Why Jane Fonda Says She’d Only Want to Have Sex With a Younger Man

In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Jane Fonda reveals she’s not really interested in having sex. But if she were going to, it would be with a younger man. 

“I don’t want to be in a relationship, a sexual relationship, again,” Fonda tells the magazine for its latest cover story.

She continues, “I don’t have that desire. Do I fantasize? Yes … 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.” 

That’s when the iconic actor added her caveat: “I think maybe now I could, but the problem is that, like a man, I would want a younger man. Isn’t that awful? It’s a thing about skin. I would want a younger man, and I’m too vain.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Fonda says she’s realized at 83 years old that she’s not “capable” of intimacy. 

“It’s not them. It’s me,” she explains. “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.” 

Jane Fonda was married three times: to Ted Turner from 1991 to 2001, to Tom Hayden from 1973 to 1990, and to Roger Vadim from 1965 to 1973. She has a son from her marriage to Hayden (Troy Garity, 47) and a daughter from her marriage to Vadim (Vanessa, 52). 

On how her relationship to motherhood’s changed over the years, she told Harper’s Bazaar, “I think about it every day. It’s the one main thing about my past that I think about almost every day. And I’ll tell you one of the things that’s keying it off is watching my son [Troy Garity], who is 47. They just had their first child, and he is about a year and a half. And when I watch my son and his wife, Simone, parent, I’m awestruck. It puts into such stark relief for me, what I didn’t do. I don’t think I’ve said this to him, so I feel a little weird, but anyway that’s the reality. Watching my son be a parent, I think, ‘God, I just wish I had done that.’ And then I realize, if I had done that I would not have become who I became.”

Read her full interview here.