Feminist author Germaine Greer ridiculed Jane Fonda at the U.K.-based Hay Festival this past weekend, suggesting the actress undergo a brain transplant for suggesting women should try to appear younger to attract men.
The two women are just about a year apart in age difference, with Greer 76, and Fonda 77, but apparently share completely opposing views on the aging process, with both identifying as “feminist.”
“I read Jane Fonda today saying men want younger women so we have to try to look young. Jane! Why not say older women want gorgeous boys? Men want older women? So let them want. There’s no shortage out there,” Greer told an audience in Wales, according to The Telegraph.
“You don’t have to pretend to be one,” she added.
Fonda, who has had a slew of cosmetic surgeries over the decades and is the face of L’Oreal’s anti-aging creams, shared her ideals with The Telegraph recently on ageism and what she believes men want.
“It is OK for men to get older, because men become more desirable by being powerful. With women, it’s all about how we look. Men are very visual, they want young women. So, for us, it’s all about trying to stay young,” said the actress, who also confessed her plastic surgery procedures have extended her acting career by about a decade.
During the interview, Fonda also tipped her hat to the “brave” women who have, unlike herself, embraced the aging process by not turning to elective surgery.
“I am brave in a lot of ways, but not that way. And I need to work, so I had some plastic surgery. It’s not like it’s too much, it’s not like you can’t see my wrinkles, right?” she said.
Greer, whose controversial book The Female Eunuch became an international best-seller in 1970, believes the pressures on women are greater now than ever before, and that the cosmetics industry is to be partially blamed.
Greer said “the terror of growing old is worse than it ever was,” saying anti-aging preparations don’t work, and “the way they are marketed is by exploiting women’s anxiety. So women spend the money as if they were buying a charm, getting an amulet to hang around your neck to stop you aging and leave you forever young.”
“And there’s poor old Jane Fonda. I mean, it’s cost her a fortune. She’s got a back full of steel, a replaced hip and a replaced something else-I don’t think it’s a brain. I think it’s a knee,” she said.
“You just think, Jane, there must have been more to life. Think of the things with her money and clout she could have done. I remember when we thought she was going to save the whale,” she continued.
Fonda announced in December she had planned to build a shrine to herself to celebrate her 77th birthday, which she hoped would boost her self-confidence, as well as pay tribute to the young girl she once was, “before the sh*t hit the fan.”
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