Erica Jong Time Out New York Article

From Fear to eternity

Twenty-five years after Fear of Flying, Erica Jong wonders What Do Women Want?

By Gia Kourlas

This column ran on page 208 in the September 10-17, 1998 Issue No. 155 of Time Out New York.

Erica Jong is best known for coining a phrase: In her raunchy 1973 novel, Fear of Flying, the now-56-year old writer introduced the character Isadora Wing, who unabashedly searched for a zipless fuck. "Zipless," Jong wrote, "because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff." Perhaps it doesn’t seem so dirty now, but at the time, many people found it both horrifying and titillating that a woman would--gasp--admit to having such thoughts (much less write about them).

A well-known poet and feminist who contributes regularly to The New York Observer, Jong recently published a humorous, insightful book of essays entitled What Do Women Want? With chapters like "The President’s Penis" and "Princess as Icon," the book is vintage Jong. And when the author met with TONY, she had even more to say about the psyches of such luminaries as Hillary Clinton, Princess Diana and Camille Paglia.

Time Out New York: Do Bill and Hillary Clinton have a zipless marriage?

Erica Jong: I think they’ll be together forever. I could be wrong--they could get a divorce--but I think they have a solid marriage. You could even say they have an S/M relationship. It’s not clear who’s the S and who’s the M. At this moment, he’s the M. He’s saying, "I’m such a bad boy." And she’s saying, "You did it again--I’ll get you." But they need each other. I’ll bet they have good sex.

TONY: How did the phrase zipless fuck come to you?

EJ: I don’t know. It was such a long time ago. I remember my first editor said, "Zipless? What does zipless mean? It’s ungrammatical." I like inventing words. A lot of people tried to talk me out of it. Copy editors tried to delete it.

TONY: You wrote Fear of Flying. Are you really afraid of planes?

EJ: In 1973, terribly. Now my life has taken me on so many, I also married an amateur pilot. I’m going to take a pinch-hitter course, which teaches you how to land a plane if the pilot should become disabled--I hate the sense of powerlessness when you’re sitting in a plane. We have a little place in Vermont where we spend a lot of time. It’s really easy to get there by plane, so that’s a motivation.

TONY: Are you a member of the mile-high club?

EJ: I don’t think I ever did it on a plane. Once, years ago, I met a very attractive man on a plane and made out with him all the way across the ocean, and I never saw him again. I don’t think that counts. [Laughs] But it was very exciting.

TONY: What’s the strangest piece of fan mail you’ve ever received?

EJ: The best fan mail I ever got was a letter from the man who runs a club for men with extremely big penises. They call themselves the Hung Jury. They invited me to be the mistress of measurement at one of their national reunions. I wrote back, "My literary reputation is in enough trouble." The guy who invited me trailed me around L.A. once, I had talked about the letter on a radio show. Afterward, there was a creepy little man hovering in the doorway with zits all over his face--awful looking, like a pervert. He came up to me and said, "Ms. Jong, thank you for the publicity you just gave to the Hung Jurors." I got into my car as fast as I could and told the driver to get the hell out of there. All day, at book signings, he followed me. The worst part of it was that he never bought a book. Since then, he’s sent me a few more letters--you know, letters that are kind of insulting: "I’ve read your novels and I see that your heroines are size queens. Admit it--you’re a size queen."

TONY: You’ve written a book about Henry Miller called The Devil at Large. Are you obsessed with him?

EJ: [Quickly] No, no, not at all. I got rid of the obsession by writing the book about him. He was really kind to me--a grandfather figure. He came into my life at a moment when I was utterly traumatized by early fame. And he started to correspond with me. He had been through it [with] Tropic of Cancer, but in a different way, and he recognized a soul mate.

TONY: Do you think Camille Paglia is a coward for constantly attacking women?

EJ: I have a different take on her. Camille was locked in a university for so many years, overlooked and writing her big Yale University Press book, Sexual Personae, which is quite brilliant, I think. She was considered a weirdo and a lesbian. She must have worked on that book for 20 years without any recognition. Suddenly, she starts to get reviewed in The New York Times; she’s on the covers of magazines; she’s invited to do this and that. By then, she’s in her late forties--I think she just went nuts. She would say almost anything to get attention. She’s really just a media tart. I don’t think she even thinks in terms of why it’s bad to trash other women. She just thinks [Loudly] I was neglected for so long, and now I’m out there, and I’m going to stay! But the only way to stay is to continue doing good work. I admire Sexual Personae; I’ve really liked some of her essays. But I find her public presentations chilling. I went to a lecture she did at the Y a couple of years ago, where she was putting down Gloria Steinem’s hair and making fun of Naomi Wolf’s prettiness. I was very disappointed. She’s a very intelligent woman, but I think she’s got to get her shit together.

TONY: Are women hostile to you?

EJ: No. I have so many women friends. I think that, because I had a scandalous novel that sold 50 million copies, there are many people who will never forgive me--they’ll never forgive me because I’m a woman, and because I present women as self-affirming in my books. But being attacked is a sign that you’ve disturbed the status quo in some way; it’s an accolade of sorts. All the people I admire the most were people who wouldn’t give in, who wouldn’t knuckle down. I’m proud to be a shit disturber. If that means that people are going to be angry, so be it. It goes with the territory. Some people were worried about me writing about Princess Di. Why do we assume that she was such a saint? I didn’t say that she was awful.

TONY: Your criticism of Princess Diana didn’t seem out of line.

EJ: It’s so silly. She was a girl, very materialistic. I think her charitable ambitions were sincere, but they weren’t very thought through. If she had thought about it, one pair of Manolo Blahniks would have fed a family in Bangladesh for a year. You could auction all your jewelry--while you’re still alive!--and set up a foundation to feed the hungry. Did she do that? No. She posed prettily with land mines. Human-rights workers are heroes--not the people who pose in magazines with legless children. I’m sorry.

TONY: Why are writers so hostile to each other?

EJ: It’s not enough for them to succeed--everybody else has to fail, which accounts for most book reviewing. Since book reviewing is done by other writers, and since every writer feels starved and wants only his book or her book to appear on the best seller list, they just trash each other right and left. For writers, there are so few rewards, and they’re so badly distributed. Everybody’s so jealous. [Laughs] It’s a yucky, creepy world. But that’s not a reason not to write. The literary world is separate from writing. The literary world is this ugly world, and writing is ecstatic. There’s nothing as wonderful as writing.

What Do Women Want? (HarperCollins) is available for $25.