Jong’s novel Fear of Flying primarily focuses on heterosexual women and their desires, yet in “The Woman of It” she beautifully describes a lesbian love scene. The poem opens with “your slit so like mine: / the woman of it” and continues to reach more sexual imagery with the lines “knowing your nipples like mine, / and the likeness of it, / watching the mirror make love.” Jong’s exploration of lesbianism was powerful as the subjects of love and sex between two women remained taboo and controversial. The poem is erotic throughout, especially because of the vivid imagery Jong uses to describe the scene to the reader.

A fascinating aspect of the poem is that Jong primarily identifies as a heterosexual woman, but she is interested in exploring the many dimensions of a woman’s sexuality.
Jong’s poem suggests that the love between a woman and a woman is as “natural” as that of a man and a woman. Jong even says this near the end of “The Woman of It”: “we were natural together / as two little girls in the bath.” This shift towards serious sentimentality lends new meaning to Jong’s work, as the poem becomes about love, not just sex. Another crucial aspect of this poem is the strictly feminine imagery, even innocence, as evidenced in the line about “two little girls in the bath.” This is image is of naivety and beauty, and leads to the other line about hoping to “be women someday” and to the final line which reads “we hoped to grow up.” The imagery of little girls to women gives meaning to the idea that these two lovers hoped to grow up together; their love was innate and natural, and they desire to grow old together just as heterosexual couples do.

While the poem is very sensual and loving in some respects, in others it mimics the sexual desire in Fear of Flying. In Fear of Flying, Jong opens the book with the idea of the “zipless fuck” and the pleasure that would accompany sex with a complete stranger. In “The Woman of It,” Jong uses that same sense of sexual urgency to express the erotic nature of her relationship with her female lover.

Sources:

Jong, Erica. “The Woman of It.” Poeticous, Poeticous, Dec. 2016, www.poeticous.com/erica-jong/the-woman-of-it. Accessed 29 November, 2018.