from Fear of Flying

ERICA JONG

When Fear of Flying first came out in the early ’70s, it articulated a growing sense among women that the popular conception of female sexuality—demure, delicate, deferential—didn’t cover all the bases. Women were recognizing and embracing their own sexual power as never before, and Jong’s best-seller gave a voice to the transformation.

A generation later, Fear of Flying would continue to inspire women at certain stages of their sexual development; it also, from my own experience, helped them communicate to the boys around them just what was going on. I was given a copy in the early weeks of a relationship in my sophomore year of college; little did I know at the time that she intended it to be a textbook, and I was a remedial student. Its famous concept— the zipless fuck—is a metaphor for sex without context, without complication, between preferably unacquainted individuals who share no language but touch, get to the business, and then get out of each other’s lives. No fuss, no muss. But my girlfriend of the time wasn’t trying to get me to bonk her and get lost; she saw the greater implication in the book that, at times, sex should be able to be a purely in-body experience (with all the psychology that implies), devoid of any intellectualizing or problematizing. She didn’t want to separate the emotions out of our coupling; she just wanted me to shut up and get to it.

The reason the zipless fuck is so appealing, of course, is that most fucks are pretty damn zip-full. Very few women I know—or men even— would want anonymous sex all the time. The foibles and bumbling around zippers and socks and condoms and all their metaphorical equivalents in the psyche are what make sex more than just a release of fluids. Sex can make us weak, and weakness can make us beautiful. But of all good things we can sometimes get enough—even of care and compassion. The zipless fuck was a call for un-PC sex—but un-PC sex dictated on a woman’s terms, not in the conventional way men had been having it for millennia.

So what I learned most from my girlfriend of sophomore year was how sexy an assertive woman could be. From that point on I realized that assertiveness and sexual self-awareness normally went hand in hand. I will never forget the first time we went to my dorm room. I had “decorated” it with a chaos of “found art” oddities of every shape and form; upon opening the door, her first and only words were, “I could never, ever, have an orgasm here.” Fear of Flying had left its mark: dome feminism, 1; Jack décor, 0.

A grimy European train compartment (Second Class) . . . In the window seat a pretty young widow in a heavy black veil and tight black dress which reveals her voluptuous figure. She is sweating profusely . . . The train screeches to a halt in a town called (perhaps) Corleone. A tall languid-looking soldier, unshaven, but with a beautiful mop of hair, a cleft chin and somewhat devilish, lazy eyes enters the compartment . . . He is sweaty and disheveled but basically a gorgeous hunk of flesh, only slightly rancid from the heat. The train screeches out of the station.

Then we become aware of the bouncing of the train and the rhythmic way the soldier’s thighs are rubbing against the thighs of the widow . . . He is watching the large gold cross between the widow’s breasts swing back and forth in her deep cleavage. Bump. Pause. Bump. It hits one moist breast and then the other. It seems to hesitate in between as if paralyzed between two repelling magnets. He is hypnotized. She stares out the window, looking at each olive tree as if she had never seen olive trees before . . . He rests his left hand on the seat between his thigh and hers and begins to wind rubber fingers around and under the soft flesh of her thighs. She continues staring at each olive tree as if she were God and had just made them and were wondering what to call them . . .

Then the fingers are sliding between her thighs and they are parting her thighs, and they are moving upward into the fleshy gap between her heavy black stockings and her garters and they are sliding up under her garters into the damp unpantied place between her legs.

The train enters a galleria, or tunnel, and in the semi-darkness the symbolism is consummated. There is the soldier’s boot in the air and the dark walls of the tunnel and the hypnotic rocking of the train and the long high whistle as it finally emerges.

Wordlessly, she gets off at a town called, perhaps, Bivona.