No fear

Decades after she made the "zipless fuck" famous, Erica Jong still has a lot to teach young feminists about sex -- and speaking out.

By Jessica Valenti

Read more: Feminism, Writing, Life

Erica Jong

April 4, 2006 | I'm probably one of the only women I know who didn't read Erica Jong's groundbreaking novel "Fear of Flying." That is, until I found out I would be interviewing her. Chalk it up as a generational thing. So reading "Fear of Flying" and "Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life" back-to-back proved to be quite the Jong tutorial.

Jong describes "Seducing the Demon" as the story of how she survived the post-"Fear of Flying" craziness. If the idea of having to "survive" a book that has more than 18 million copies in print seems a little much, don't worry, Jong feels the same way: "Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included."

In "Seducing," Jong retells the story of her demons (men, addiction), her inspirations (family, exotic locales), and the writers that she admired along the way. It's witty, insightful and, above all, honest.

But there's no getting around the fact that "Seducing" is all Jong, all the time -- even the book design ensures that you don't forget it. The front cover features a black-and-white picture of a young Jong, all hair and lips and cuteness. The back cover is a more recent picture, the same hair and lips, but now a pink overcoat takes over the page. And yes, "Seducing" is a memoir, but I have to admit that I still found something off-putting about how much of her fabulous life I was inundated with. I mean, before you can even get to the name-dropping in the text, you're hit with a picture of Jong with James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg in the front pages of the book. We get it, you're famous.

Jong makes no apologies about telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the dirty truth. From a "hook-up" with Martha Stewart's husband to giving oral sex to a publisher with the hopes of getting a first edition book, Jong doesn't hold back explaining in full (and often unflattering) detail the mistakes she made along the way. That kind of honesty commands respect, but there were times when I found myself wondering if I really needed to know that it took the before-mentioned publisher forever to come because the "sap was congealed." "Seducing" is all truth and candor, but how much truth can one person take? After all, even self-aware egotism is still egotism.

After speaking with Jong, however, I was left wondering whether my initial eye rolling over her frankness and honesty about fame was just my own discomfort with a woman writer not giving a shit what anyone thinks. (Even though that's how I'd like to think of myself, strangely enough.) Let's face it, Erica Jong is famous. And talented. So why should she pretend to be anything but? It's not as if you see male writers apologizing for their popularity and amazing lives.

Jong spoke to my concerns (and more), and did it in a way that left me a bit shamed at how harsh I had been in my original take on the book. I had judged "Seducing" within the paradigm that Jong is working so hard to change -- punishing women writers for transgressing.

The truth of it is, I saw myself in the book more than I would have liked to. A book that I thought was all about her, really became all about me. And maybe that's the point.

What struck me most about "Seducing" was that it all seemed to come back to "Fear of Flying" -- you seem to have this love-hate relationship with it. You credit "Fear" with propelling your career and changing your life, but you also say that it almost "obliterated" everything. That's strong language for a book that was so successful. What exactly did it destroy?

Of course I feel lucky, I feel blessed, to have had a book that sold so many copies and established my name all over the world and made me "a brand." You can't help that; you know how few writers get that and how lucky you are. I know so well that most writers don't make more than $5,000 a year for their writing. So I know I'm blessed. But also because it intersected with the time in such a particular way, it sort of obliterated everything else I've done. "Seducing the Demon" is my 20th book ... but "Fear of Flying" is always the book that people speak about. And it's very nice and I'm very grateful, but I wish to hell people would read my poetry or something else. Complaining about success is never nice, so I don't want to go on.

Right. You say you know that writers don't make that much money and that you feel blessed, but reading your advice to writers there were times where I felt a bit of a disconnect -- you talk about flying off to Venice for inspiration, and hobnobbing with the literati and having passing conversations with Barbra Streisand. I mean, given that you've led this extraordinary life, how can you still connect with young writers, let's just say, holed up in their shitty apartments in Brooklyn?

I do a lot of teaching ... and so I think I know how hard it is for young writers, how they have to work two jobs to survive. I've also been privileged to get involved with the Woodhull Institute [a nonprofit that provides leadership training for young women].

So it's important for you to foster relationships with young women writers?

Well, I think the next stage of feminism is mentoring. The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves and I think we did so much damage to the movement ... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world. I care very much about that. And I really love to teach, so I'm not out of touch.

You know, what you say about the second wave of feminism -- I think we still see that now, we're still fighting among ourselves. The exclusiveness of the second wave has definitely left its mark on how the third wave functions, which is good because I think it's important that younger feminists make sure we don't repeat those same mistakes. But I don't think the trend of feminist-on-feminist bashing has really gone away.

I remember that my constant rant in those days was, you just can't make it seem that only lesbian separatists are feminists. It's fine to be a lesbian, lesbians should have full civil rights, they should be able to marry, they should be able to adopt children or have children and share custody. They should be able to inherit property from their partners, which is happening more and more in certain states, thank god, but we shouldn't give out the idea that you have to be a lesbian in order to be a feminist. Because -- let's face it -- most women in the world aren't. And we're going to lose our grass-roots support. And people would disagree with me and mock me and say I was just a male-identified feminist and I wore lipstick and that was so bad, and I wore heels and that was so bad. I think that feminism has to be a very broad and an all-encompassing movement.

Is that why in a previous Salon article on the word "feminism" you said that you thought it was "very smart" to consider using a new word? Because after reading the book, and thinking about what you say about language and using it to tell the truth, if we use a new word isn't that watering down the truth of feminism? Or do you think it's more important that we have a broader movement and reach out to people who may be afraid of the word "feminism"?

It's a perplexing problem because it seems to me that every word that becomes associated with women is eventually downgraded; it becomes pejorative sooner or later. And acknowledging that, maybe it doesn't matter what we're called. I would say: We are women and men who believe that both sexes should have totally equal rights, but we don't believe that both sexes are exactly the same, biologically. We are not. And I don't know what the word for it would be, but I'm very troubled by the fact that when I run into my daughter's friends, they feel that the feminists of the second wave betrayed them because they don't have child care unless they're rich. Our country is cutting Head Start, day care, women's clinics, women's health, children's health. The suffragists yelled and screamed about it, the second wave yelled and screamed about it, but there is no political will to change it. And until we do, women and men with small children and without big incomes [will continue to be] penalized.

Next page: "If I were running a political movement today, I would focus on children and how parents are being screwed"