Jane Fonda
Credit: Caroline McCredie/Getty Images for Chopard

Jane Fonda has always been like our unofficial and virtual second mum. She’s our hero in climate change activism and for diversity in Hollywood and we grasp on to her advice so tightly it may as well be gospel. In an interview on Andy Cohen Live this week on SiriusXM, the actress shared her next bout of sage wisdom. This time, about sex.

Cohen attempted to ask the award-winning star on how she would characterise her sex life nowadays. She swiftly responded “private” and “solo, solo”. Fonda being the classy woman she is, instead offered advice on how sex changes as we age. At 84, she says it got better.

“Women, I think tend to get better because they lose their fear of saying what they need,” Fonda said. “You know, we go through, we waste way too much time not wanting to say, ‘Wait a minute, hold, hold it, hold it. No, no, no. Slow down. And a little to the left.’ You know, we don’t, we don’t wanna do that.”

She added, “But when we get older, it’s like, ‘No, I know what I want. Give me what I want.'”

In a 2021 interview Fonda revealed she had no “desire” for another sexual relationship. The actress has been married three times throughout her life, to French director Roger Vadim, political activist Tom Hayden, and CNN founder Ted Turner.

Jane Fonda and Ted Turner during 65th Annual Academy Awards at Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, United States. (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)

“One of the painful things that I’ve realised by 80 – I don’t even know how old I am – 83, and single now. What I’ve had to really think about is that I’m not really capable [of intimacy],” she said. “It’s not them. It’s me. 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.”