For decades, that kiss became the epitome of romance. He, a sailor fresh from World War II. She, a girl who was carried away by his manly embrace in downtown New York. Jollity, laughter, exhilaration. The photograph, titled ‘V-J Day in Times Square’ has hung on thousands of walls for years and years. There’s just one problem: the kiss was at no time consensual.
Sixty years in silence
August 14, 1945. Alfred Eisenstaedt is in the middle of celebrating the American victory against Japan when he sees an unrepeatable scene, with the perfect angle. A week later it would be published in ‘Time’ magazine in a twelve-page report on the end of the war, and would immortalize its two almost faceless protagonists.
“I noticed a sailor coming towards me. He grabbed all the women he met and kissed them, young and old,” the photographer commented in one of his books, showing that, indeed, the kiss was not consensual but taken as a matter of course. We have won, so kiss. Of the two protagonists of the photo we are only clear who she was, Greta Zimmer Friedman, who at that time worked in a dental clinic (hence the uniform). And it was she who brought down the myth.
Once her identity was known she began to be more open about it. But there were no sighs of love, but rather of pure resignation. “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed. The guy just came, grabbed me and kissed me. It was not a romantic moment. It was just a moment of thanking God that the war was over,” she said in an interview at the U.S. Library of Congress in 2005.
It is generally accepted that the man was George Mendonsa, who came out of a movie theater where he was watching a movie with his girlfriend (and later wife) Rita to celebrate the victory and, while he was at it, kiss Greta. “I had had a few drinks and considered her one of us because she was a nurse,” he once remarked, making it all fit. It was 1945. The sad thing is that we have to go through all this again in 2023, and the word “consent” seems to mean absolutely nothing.
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