Like samizdat for a sex-positive feminist underground

November 13, 2023 3:05 AM

Bitter but true; her writing is not much taught or studied. A couple dozen dissertations center on her work, about a tenth as many as those analyzing Roth. “‘Fear of Flying’ had seemed an apprentice work to me when I wrote it,” Jong recalled, “and now it was to be my tombstone.” from Fear of Flying at 50 [NY Times; ungated]

A Woman’s Fantasy in a Modern Reality [Fear of Flying at 40] [ungated]

posted by chavenet (16 comments total)

Maybe there are only a “couple dozen dissertations” about her writing because it is not especially good. I appreciate that it may be historically interesting, but of course that is not at all the same thing.
posted by PaulVario at 3:13 AM on November 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

On what do you base that hypothesis? I for one remember enjoying FoF much more than the chronically overrated Portnoy's Complaint, both having caused countless pearls to be publicly clutched for their deleterious effect on my teenage morals and thereby been made irresistible, though I'd struggle to give a plot recount of either so many decades on.

Portnoy mainly needed to get the fuck over himself, if I recall at all correctly. Wing was way more fun.
posted by flabdablet at 3:27 AM on November 13, 2023 [13 favorites]

I read this when I was in my late teens and in search of a dirty book. I knew but didn’t fully appreciate how important it was and thought it was okay. What took me out of the book was the racism. The way Isabella wrote about her Asian husband and about non-white men. Yes, this kind of casual racism existed in other books by men, but I had expected a feminist novel would be more socially conscious.

Reading this article now, I see she was married to an Asian man, and Isabella’s issues in her marriage may have paralleled Jong’s. I do wish this article had addressed the racism in Fear of Flying and why it might be a harder sell for millennial and Gen Z readers.
posted by pxe2000 at 3:52 AM on November 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

You could be forgiven for reading this entire article and assuming that Erica Jong is dead. But she's apparently very much alive, and still writing. It is kind of weird that neither article mentions this. You'd think you'd reach out to a living author to ask what they thought? It's not like she's a recluse.
posted by phooky at 3:55 AM on November 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

"the zipless fuck" would look a bit strange as a tombstone epithet
posted by nofundy at 4:45 AM on November 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I read this when I was in my late teens and in search of a dirty book. I knew but didn’t fully appreciate how important it was and thought it was okay. What took me out of the book was the racism. The way Isabella wrote about her Asian husband and about non-white men. Yes, this kind of casual racism existed in other books by men, but I had expected a feminist novel would be more socially conscious.

I read it at the same age and for the same reason, and also thought it was ok but much more deficient on dirty parts than I'd been led to believe by the way it was talked about. The racism you mention completely passed me by, as probably did most of what was in the book. I probably would have gotten much more out of it just a few years later.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:12 AM on November 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

my girlfriend at 15 gave me a copy of this book and i devoured it, and in many ways it completely changed my life and is probably the first thing that introduced me to feminism. i remember it being funny and sometimes sad but mostly so adult that i felt grown up just reading it. that relationship did not last but the impact of fear of flying did. it made me sure to always wipe my ass clean before getting in bed with someone lol
posted by dis_integration at 6:14 AM on November 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Regarding racism in her work, we went to see a discussion between Erica Jong and Roxane Gay as part of the 2015 Decatur Book Festival and it was... something. At times Erica Jong seemed pretty clueless about her privilege and the history of racism in white feminism. Roxane Gay was magnificently polite and thoughtful in her reactions to this, but you could tell she was making a real effort to do so at times.
A couple of write-ups
The Guardian: Roxane Gay and Erica Jong discuss feminism and it instantly gets awkward
Electric Lit: Speak Up!: A Graphic Account of Roxane Gay and Erica Jong’s Uncomfortable Conversation
posted by indexy at 6:45 AM on November 13, 2023 [14 favorites]

Portnoy should not have complained. My reading of it felt like wading through molasses. Or something worse.

FoF...I read it long ago, but the image I take away from it is the skid marks her husband left on the bed. I learned a lot from that and have been careful about, you know, dingleberries ever since. Compared to "Fanny Hill*," FoF didn't strike me as a literary masterpiece, but it was interesting because of its first-person POV, a peek into the other sex's experience. Her impressions of men unsettled my notions of interaction between the sexes, but not in a bad way.

My partner, having read it first, handed me the book and said something along the lines of "Good. It's about time." I may have some information of interest to EJ about flying at 70: There's nothing to fear. It gets better and better.

* Yeah, I know. But I was 18 years old when I read it, and I didn't care who wrote it.
posted by mule98J at 6:46 AM on November 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I wonder if the mixed reactions in here might be a generational thing.

For people reading it who were adults in the 70s, this was groundbreaking, for the reasons the article describes, and that in and of itself may have over-written the inherant quality of the writing. But for people who were kids in the 70s, and later, the sexual mores were very different - a woman writing about the pursuit of sexual pleasure was no big deal. So we all skipped through looking for the dirty parts and had more headspace to react to the quality instead.

I never read the book itself - the closest I came was reading the portions of it that were included in a womens' erotica anthology I checked out of the college library the week after I actually had HAD sex for the first time and I was in my recovering-Catholic "whoa holy crap sex is AWESOME" zeal phase. I remember thinking Anais Nin was more my speed - the language to describe sex was more lush and poetic than Jong's, which I would call more....utilitarian?

But - again, I hadn't been raised thinking that I actually shouldn't like sex. (The Catholicism only dealt with whether I should be HAVING it, which is different.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:10 AM on November 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

To me, Fear of Flying was really engaging and I thought the sheer liveliness of her voice overcame some of the many objections you could reasonably have to the book. And as much as Isadora was rich and privileged and beautiful, with a certain level of security and happiness seemingly guaranteed, she was young enough and vulnerable enough to gain some sympathy from me. When I read Jong's later novels, the sense of privilege in some of them was so much more obvious, I now can't unsee it when it comes to Fear of Flying. But I still feel like giving her a pass for some of that. I mean, I gave a pass to Martin Amis for a while--on similar grounds; both writers just seemed so fucking talented-- I certainly feel like I owe her one.
posted by BibiRose at 9:30 AM on November 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was thinking more about the idea of fear of flying being already passé by the 90s and about the impact it had on me as a teen boy. I think an interesting thing about the specific case of exposing boys to feminist ideas is that in the environment boys seem to *still* grow up in, the Andrew Tateiverse you might call it, there is no feminist idea that is out of date and in a way you have to kind of run the historical gauntlet. Like I think going through all the "waves" of feminism in order is still a kind of necessary task (feminist ontogeny, feminist phylogeny). You can't get to Crenshaw without going through the Seneca falls declaration and Ms. Magazine first as it were, understanding each in the context of their time and how they relate (crucially) to the racial and colonial context of the west. I'm not surprised to hear that Jong's book feels pretty outdated, but works like it still seem crucial to understanding the world we live in now and something that expressed what it was like to be a woman in an era much more hostile to women than the still-hostile world today was important for stepping out of the blinders that male culture put on me and seeing how the hostility of masculinity was still playing out in my own actions.
posted by dis_integration at 12:43 PM on November 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

It is kind of weird that neither article mentions this. You'd think you'd reach out to a living author to ask what they thought?

According to her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, she's suffering from dementia and has been for some years. That might explain the lack of comment.
posted by The Bellman at 12:57 PM on November 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

"She said you don't read women authors do you? [...]
I said you're way wrong
She said which ones have you read then
I said I've read Erica Jong"
posted by sy at 5:38 PM on November 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Do Jewish people cringe at the thought of Portnoy's Complaint as someone's introduction to American Jewish culture? That describes me, I read it as a teen. I related to the obsessive teen boy horniness, but everything else was fascinatingly exotic to me. The Yiddish was fun.

I remember when Fear of Flying came out. I was a kid, but I remember some people were scandalized. The 70s were in some sense sexually liberated, but I feel that it wasn't really until the 90s that "women enjoying sex is okay" gained real cultural traction in the US. At that point it became "of course women should enjoy sex, it's fun, but they're still sluts if they're not discreet about it", a misogynist impasse that still exists today. So I'm not sure things are that much better.

It's certainly true that the rates of reported anorgasmia among women have decreased, although they're still much too high amongst young women. Many surveys in the post-war era showed a majority of women reporting being anorgasmic, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of this might be a reporting artifact of stigmatization, but Masters and Johnson and other researchers found this to largely be true, independent of self-reporting surveys.

M&S found that the most effective therapeutic technique for treating female anorgasmia (anorgasmia that's not somatic) is a slow "no goals" approach to masturbation. I think there's a plausible argument that the large decrease in female anorgasmia over the last forty years is almost entirely due to a moderate increase in the acceptability of female masturbation.

The truth is, though, that the acceptability of female sexuality in American culture to this day exists almost solely as a function of the male gaze, so to speak, and a woman enjoying her own body and sexuality on her own terms still threatens the patriarchy. Things have gotten better, but they're still far short of what I hoped for, or even pessimistically expected, forty years ago.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:55 AM on November 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Jong had said in interviews that her "starter marriage fell apart" because the man was mentally ill and was physically abusive during these episodes. She claimed that The Madman chapter in FoF was taken from real life.
posted by brujita at 3:00 PM on December 1, 2023