At 83-years-old, actor and activist Jane Fonda, doesn’t suffer fools and when it comes to relationships and sex, she's quite clear about what she wants and what she’s able to give.
Fonda is a two-time Oscar winner, the author of eight books, and has starred in numerous iconic films. The “Grace and Frankie” star has been married and divorced three times, and tells Harpers Bazaar in a recent interview that she’s attracted to men who can teach her things and “whose lives are different" from her own.
She also says she’s not capable of intimacy. “It’s not them. It’s me. If a guy had come along and said, ‘Come on, Fonda, show up,’ I would have run away scared. I was attracted to men who never would have done that to me because they couldn’t necessarily show up themselves. I didn’t know that at the time, but now I know. I don’t think I can do anything about it now, but that’s the truth, as Lily [Tomlin] would say. That’s the truth.”
Fonda explains that because of her inability to have intimacy in relationships she doesn't really want a sexual relationship at the moment.
“I don’t have that desire. Do I fantasize? Yes, here’s my fantasy. I’ll just put it out there. That I meet a professor or a researcher, somebody in that line who is really capable of loving, of cherishing a woman, so that I could test myself and see if I could show up.”
She adds that if the man were younger than her, that might work better. “Isn’t that awful? It’s a thing about skin. I would want a younger man, and I’m too vain.”
When writer Durga Chew-Bose asks asks Fonda what she means about skin and vanity, she says, “I'm very grateful that I don’t have to get naked in front of anybody again ever, even in candlelight. And if I did, I mean in my fantasy, the man is younger than me, so that would make it even harder. I’m being perfectly honest. I wish that wasn’t true. But, you know, [the way] I was raised, the man I adored was my dad. And, man, you had to look a certain way, and I never could. I’ve never been able to get that out of my body. It’s just part of me.”