do, they care less about those daughters than Barack Obama does about his? And that if they do not, they cannot possibly know better than a father of daughters what is best for young women? Why should we be asked to believe that Obama’s paternity imbues him with more moral authority on the subject of women’s health and reproductive lives than the investments of doctors, researchers and advocates who – regardless of their parental status – have dedicated their lives to working on behalf of increased reproductive health options. This line of argument is no better than the Mama Grizzly argument developed by Sarah Palin during 2010′s midterm elections, in which she asserted that her band of super-conservative mothers were qualified for office because “moms just know when there’s something wrong.”
Barack Obama has long had a tin ear for language that has anything to do with women and even more specifically with women’s rights. While on the campaign trail for president in 2008, he waved off a female reporter who asked a question about the future of the auto industry, referring to her diminutively as “sweetie.” The same year, attempting to play both sides on the issue of reproductive freedom, he gave an interview with a religious magazine in which he asserted his support for states’ restrictions on late-term abortions as long as there was an exception for the health of the mother, but added that he didn’t “think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother.” Attempting to recover from that line and reassert his pro-choice bona fides, Obama later clarified that of course he believed in a medical exemption for “serious clinical mental health diseases,” just not when seeking a late-term abortion is “a matter of feeling blue,” perpetuating a wildly irresponsible vision of the rare and difficult late-term abortion as a moody impulse-buy.
Today also isn’t the first time he’s used references to members of his family to make a larger offensive point about women. Back in 2009, when charges that his officially female-friendly administration included some boys’ club tendencies hit the front of the New York Times, Obama dismissed the claims as “bunk.” Reporter Mark Leibovich noted at the time that the president “often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home,” an argument that not only mimics an old saw about how being henpecked by women is equivalent to respecting them, but reflects a dynamic as old as patriarchal power itself and sidesteps the question of how strong females are treated at work. In 2010, while appearing on “The View,” Obama made a creaky Take-My-Wife-Please joke about how he wanted to appear on “a show that Michelle actually watched” as opposed to the news shows she usually flips past. The joke being that his missus, the one he met when she mentored him at a high-powered law firm, just doesn’t have a head for news delivered by anyone other than Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
It should no longer come as a surprise that the president of the United States is, on perhaps an unconscious level, an old-school patriarch. What’s startling is the degree to which Obama seems not to have learned from any of his past gaffes, how no one seems to have told him – or told him in a way that he’s absorbed – that the best way to address a question of women’s health and rights is probably not by making it about his role as a father.
This might be an especially valuable chat to have with the president as he moves into 2012 and toward an election in which he is going to be relying on the support of people he has just managed to anger, offend and speak down to — women. The least he could do is learn to address them with respect.
Last week, the summer’s surprise blockbuster, “Bridesmaids,” was released on DVD, after a spectacular run both in the United States and abroad. The fortunes of the film, which starred a brace of funny women and dealt equally in fart jokes and friendship, were regarded as crucial to the future of women in entertainment.
Hollywood, perpetually on the verge of never making another movie for anyone but teenage boys, was in need of a slap in the face, reminding it that women buy tickets, fill theaters, tell friends they loved it — and know men who are occasionally eager to see the opposite sex portrayed compellingly on celluloid. “Bridesmaids” delivered a wallop, bringing in more than $280 million worldwide, and drawing an audience reported to be a third male, and largely over 30.
But has it actually whetted the film business’s appetite for more female-driven projects? Salon called Lynda Obst, producer of movies like “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Contact” and “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” the television show “Hot in Cleveland,” the author of “Hello, He Lied” and all-around movie sage, to see what, if anything, has changed in her town this summer.
Did the success of “Bridesmaids” make a difference to your business?
Yes. It had the biggest impact of any women’s movie that I can remember in my career.
In your whole career, which began with “Flashdance” in 1983?
Yeah. It came at a moment when any movies for women, women’s comedies — forget dramas, there are no dramas for anybody — but women’s comedies, women’s thrillers were going to get put by the wayside forever. Women’s projects were dying everywhere. That’s why the opening of “Bridesmaids” was so critical for every woman in features, why its success was attended with such profound interest by every woman writer, producer and director in town.
The second important factor was that there were no stars in the movie and it wasn’t tracking in advance.
And that matters because it means that it was the material, not a movie star, that drew people to theaters?
Yes. Its success wasn’t automatic. A star opens a movie. Sandra Bullock opens a movie. But there was nobody in this movie who had ever been in a movie before, so it’s the hardest kind of movie to open.
It means that its success was due to the fact that people enjoyed it, and gave it good word of mouth once the movie started screening. Which leads us to the gigantic thing, which was the revelation that women can open a movie, and also, that this [women's movie] crossed over. Men came. It drew women of all ages and it drew guys and was a major hit. And not just domestically, which is part two of this gigantic thing, because the movie business right now is being driven by international box office.
Comedy doesn’t usually travel well. Movies that travel are movies with very little dialogue, usually dependent on action or family content or big international stars. But “Bridesmaids” did very well internationally. The concept was easy to understand in all languages. It gave us a clue as to what movies will work internationally with women in them. So what we learned is: Broad comedies will sell abroad, even with broads.
What are the immediate effects of this?
There are suddenly projects for women! I’m pitching one right now that is a female-based comedy and people are really responsive to it. And then my directing debut, which was dead in the water at New Line, went from having no momentum to having momentum, the weekend right after “Bridesmaids” opened. “Bridesmaids” meant that the idea of being able to make a movie about women was resuscitated.
Well, for now. What if the next female comedy flops?
If the next one flops, who knows? Two action movies flop and it means nothing; one women’s movie flops and it’s the end. But “Bridesmaids” was followed immediately by the success of “The Help,” which was terrific because that was driven by women too.
So what we’re finding in the American market is that younger male eyeballs are disappearing in large numbers, going to video games, going to the Internet. But women are going to the movies, if you make movies for them.
Now, does this mean we will stop making movies for the younger male quadrant? No, because the young male quadrant likes the same movies as international audiences — action movies, man movies.
Man movies?
“Ironman,” “Spider-Man,” “Batman.” Man movies.
Are studios pursuing women’s projects or are people just feeling like they can pitch them again?
I think the latter. But I think studios were suddenly receptive to them.
This is not the first time in recent memory that a woman’s movie has done well and studios have failed to notice in any permanent way. “The Devil Wears Prada,” your movie “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” “Sex and the City” have all been big women-driven hits, and yet women’s movies were on the brink of extinction.
Studios have institutionally short memories when it comes to women’s movies. “Sex and the City II” did better internationally than it did domestically, which would have made you think that they would have noticed it. I mean, that’s what inclines Fox to make “Ice Ages”; sequels do so well internationally. But studios don’t seem to generalize by the same rules in women’s movies as they do for other movies.
Every time a woman’s movie does well, it’s a brand-new fact. Every time we rediscover the female audience, it’s astonishing.
So it’s possible that despite “Bridesmaids’” success, four years from now you and I will be having the same conversation about the death of women’s comedy?
Yes.
That’s depressing. But back to the success of “Bridesmaids.” There was a certain amount of social awareness around going to the movie. Because of the press it got, women seemed to be aware that going to see the movie was not just about enjoying it, but about sending a message to Hollywood. Do you think that had an impact on its box office?
Well, I know there was tremendous awareness in Los Angeles that we had to open this movie. I believe it happened in New York too, but I don’t know that that happened nationally.
What happened nationally was that there was a hunger for something for women to relate to, because there’s usually nothing out there for them. It’s what happens with an urban audience with Tyler Perry.
I had a sense from friends in other cities that they were going with their girlfriends and that they knew it was made for them. It’s so rare that there’s a movie made for them. It generated such excitement.
You would think that that excitement alone would send a message that there is an eager audience out there for material about women.
Well, I think you can see a lot of that reaction on television. It is the year of women on television. Television is much more female-friendly than Hollywood. There are a tremendous number of female executives, and when they see something like “Bridesmaids,” it’s much easier to react fast to it, and there’s less institutional resistance. They love the zeitgeist.
But timing-wise, this season of television was already a done deal before “Bridesmaids” opened, so it can’t have been a reaction, can it?
Well, the [final] decisions about this current fall season were made at the upfronts, which roughly coincided [Editor's note: actually, directly coincided in mid-May] with the opening of “Bridesmaids,” so there actually could have been a connection.
But also, I have just been through the next season of creative development and let me tell you it’s just as female-friendly as the one that’s on air now. There are shows about women and girlfriends and not just couples. There is television about women, for women. Real women.
The casts of "Sex and the City" (top) and "Girls" 
Singer Whitney Houston performs in concert at Wembley Stadium in London on May 5, 1988 (Credit: Reuters) 
Members of Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and more than 20 other organizations hold a "Stand Up for Women's Health" rally in Washington (Credit: Joshua Roberts / Reuters) 
(Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster/Salon) 
Kristin Wiig in "Bridesmaids" and Viola Davis in "The Help" 