The woman who gave us the Zipless Fuck is going to be a grandmother. ”A friend of mine said, when the baby arrives, he’s going to start calling me the Zipless Granny.” Erica Jong doubles over with laughter, and frankly, she is right to. At 61, she is still as lusty and provocative as the woman who penned the phrase three decades ago.
Only today she doesn’t regard the resultant notoriety as a millstone. ”I used to worry they would put Zipless Fuck on my tombstone,” confesses Jong, who still has that thick, blonde mane, throaty laugh and throws four-letter words around like confetti. ”I don’t any more though. I know it’s rare for a book to touch so many lives, and I am really humbled by it.”
The book, of course, was Fear of Flying, and it has just been reissued by publishers New American Library to celebrate its 30th anniversary. For those too young in 1973 to either read it or remember the frenzy, just know it was the Harry Potter of its time. Except, Fear of Flying‘s readers were not children, but women stuck in mundane marriages, having lacklustre sex, shocked that their lives had become reduced to the sink and the see-saw. Fear of Flying, with its talk-dirty-to-me dialogue and sexually unsatisfied wife as protagonist, was their salvation.
It tells the story of Isadora, a 29-year-old writer five years into her second marriage to Dr Bennett Wing. Like all women who came of age in the 1950s, Isadora was raised to believe that marriage was just like a Doris Day movie. ”Nobody bothered to tell you what marriage was really about,” says Isadora when she discovers the American fantasy of marriage is a crock.
As Isadora’s marriage unravels, she escapes into the arms of a British psychoanalyst and, as they travel through Europe, she mentally revisits past relationships, lovers and the sexual fantasies that sustained her. Her ultimate was the now infamous Zipless Fuck, a phrase Jong had no idea would enter the popular lexicon. ”The fantasy was to have sex that was just totally wild and dreamlike. Nothing real or messy,” she says.
As Jong wrote in Fear of Flying: ”The zipless fuck was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.”
Jong published her first book of poetry, the erotic Fruits and Vegetables, in 1971. Though she claims she has been a feminist since her teens, she began her first novel in the male voice. ”I didn’t think anyone would be interested in a woman’s point of view.”
When her publisher read her male novel, he kindly suggested she shelve it. ”He said, ‘Why don’t you write a book in that fierce female voice of your poems?’ And that freed me.”
Jong had read John Updike’s Couples, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and wondered why women weren’t writing about their emotional and sexual lives with the same candour. Jong resolved to march readers into a woman’s brain and her bedroom, then give them a front-row seat. Listen to Isadora on her husband: ”He soared and glided when he screwed. He made marvellous dipping and corkscrewing motions. He stayed hard forever.”
No surprise then that when Fear of Flying was published, reaction was volcanic. Despite inroads made by the women’s movement, in 1973, nice girls still didn’t write about sex, let alone call it fucking. Social commentators blamed the mini-skirted Jong for encouraging promiscuity. But for mainstream feminists this was Christmas; a book that celebrated the sexually liberated female.
But, says feminist Phyllis Chesler, ”Erica paid a terrible price when the book came out. She was a woman writing about sex and admitting she enjoyed it. She had to be punished.”
The New York Times called it a whiny, feminist novel, Updike raved and Miller gushed. ”But when it came out in London, I got hateful reviews,” Jong says.
Martin Amis dismissed it as ”horrible and embarrassing”.
”Reviews used to get to me, but they don’t bother me any more. To hell with them. I’m still here.” Indeed she is, and 30 years after turning the culture on its head, Jong is still annoying people, which she loves. ”I took it as my life’s work to write about the inner lives of women, and to do it properly that means the emotional and sexual. And when you do that in a culture that is still so puritanical, people are going to give you shit. I don’t mind.”
What she does mind are young women today who refuse to call themselves feminists and insist the women’s movement is obsolete. ”They think equal pay and women talking dirty on Sex and the City means we’ve won, we don’t need to fight any more,” says Jong, rolling her eyes.
”I understand a woman writing about sex 30 years ago was shocking. What bothers me is that nothing seems to have changed.” People are still unhappy with their sex lives. ”The truth is that ziplessness has always been a platonic ideal rather than a daily reality. Yes, wild passionate sex exists. It can even exist in marriage. But it is occasional, not daily.”
Recently Jong spoke to a female English literature class studying Fear of Flying. It upset her that the students identified with Isadora so much.
”They told me they still feel the conflict between motherhood and a career, and that women in touch with their sexuality are still sluts. I was devastated. How can anyone think the women’s movement is irrelevant when you hear that?” she shrieks tearing at her hair.
”It just tells me we still have a lot of work to do creating a society where women’s sexuality can be powerful and we aren’t afraid of it.” — Â