Jennifer Fox director, producer and writer of "Flying: Confessions Of A Free Woman".  The film opened today exclusively at Film Forum in New York City.

July 4, 2007

Jennifer Fox spent five years filming the epic documentary "Flying: Confessions Of A Free Woman", which chronicles the filmmaker's life and crises, as well as the lives of women around the world.  "Flying" opened today exclusively in New York City at Film Forum.

Recently Omar P.L. Moore of The Popcorn Reel had an intimate personal telephone conversation with Jennifer Fox.  Omar spoke with her in January as her film was ready to screen at Sundance.  In this second conversation Ms. Fox shares her thoughts on her place in the modern world as a woman, confronting the personal pain of being sexually abused at 13, the strict family influences on her early life, sex, sexual freedom, men, women, infidelity, monogamy, religion and society's perceptions of women.  All of these issues are discussed in her new film "Flying".  What follows is the entire conversation, virtually unedited.
 

OM:    What is the one characteristic about a man that you don't appreciate, and what kind of characteristic do you appreciate the most?

JF:       Wow.  That's personal, isn't it!

OM:     Well, yes.  It is a little bit too personal.

JF:        No, no, no, it's fine!     

OM:     Okay.

JF:        For me, men tend not to ask questions  And you kind of have to get used to it -- it's a funny thing, but the classic male -- I'm not talking about all men -- but if you want to talk about a classic male -- they will talk, they will assert, they will tell you about themselves.  But they will rarely ask you a question.  And women ask one question after another but sometimes that's annoying too.  Women are always investigating each other and men, men assert and want to, often want to impress, you know?  I mean I even struggle with Patrick (her boyfriend featured in "Flying".)  We'll be out with a group of people and I'll say, "just ask a question," you know?  "Please, get to know people!" 

OM:    Right.

JF:       But it's a very male trait.  I can say most of the male-type men in my life don't ask questions.  I recently was interviewed by a man for an article I won't name -- but he never asked me a question.

OM:    Wow.

JF:       And it's hard to -- I was like, so what am I supposed to do here? -- I knew he wanted me to talk, but he sort of made statements.  And it's just -- he's a very male type guy.  Certainly there are other types of men --but I think that's a male-type characteristic.  And men -- older men almost never ask questions.  You'll see them out to dinner and all they do is tell you about themselves?

OM:   Right.

JF:     So I think that on the most simple level is very hard to deal with.  The other thing involving males is never to talk about feelings.  Now of course the new man, the man that has grown up in a more liberal world, are much more of a balance between male and female . . . so of course a lot of men don't fit these roles.  I don't want to judge, but if you want to say the negative male characteristic it's never relayed in emotion.

OM:  Was there any time in your life that the three women in your life (mother, grandmother, aunt) had been responsible for what happened to you (sexual abuse) when you were 13?  You don't explicitly speak on this in your film.

JF:    Well I think I do get at it in the film.  The control that they placed on me was so rigid.  And I felt . . . and there was no movement possible, so for me all the things that they wanted to try to control me around became interesting.  Any kind of freedom, any kind of sexuality -- even if I didn't know what sexuality was -- was where I wanted to go.  Everything they said "no" to, I wanted to do.

OM:  It was a natural curiosity, I guess.

JF:    Well -- it was also -- there was no space within the rules they imposed on me.  So I was reacting and wanted out, and in a funny way it drives me into the arms of an abusive man.  But it wasn't just that.  I mean I feel sad saying this, but I didn't feel loved in my family.  And I say that despite the fact that I think they had the best intentions and still somehow the midst of all the drama that's going on in my family made me feel like I was the orphan child.  And -- so I was deeply searching for love.  And you hear that a lot from eastern women who have been sexually abused, that they end up with a man abusing them because they getting what they feel is love from that man.  And nothing felt loved by my track coach who sexually abused me.  And I felt, "ok, if that's the price, then I'm willing to pay it.  If you're gonna love me, I'll give you what you want," -- because I was so desperate for love.  So in another family situation I don't think it would have happened because I wouldn't have been so needy.  I wouldn't have felt so alone.  I wouldn't have felt like I had to escape.  I felt there were a lot of rules in my family but I didn't feel that there was a lot of compassion and love or understanding.  And you know, I'm older than most people who have been reading your columns so -- I was born in '59.  I'm 47 now -- 47 1/2.  I grew up in a period where children are to be seen and not heard.  And if you didn't obey you were punished, sent to your room, or your mouth was washed out with soap, or you had the strap.  They were very old-fashioned rules that my parents still had and my grandmother had.  And they weren't about wanting to know you, or know you what you felt, or know what you thought.  There wasn't a whole lot of that.  The times have changed and parenting is different now.  So part of it also was times and part of it was all the drama that was going on in my family.  A lot of kids.  A difficult marriage.  A difficult relationship.  A lot of stress on my parents and my grandmother.  So nobody was really tending to my feelings.  I looked outside the house for help and unfortunately ended up being abused.

OM:  Right.

JF:    And that's not an uncommon story by the way.  Abuse is something that cannot be talked about simply.  There's so many factors, you know?  There's so many factors in every abuse story.  And of course we try to simplify it cause it makes it easy.  Actually I think if one were to really change things one would have to understand the complexity of it, and talk about it that way.  I just think sometimes in the media we think about these things in an un-complex way.  Not you, but in the media in general.  It's hard because, it is so widespread it's unbelievable.  So widespread -- I mean, it makes you crazy.  Even, Omar, in the film, probably I would say 7 out of the 10 women that appeared in the film were sexually abused and I had no idea of that.  And I don't bring it up because the film isn't a film about sexual abuse.  It's shocking the number of women I run across of all classes who will suddenly blurt out that their father or a coach or something -- it's shocking to me.  So somehow even in the west and of course in the third world we're not getting at it at all.  And I think that one of the solutions is a more complex dialogue.

OM:  How did "Flying" affect you while you were making it -- and after you completed it?

JF:    Making "Flying" really opened a lot up for me . . . it really allowed me to face -- to begin to face this abuse that I had totally denied and got on with my life.  And when it happened I just put it behind me.  I mean, I didn't talk about it.  I didn't think about it.  I didn't dwell on it.  And I didn't call it abuse.  And in my head the people just disappeared -- meaning the man who abused me.  And it was complicated because I was a student of his lover -- it's a long story -- so it was actually a triangle.  There was a woman involved and she set me up to be with [the track coach that abused Jennifer] -- it's a very complicated story.  And she was also a teacher of mine.  And when it happened I just sort of -- I walked away from them -- to make a long, long story short.  Nobody helped me.  I just said, "I won't see you anymore."  And I shut the door.  And it was as if they died.  And here I am in my late forties, and after making this film for the first time I thought, "wow, these people might still be alive!"  And my mom saw the film too and she was so pissed off at this man because she knew him at the time -- exactly as like it says in the film and she wanted to stop me from seeing him and my dad didn't believe her.  One day, I googled him.  And not only is he alive and well, he's like this very celebrated athletic guy, retired --

OM:    -- wow.

JF:    -- he was a big coach at many universities.  Totally celebrated human being . . . on all these committees today in 2007.  And I was so shocked!  Because I had so disassociated -- I thought, "well, he must be dead!"  And my mom called me one day and told me she found him on the Internet.  And it was so weird that up until making this film I couldn't face it.

 


OM:    Has the film then been a sort of therapy for you?  Did the project start out as one about your own ordeal?

JF:    It didn't start out -- it had nothing to with the sexual abuse first of all -- that was the surprise.  That was something that came up in the journey.  It was in a different point that I was at.  I might have said this before, but I was in my early 40's.  Not married, no kids.  And very aware that while I never wanted kids, I never wanted to be married, there was kind of a secret silent voice in me that was kind of waiting for the day when I would be married and have kids, even though I didn't want to.  It was sort of this old feminine voice which was sort of like -- my friends call it "the one-day-I'll-have-a-life-syndrome" -- which means like, until you're married and have kids, your life actually doesn't mean anything.  And no matter how liberated women are, most of us struggle with these silent voices of how our lives should fit in the normative society.  And here I have lived the ultimate antithesis of all the rules, but somehow in my brain I should also achieve all the rules.  And I kind of got into my early 40's realizing I hadn't achieved them.  And that I didn't value what I had achieved.  I felt like, "what did it all mean?", I've slept with these men or I had very serious love relationships in my life but nobody knew about them.  And in the eyes of society, I was a single woman.  It didn't matter all that I'd lived or all the relationships that I'd had.  In fact in my early 40's I had just broken up with a man who I thought -- actually I thought we would marry . . . and it sort of really opened my eyes to the fact there was no prince charming coming.  But also again -- I had secretly held a belief that one day there would be a prince charming and one day I would fit into the normative society role.

OM:    Patrick wasn't someone that caught your eye when you first met during the film.  Do you still remain in contact with him?  And did you have problems filming him [in "Flying"]?  He seemed very resistant to the process.

JF:    I think with the camera being there it was clear he didn't want me to film.  It was a constant, constant negotiation how much I could film him.  I think it's a testament about how much he cared for me that he let me keep going.  But he did have an approval over everything.  He never gave me a release until he saw the finished film, actually.  It was actually a really sore point in our relationship because I wanted to film more and he wanted me to film as little as possible!  So then we fought about it and then we had to negotiate it.  But the relationship intensified.  In fact we're very much together now.  And more committed than ever.  We're not married because I don't believe in marriage as you know from the film.

OM:    Right!

JF:    This is a political statement -- I think [marriage] is a form of ownership.  I would practically call him my husband at this point. 

OM:    Oh, good!

JF:    We're doing all those partnering things that people do.  We're actually I think, very good.  And I think -- and this is a funny thing to say but I think the film really helped me see a), that he was a good guy, and b), that I was wasting my life running after men that weren't right for me and who couldn't commit.  And by making the film and talking to all these women and my family, and all these people I really saw that reflection.  It gave me the time to see Patrick and to see how good of a guy he was.  And to also -- you know, we had a lot to negotiate.  He had to put up with me being with somebody else.  Which is huge for a man.  And I respected him for that, also.  He never gave me an ultimatum -- which most men would have done -- like, "leave the other guy or else I'm out of here."  He never did that.  That was huge points in his favor.  Also when we would shoot and I would look at the footage later -- I thought, "wow, he's really cute!"  And I saw we were good together.  And then of course what did happen with my lover [Kye] was so unbelievably perfect to say, "well, I might have loved him, he couldn't tolerate who I really was.  And the whole issue of sexual freedom was just really so intolerable to him that he never really could live with me in the world.  He was just too jealous.  And so that, kind of juxtaposed to Patrick, was -- you know, I am actually a very monogamous person.  And the only reason I ended up with two men in my 40's was because I didn't want to commit to someone who was married [Kye] and then suffer.  So I said, "okay, I'm gonna open the box."  It was the first time in my life that I hadn't been monogamous.  But my lover couldn't believe that because he thought I was so wild.  Well I'm not a wild person, actually.  It's just that for me rules are arbitrary.  And you have to do what's right for you at that moment.  And at that moment it didn't make sense to be monogamous.  But I'm actually totally committed to Patrick now and monogamous with him, although I think if he was away in Alaska for six months on a film and he had an affair, I think I would have to find a way to live with that, and vice versa.  Because I also don't want to build a glass house where if one of us sleeps with somebody else, it's the end of our relationship.  I don't think -- you know for me, that's too frightening.  I think we should have real lives in partnership.  This is much more than you asked for!

OM:    No, no, no.  It's not.

JF:    I'm just blah-blahing --

OM:    No.  This is exactly what I'm hoping for.

JF:    I think the film gave me the time and space to find out who Patrick was, as well as to explore my issues with other women.  And their reflection actually helped me get a committed relationship.  I think the whole process helped me to commit to Patrick.

OM:    Wow.

JF:    Because he so didn't want to be in the film. 

OM:    Right.

JF:    But you know that also a real sign of love when someone does something they don't want to do for you?

OM:    Yes.  Absolutely.

JF:    He has gone a long way to make this work.  And that means something to me, you know?  As my mother says, "he actually puts up with you.  Don't let him go.  What's the matter with you?  Hold on to him!!"  You know my lifestyle is so unusual.  You know I travel so much, etcetera.  Most men wouldn't accept that.  And most women wouldn't accept it from a man -- but harder for a man to accept it from a woman.

OM:    Do you think that's because many men might feel threatened by a woman's autonomy?  Is that how you'd react to that?  As we both know, most of the time it's the woman that has to make the move if the guy has a career change that requires a move to another country or something, the woman in that relationship is typically the one to pick up and leave all that she has known behind, in order to support his venture.  But it's less often the case the other way around.  Are many men in general just fearful?  The film in some ways reinforced to me that many men are just -- feel very fearful and very insecure and very threatened when a woman asserts herself -- and particularly asserts herself whether it's in her sexuality or whether it's in her career moves -- it seems like a great many men are threatened by that.  

JF:    I think they are.  I think that -- a) we can't separate ourselves from our genetic code and our historical -- you know, women historically had been the property of men.  And men went out and hunted and women stayed home.  Men went out and had experiences and women stayed home.  Men had their sexual partners and women didn't because they would get pregnant.  And a man wanted to know that his children coming out of his woman were his seed.  Then what happened for us as women because of the advent of birth control, widespread birth control, especially the pill -- suddenly one could have sex without getting pregnant.  And that is a huge liberation.  But male genetic code is not gonna change in 30 years.  It's why I'm still haunted by the whole female thing, men are still haunted by the male thing.  So I think it is scary to have a woman away from you for a long period -- "What is she doing?  She must be sleeping with somebody else."  You know, all of those fears.  But I don't think that's the only piece.  I think that men want women to make a home and be there for them when they're free.  And when the woman isn't free that also doesn't fit the bill.  But I have to say on that one, a lot of woman wouldn't like to be with a man who has my lifestyle.  If you have a 9 to 5 job and your partner is gone four to five months out of the year, that's very hard.

OM:    Sure.

JF:    So on any given year it may change.  One year it may be one month.  Another year it may be six months you're gone.  So I think that it's also bigger than gender.  It's about lifestyle -- it being similar lifestyle.  Patrick and I happen to have a similar lifestyle.  We're both traveling a lot.  But I think on the male thing, it's very hard to see a woman be free.  Even so-called "liberated" men.  Because they're haunted by old values.  And even their guy friends will say, "wow, huh, she's gone for a month?  What is she doing?"  You know, the society comes also comes around the man to whip up his fears.  So I think it is very hard.  Trust is the biggest thing.  Is both trust or believing -- that's the other thing.  I think we need to trust each other but also not make sexuality the line we draw in the sand about whether somebody loves you or not.  I know it's hard.  It's hard even for me.  But if my partner sleeps with somebody else and still wants to be with me, why does that mean that he doesn't love me?  Why do we have to own each other's penises and vaginas?  That's the thing I don't agree with.  I think it's chocie rather than ownership and I think that we make the box too brittle, myself.  And a lot of people still do.  People get married all the time and the line is their sexuality.  I don't get that!  What does that have to do with building a life together?

OM:    The whole penis and vagina ownership aspect seems to be part of a reductionist type of thinking that marginalizes an entirety of a relationship down to [those organs].

JF:    Seems to me, yeah.  On the other hand, just to make things complicated, there is something that happens between -- in the relationship when people commit deeply and there's a . . . I think we're still living under a hundred years-old-owning-someone's-sexuality-means-knowing-who-your-children-are.  I think we're still in the shadow of that.  And nobody says it and nobody acknowledges it.  We just behave like monkeys.  It's sort of like this: in the Jewish religion, we circumcise our boys.  And if the boy's not circumcised, he's not Jewish.  In the olden days it was primarily hygenic.  But to me, to my eyes, in a modern world, where you have indoor plumbing and good healthcare, there's no reason why circumcision has to be continued.  To me it's anti-pleasure activity.  But if you try to talk to even the most liberal Jews not to circumcise their kid -- they have to -- because -- I've [spoken] to Israelis who aren't religious at all but if they don't circumcise their boys their children aren't Jewish.  And I'm thinking to myself, "you've got to be kidding, that whether you take off a foreskin or not changes the child's religion?"  It makes no sense.  We just do it because we're monkeys.

OM:    There's no logical connection at all between that and someone's faith. 

JF:    Exactly.

OM:    People actually formulate that as something credible and logical, when it's not.  And you've got so called educated people who pander to that line of reasoning.

JF:    Then you think back to sexuality in general.  Monogamy was marriage.  Monogamy was borne at a time when there was no birth control, when people lived to about 22, 23.  You were married for a few years.  All of these ideas so that everybody knew the genetic line of a family.  In a modern world, people live between 70 and 90.  It may not be logical that people are going to stay together for 40 years in a monogamous position.  It may just not be the way -- maybe you want a relationship to survive 40 years but in that kind of rigid box are we asking too much?  In a world where birth control is available.  All these things.  I just think we need to change the rules to adjust to the circumstances.  And not -- again, we sort of wrap monogamy and lump marriage together in one little neat knot.  What would it be so bad if somebody is with somebody for 30 years if both people sometimes have some other aspects of their sexuality play out, if both people accept it?

OM:    What was the most fruitful discussion you had in the film?  It seemed that the dialogue you had with one of the women about the differences between love and marriage was most insightful.

JF:    It's funny -- I just talked with Paramita [the woman featured in the dialogue in question, the day before this conversation].  She just got married to a man ten years her junior.  I agree.  For me that discussion was really helpful.  Because in my drive for freedom to escape the controls of, the rules of my family -- the women's role and all -- of course, one of the drives is for pleasure and to explore my sexuality.  And I think one of the great things about talking to Paramita in India for example was her saying, "well wait a second, sexual passion isn't necessarily love."  And I think it's really easy in the west to confuse the two because -- this is sort of the opposite of my argument about sexual freedom, which is -- we are sexually free.  I started having sex at 13 -- albeit abuse -- but I started having sex at 13.  And one of my big drives was to have pleasure.  And because of the abuse it was very hard for me for many years to have any feeling at all.  It was like a huge thing.  So for me, having pleasure is often equated with love.  And I know that for a lot of women in the west, we have sex so quickly.  And at least for women when you have sex with a man -- I have a girlfriend -- actually it's Pat from the film -- who says there's the "three-fuck rule": you sleep with a man three times, you will fall in love with him.  So if you don't want to have a relationship you better not have sex three times, because you'll get attached.  And I think there's a way that in the west we have sex so quickly and then we kind of translate that into feeling love.  But what Paramita would say is that that's not love, that's passion.  And her illuminating that for me and saying, "you know you guys are so sexual, but do you really know anything about love?" -- was really useful because I thought she was right.  I'd had a lot of passion in my life.  But I hadn't had anything that required commitment, that required work, that required compromise, that required anything like that -- in which love is built.  I tended to take the feelings of passion to be love.  And I think that in a way that's where the sexual revolution is hard sometimes, because it's really easy to confuse sexuality with love.  I don't want to go back.  I'm not arguing for let's turn the clock back and become more puritanical because I think women are the losers in that game.

OM:    Absolutely.

JF:    But I do think that one has to be mindful -- particularly women -- because it is so easy for us to have those feelings of love when we have sex.  And I think what was so good about what Paramita said to me, "how would your lover be if you were in a wheelchair if he doesn't take care of you and love you>"  I said,   "Patrick would."  And she was like, "well that's the guy you should be with."  And it was a whole other value system because I never thought about longeivity.  And because I wasn't looking for marriage I wasn't looking for a partner that exhibited qualities that would work well in longevity.  And I wasn't looking for that in love.  Maybe there's different kinds of love.  I wasn't looking for the kind of love that grows over time.  And that's what's so interesting about my relationship with Patrick is that he wasn't my type as you know.  I wasn't in love with him.  But over time I have fallen for him.  And I am in love with him now.  And it took many years.  And it's really, really interesting for me.  I'm like, "wow, I love this man!"  And the other paradigm of men that I was crazy about at the beginning, often went in the other direction, which is at the point where I should get serious I would see their flaws and stop loving them so much.  Whereas with Patrick, both our flaws were right out there from the beginning, and we dealt with the flaws first and then the love has grown out of dealing with them, so I kind of think Paramita was right that I knew nothing about real love, I only knew about passion.


"Flying: Confessions Of A Free Woman" is playing now at the Film Forum in New York City.  It opened on July 4, 2007.


Reactions to this dialogue?  E-mail editor@popcornreel.com



                                

Related stories:

The Popcorn Reel Film Review of "Flying: Confessions Of A Free Woman"

The Power Of She: A Feature Story on Jennifer Fox, At Sundance

Heroines At Your Local Movie Theater

"Flying" trailer

"Flying" website


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