Author: Jane

I haven’t done a blog in almost 2 months. I feel bad. Not guilty—social media is supposed to make life (and communicating) less stressful and easier, right? —but bad nonetheless. Not sure quite why I haven’t written. Well, one reason is that right after my last blog about Portugal (seems like a lifetime ago!) Lily and I did a lot of promotion work in Los Angeles and New York for Season 2 and right after that we started shooting season 3 of “Grace & Frankie.” Man oh man am I getting positive feedback on Season 2. We all are. I was confident that it was better than the first season and clearly I was right. We’re settling in, finding our voices and so are the writers. As I’ve written before, season 1 was hard for me personally. Maybe one day when I’m too old to keep acting I will write another sort of memoir and then I’ll explain the reasons—-or not. What matters is the I felt very differently season 2 and even more so right now, on season 3. We’re having a blast even though the hours are usually super long. Sometimes 16-17 hour days. I hardly have any time to hike or be with Richard. He’s so great though, he never complains, never depressed, never angry or mean. Sweetest, gentlest man! Maybe one reason we all feel so good on “Grace & Frankie” this season is because we know we have a hit on our hands. That sure feels terrific. I get the most amazing feedback, not only from my social media community (thank all of you so much!) but from people in the streets, in stores (not that I’ve been in stores much lately), but you know, at the hairdresser where I just was to get my gray roots dyed. (I’m going to be gray in the movie I’m doing with Redford in the fall), and the manicure place where I had to go because my clear nail polish turned yellow over night. Has that happened to any of you? I think we all even look better the 2nd season thanks to the wonderful Gale Tattersole (above). I also look better because I gained 5-6 pounds. When I was growing up we were told when that when women get older we’d have to choose between our ass and our face, well guess what, its a false choice. I’ve gained some weight and I’ve gotten complements on both!! Another fun thing I did just before we started shooting was to attend a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee at the home of George and Amal Clooney. My tooth fell out again but oh well. I had fun with Ellen Degeneres and Portia de Rossi and a good chat with Amal who is smart, humble and interesting. Last weekend I attended a Netflix function for EMMY voters and was on a panel with our show runner, Marta Kaufman, Chelsea Handler, Kristen Ritter and others. Love Chelsea’s new Netflix show. So, there’s a brief update on this lovely Memorial Day Weekend. I hope it’s a sweet, fun one for all of you. And while we celebrate our soldiers, let’s pledge to do all we can to stop the wars and to not vote for any loudmouth saber rattler. Enough death, enough killing, enough PTSD and sadness. Let’s mourn the losses and help heal the wounded.

My hairstylist, Matthew Shields and I, went for 2 days to Lisbon where L’Oreal asked me to speak at a conference on beauty and aging and do a bunch of interviews. Never having been, I was delighted at the opportunity. We stayed at the spectacular Pestana Palace Hotel built by Marquis of Valle Flor who made his wealth during colonialism as one of the major cocoa producers. The palace was recently turned into a hotel without damaging any of the structure or art of the original. This view from my window shows the stables across the street where the Marquis kept his horses. Staircase going to my room This is what I looked up at when I lay in bed. It’s all so beautiful and I applaud the people who restored it, but couldn’t help thinking of the slave labor that allowed such wealth. The corridor to my room This is the ceiling of the room where I was interviewed. The first evening after our arrival, the representative of L’Oreal suggested me go to the Porto Santa Maria, about 40 min north of Lisbon on the beach. I can’t recall having had a more delicious meal of fresh cray fish and bass. This was the view from our table. The crayfish were still moving when the chef showed them to us. It was while I was sucking on those delectable legs that my tooth—or rather the veneer on my tooth—came out. Matthew and I had a good laugh helped along by the best bottle of Portugese white wine. I wanted to ship a case back home but they don’t export it. Worth going back for another visit. Fortunately, the head of L’Oreal Portugal has a brother who is a dentist who had just returned to town and he met me in my room after dinner to put the veneer back. Our main course was sea bass coated in sea salt and baked The salt is scraped away and the fish was melt-in-your-mouth fresh and delicious as were the vegetables. The next day was the conference. . . . and then a luncheon of most of Portugal’s beauty editors and other journalists in one of the palace’s dining rooms. It was fun until my tooth came out again One kind lady at the lunch loaned me her fan to cover the damage until my kind new friend, the dentist, made a return trip to fix it again. That’s Matthew next to me. We returned to Los Angeles the following day and I went straight from the airport to my dentist who, on Monday, will put a new (hopefully permanent) veneer in—just in time because we start shooting 3rd season of “Grace & Frankie” on Tuesday. By the way, the 2nd season will start (streaming) May 6th and I assure you it is really funny…better than 1st season. We previewed the first 2 episodes of season 2 at the Tribecca Film Festival on Thursday and I am told the packed theatre laughed and even cried. There are some very touching moments. After the screening, Gayle King interviewed Lily and me and it was a lot of fun. It’s always fun with Lily. Stay tuned.

I wrote last month I wrote a blog called “Interviewing a Shero of Mine”. The blog was about Dr Jane Goodall who I interviewed for Interview Magazine. The Interview is now available in the April 2016 print edition of Interview magazine, and Interview Online at this link: http://bit.ly/1VvfrNC I hope you will read it and let me know what you think!

Click here for the original article on LennyLetter.com. ​The legendary Jane Fonda on how she came to define herself as a feminist​. Lena asked me to write about my journey to feminism. Lena asks, I do. So here it is. For starters, I was slow getting here. In 1970, when I was 33, I learned that 5,000 women in New York City were demonstrating for legalized abortion. I wrote in my journal: “Don’t understand the Women’s Liberation Movement. There are more important things to have a movement for, it seems to me. To focus on women’s issues is diversionary when so much wrong is being done in the world. Each woman should take it upon herself to be liberated and show a man what that means.” Yeah, sure. I’m glad I kept that journal as a reminder of how far I’ve come. I had been married and living in France for eight years and had just come home to become an anti-war activist. It was a very different country from the America I’d left, so I decided to spend two months, that spring of 1970, driving cross-country to New York, where I was to start filming Klute. I needed to get to know the USA again. Two weeks into my trip, Nixon invaded Cambodia; four students were killed at Kent State, two at Jackson State; 35,000 National Guard troops were called out in 16 states; a third of the nation’s colleges closed down; and before I arrived in New York, I’d been arrested five times for distributing copies of the Uniform Code of Military Justice outside military bases. Yet what I remember most vividly was none of that. It was a woman I met. Terry was her name. She ran a G.I. coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood. These coffeehouses — springing up outside major military bases around the country — were meeting places for active-duty soldiers who were questioning the war. I had just become involved as a civilian supporter of the G.I. Movement and was spending as much time at as many such coffeehouses as I could. The moment I was in Terry’s presence, I felt something shift. Not something I had been missing or was looking for, because I hadn’t known it existed. But I felt different in her presence. I watched the way she dealt with the soldiers. She didn’t judge the young men who were on their way to Vietnam. She knew most of them were from working-class or poor, rural, and inner-city environments with few alternatives or fancy lawyers to get them deferments. I watched as she engaged them in what I now call “heartful” listening — listening not just with her ears, but with her heart. It wasn’t until much later, when I read Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, that I discovered the early 1970s were when new feminist psychologists were bringing empathic, relational listening — the opposite of the Freudian approach — into their therapeutic professions, with revolutionary results. It turned out that heartful listening can initiate a healing process for people who’ve been violated physically or psychically. I doubt that Terry knew this. I think she was simply modeling in her everyday life the sort of democratic society she was fighting for, where everyone deserved respect and compassion. She manifested this with the soldiers and with me. Terry seemed to see me. Not the “movie star” me, but a whole me that I myself didn’t even know yet. I don’t think I’d ever felt seen before. She was interested in why I had become an activist and how I had gotten involved in the movement. While we planned an upcoming rally, she asked my opinion and included me in all decisions. This was new for me. When the male staffers printed flyers for the rally without consulting the women, Terry called them on it. It was my first time experiencing what I later realized was feminist leadership and sisterhood, and it was powerful, palpable. One night, Terry brought a feminist to the coffeehouse to speak to soldiers about the women’s movement. At first I was shocked. Why was it important to talk to soldiers about the women’s movement? I remember the talk well. The woman said that if there were true equality between women and men, it would be good for both sexes: men wouldn’t feel that they alone have to carry the burden placed on them by the system. “It’s not a matter of women taking a piece of your pie,” she said to the rapt men sitting on the floor of the packed room. “It’s about us sharing the pie and making it bigger. It’s a win-win. Boys, men, women, girls, the Earth, everything.” Her talk helped me understand that for feminists, a belief system is the enemy, not men. “Patriarchy” is what she called it. Up until then, I assumed being a feminist meant being angry with men. I began to identify myself publicly as a feminist, although it would be many more years before I would be brave enough to look within myself and locate the multiple ways in which I had internalized sexism and the profound damage that it had done to me. As the Indian sage Kristnamurti said, “You think you are thinking your thoughts, you are not; you are thinking the culture’s thoughts.” The culture that incubated in me since childhood insists that to be loved, a female has to be perfect: thin, pretty, having good hair, being nice rather than honest, ready to sacrifice, never smarter than a man, never angry. This didn’t matter so much when I was a strong, feisty tomboy during childhood. But when I hit adolescence and the specter of womanhood loomed, all that mattered was how I looked and fit in. My father would send my stepmother to tell me to lose weight and wear longer skirts. One of my stepmothers told me all the ways I’d have to change physically if I wanted a boyfriend. Meanwhile, I sort of … hollowed out. Almost everything interesting about me scooped itself out and took up residence alongside the empty, disembodied me. It’s hard to be embodied if you hate your body. Like three of my father’s five wives, I developed an eating disorder (probably to fill the emptiness), and given that it was, at least partially, an inauthentic me that I presented to the world, I instinctively chose men who would never notice because of their own addictions and “issues.” Ah, but they were interesting, charismatic, alpha men, and they validated me. If he’s with me, I must be someone. And, of course, I continued to try to be perfect on whatever level the man I was with wanted, willing to forgo emotional intimacy and betray my own body and soul if honestly speaking with my true voice might mean losing him. (Trust me, my Oscars should be for my private life.) It wasn’t even that I depended on any of them financially, as many women do who turn themselves into pretzels for their men. I always supported myself. (Since the issue of equal pay has been raised in this newsletter, I want to admit that back then my self-esteem was so low I assumed I was paid less than the men and that I didn’t deserve more.) What the public saw was something else. They saw a feminist. And I was one, in that I supported women candidates, brought gender issues into my movie roles, produced women-centered films, and made exercise videos to help women get strong physically. But my feminism was theoretical, in my head, not my blood and bones. For me to really confront sexism would have required doing something about my relationships with men, and I couldn’t. That was too scary. It would have been like stepping off a cliff without knowing if there was a trampoline below. When I turned 60 and entered my third and final act, I decided that, no matter how scary it was, I needed to heal the wounds patriarchy had dealt me. I didn’t want to come to the end of my life without doing all I could to become a whole, full-voiced woman. I worry that the word patriarchy makes people’s eyes glaze over with the assumption that it means “Men are bad, and we need to change to a matriarchy.” Of course, given all the ways we’re now learning women differ from men, a brief dose of matriarchy might not be the worst thing: a course correction to restore some balance. My third husband, Ted Turner, is fond of saying, “Men, we’ve had our chance and botched it. It’s time to turn it over to women.” (On some level, he really means it. Then again, he never liked me to talk too much.) But this is not about replacing one “-archy” with another, it’s about transforming social and cultural norms and institutions so that power, violence, and greed are not the primary operating principles. It’s not about moving from patriarchy to matriarchy, but from patriarchy to democracy. Feminism means real democracy. There’s no road map to get there. It hasn’t happened yet. Women and men of conscience have never had a chance thus far to make our revolution. The journey is both external and internal, political and personal. For me, the personal meant becoming a single woman, no longer silencing my voice, slowly becoming the subject of my own life. My friendships with women grew deeper and more fulfilling. I read books I’d read before, by Carol Gilligan, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Gerda Lerner, bell hooks, and Jean Baker Miller, among others, but I understood them in a new way. In the process, I discovered that what I’d thought were just my issues were, in fact, shared by other women. I was not alone. The personal became political, and I became an embodied feminist. I had gone from believing that women’s issues were a distraction, mere ancillary problems to be addressed after everything else had been taken care of, to the realization that women are the issue, the core issue. We will fail to solve any problem — poverty, peace, sustainable development, environment, health — unless we look at it through a gender lens and make sure the solution will be good for women. It took me 30 years to get it, but it’s OK to be a late bloomer as long as you don’t miss the flower show. Jane Fonda is an actor, activist, and writer. Link to original article: http://www.lennyletter.com/politics/news/a311/my-convoluted-journey-to-feminism/

This morning two big announcements have been made. First, as Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau meets with President Obama this week, they have made some huge announcements in regards to Arctic Protection and Indigenous rights. An advance report says, “commercial activities will occur only when the highest safety and environmental standards are met, including national and global climate and environmental goals, and Indigenous rights and agreements” IF they are serious about this, that means NO ARCTIC OIL. Because there can be no arctic oil if we are to meet the goal of the Paris Summit: a world that doesn’t warm more than 2 degrees celsius or 3-4 degrees farenheit.