Iowa City, Iowa—When Jane Fonda was recently bounced around by customs lugs and police patriots at the Cleveland Airport on a phony pill-smuggling charge, the local Daily Iowan referred to her in its story as simply ‘’Fonda.” Not Miss Fonda, not Jane Fonda after the first sentence, but basic, rugged Fonda in the same way that you’re Hoffman or Jordan and I’m Krim. This is deliberate policy on the part of (Leona) Durham, who edits this college daily out here, a 23- or 24-year-old Kansas person who deals some strong piss and fire at groaning American traditions, and if it is a practice that took root in the college and underground press during my seventeen months abroad I never heard about it. But in my questioning of people—and reading a headline like “Fonda Pleads Innocent of Smuggling, Assault” really got to my male-conditioned, Pavlovianized eyes—no one seems sure whether this practice of using a woman’s last name as flatly as men’s names are customarily used is something started here or not. Apparently the Guardian in NY is now doing it too.
Let me just say that it was brand-new for me and it had its intended effect. “Fonda” was suddenly an equal, a mate, a full person I could identify with much more closely than if she had been kept apart by the usual meaningless delicacies which require a Miss or a Mrs. in front of the essence: which in our society is that crucial last name. “Fonda, 32, is scheduled to return here Monday for a preliminary hearing on federal charges of smuggling pills into … Police and federal officials contend Fonda became abusive and violent when …”
Quite simply, these sentences made me think of Fonda as I would a man. Don’t misunderstand. Not that I wouldn’t be delighted given the opportunity to fuck her, kiss, dive, seek softness—no lessening of her womanly attributes and their ability to rouse desire—but the sudden realization on my part that beyond looking female (producing ova, bearing offspring) she was as separate and individual a human as I might flatter myself as being and above all did not deserve programming by the push-button curseword, Miss.
Again, to make it clear, I’m not a professional Women’s Lib propagandist, I read this piece in the DI with no preconceptions—Fonda’s marriage to putative French Fonda, My Buddy cocksman Roger Vadim would, if anything, tend to make it all confusingly comic if you have my grisly humor—but just by Editor Durham’s dropping the “Miss’’ and a couple of “Janes” from the AP dispatch she turned the whole thing around for most of the men who read the piece out here. Keep in mind that it didn’t have to be Fonda. It could have been Streisand, Joplin, (Angela) Davis, etc., etc. In a way, I think it was fitting that I first saw this last-name way of identifying a woman applied to Fonda, certainly she has become ‘’Fonda” even more than her father these days, more really THERE, but any woman would have been revealed just as suddenly by this stroke of justice on Durham’s part.
Why have the young editor and staff of a midwest college paper introduced this change of newspaper manners? What went through their minds before pulling a switch which I believe will pick up acceptance in all of the print media in this country just as “blacks” did? Well, it isn’t hard to see, again suddenly, the kind of contempt some women (like some Negroes, chicanos, Jewish boys, Italian-Americans, so forth) must have had for themselves just because of all the loaded symbolism of that preening little word, Miss. It meant, and means still to the new female consciousness, something artificial and removed from the real world of battle and ideas. And for “real world” read male world. It means a paternalistic condescension and narcissistic gallantry on the part of men which is paid for by the segregation of women to the nonserious side of life. But most of all it means that, in a world dominated by men you’re a side issue, a decoration, an ornament, a “fucking machine” in business primarily to please men in some fashion or else humiliate yourself internally for not being acceptable.
All the millions of miles of crap that went with being either on a pedestal or on the floor, never simply standing straight.
But all I really know about this, viscerally, is that these notions are undone in a flash when you see the name “Fonda” on the page without any preliminary curtsy. It’s quite an amazing experience, especially in this day when the printed word is supposed to be not half so effective as it used to. Take it from me that in this case, at least, such easy McLuhanism is dead wrong and misleading. Pound once said “it can all be put into the language,” meaning everything can be said, and while I agree with him (and have to disagree with Sontag who said she wanted to make film because words were inadequate) the beautiful thing about “Fonda Pleads Innocent …” is that it achieved an opening in my and other men’s heads by eliminating a piece of language instead of adding. That, too, is part of the literary genius, skillful editing, and so it fascinates me that the expert and acute handling of words can have such a powerful effect on the inner life. Frankly I love it: always hoping against hope that words are still the most potent agents of communication going, identifying with them and their role, somehow fighting each and every day for their status against detractors because, let’s face it, my own rather scarred mortality is wrapped into them and when they go I might as well—
But returning to thinking of Fonda as a man. I said earlier that this didn’t mean one smothered one’s erotic feelings. I still believe that, but would like to hazard something else: if Fonda is like a man in essence, or if a man is like Fonda, then love between myself and a Fonda becomes closer to homosexual love than what we’ve previously been accustomed to. Heterosexual love emphasized basic differences; homosexual love emphasizes basic sameness. Can that be tolerated by a majority of men? That when we finally SEE women as separate, proud, deep, individualistic entities like ourselves—at least the selves we imagine we are—we will make love to them as we do to our own kind, whether in sublimated straight-guy fashion or right-out-front faggotry? Complete equals? I feel that something along this line must inevitably follow the stripping of the gingerbread from our conception of women and the ranking of them in exactly the same way that we’re lined up in the world.
When this happens, increasingly, I think the relations between men and women will become easier in this country; or, if not exactly easier, because “there is always conflict when there are more than two wills on the planet at the same time” (William Burroughs), at least more grownup than the present nervous, cryptic, exasperating psychodrama that has ripped the guts out of practically all of us. In other words, I think all our love lives will be the better for seeing men and women as part of the same exact species because they can’t get any worse. Think of Fonda, think of Krim, getting together as self-respecting people in just the same way that Krim and a male friend of his might hang out together or Fonda and a female friend. I think practicing homosexuals have broken the path of what will happen between heterosexuals once women are thought of as every bit standup people BEFORE THE UNIVERSE just as men have always conceived of themselves.
Homosexuals assume a dignity, a relaxation (when there’s no harassment), a sameness, a likeness, in the people they want to communicate with sexually whatever their other difficulties and hangups. And it is this sameness, this mutual understanding, that I’ve always felt was lacking in the frantic dating-game between men and women over here. We’re so different we’re scared of each other. It’s tense, artificial, nonhumane, perverted in some slave-master game of power and neurosis, and yet one kicks oneself because this was supposed to be the grand thing, the marvelous time that everyone had been waiting to grow up to find. Most of us of both sexes know it isn’t so—it’s been almost a ghastly fraud on both sides.
So for what it’s worth I say let the Fondas, Firestones, Steinems, Oates’s, Streisands, Davis’s, (Tess) Schwartzes, all the slit people, insist that the male-controlled media refer to them as bluntly as it does to men. Dropping of the ‘’Miss” and even the ‘’Mrs.” may seem a small thing, just doing away with outmoded etiquette, but it indicates a much larger idea to the reading public and will make its effect, never doubt it. And once this formal newspaper equality is accepted by the mind, the senses, when it undermines old habits, it will lead—should, and as I see it, must—to a different contract between the sexes in our country. Which means a new contract between people. Something that men now have only with their drinking or kibitzing pals, something that women normally have only with sisters or that casual homo they feel easy with. Instead of being enemies, superior-inferiors, coy cunts, and brutal pricks, I’m the man and you’re the chick, let every Krim see every Fonda as a replica of himself (in this case doubtless a better and more effective one), and we’ll be on the road to being more human, no matter where it leads, than we ever have. Certainly there’s trouble ahead with this concept, but think of all the horror behind. Do you want a repeat of that?
P.S. A smartass in the Writer’s Workshop here where I teach asks when Durham is going to start running ‘’he” for ‘’she” in the follow-up stories on Fonda. Ha ha. This guy misses the point, but you can expect gags of this type while feminist radicals wage war with words which can shock the best of men out of their lack of imagination.