Fear of Flying

by NPR STAFF

October 05, 2013 6:07 AM

http://www.npr.org/

In 1973, Erica Jong was tired of reading about silent, seething housewifes, so she introduced a new kind of female protagonist: a frank young woman who loved sex and wasn't ashamed to admit it. Fear of Flying turns 40 this year, as does its most famous phrase: "the zipless f - - - ." Jong defines it in the novel:

"The zipless f - - - was more than a f - - - . It was a platonic ideal. Zipless, because when you came together, zippers fell away like rose petals. Underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover."

Jong spoke with NPR's Susan Stamberg about hook-ups, Fifty Shades of Gray, and the shocking revelation that women enjoy sex, too.

On writing about women enjoying sex

It's very strange that it was a revelation, because the population of the world has been growing for centuries. Women do like sex, and they do fantasize about sex.

On what was expected of women in the early 1970s

You were supposed to get married, have children, take care of a husband; and that was why there was an epidemic of mad housewife novels in which a woman woke up and discovered actually her sworn enemy was her cranky husband who had made her into a slave. And I truly hated those mad housewife novels. Hate, hate, hated them. Because they were blaming men for something that was not literally men's fault. I mean, we were in a terrible predicament as a society, but it was not the fault of individual men or women. We were stuck in certain roles.

On her own experience

I married the man who I lost my virginity with. But I have to say that I grew up in a very hip family. My parents were very sexual, and there was absolutely no question, in the household I grew up in, that sex was fun. My parents were crazy about each other. You know, hippies were not invented in 1969.

On Fear of Flying being billed as a feminine version of Philip Roth's 1969 Portnoy's Complaint

When I read these [men's] books, I thought: But where are we? Why are we not writing about our feelings? I thought it was time to claim that territory for women. And I was scared to death writing the book. Scared to death, but also laughing hysterically and having a ball.

On the effect of Fear of Flying on her male readers

In the beginning, they were very threatened. Over the 40 years, I've heard all kinds of things about the book. One man said to me, "Whenever I saw that book on a woman's night table, I knew I was gonna get lucky."

On how she doesn't actually believe in the "zipless f - - - "

I doubt that I would write the story today, of Isadora. I mean, the arc of the book is a picaresque journey — a woman going, leaving her husband and taking off with a very sexy British psychoanalyst, and they're traveling across Europe. They're on an existential journey. And I think that, in my 20s and early 30s, an existential journey appealed to me. It was a way of solving my problems and learning about myself.

I don't have that illusion, or delusion, anymore. First of all, I don't believe that the zipless "bleep" actually exists. I think that, for the most part, we tend to be more sexual with somebody we feel comfortable with. Occasionally you might fall into bed with a total stranger, and it is a beautiful fantasy. But for the most part, when you fall into bed with a total stranger, it's a great disappointment.

On why Fifty Shades of Gray isn't empowering

If you look at Fifty Shades of Gray, it's a very, very retrograde book, because if you're tied up and aroused, what are you really doing? You're giving up all responsibility for your sexuality. So, you cannot be a bad girl, because you're tied up. ... You can be a victim.

On today's version of the "zipless f - - - "

I think that [young] women today — particularly in universities and so on — are doing hook-ups. The hook-up is a zipless "bleep." But I don't think that they're getting much joy out of it. If you look at Girls, Lena Dunham's program ... in many ways is very dark — these girls are not getting any pleasure. They're watching the men get pleasure. And so if hook-ups are so wonderful, why are these shows so dark and disappointing?

“ I don't believe that the zipless 'bleep' actually exists. ... It is a beautiful fantasy. But for the most part, when you fall into bed with a total stranger, it's a great disappointment."

- Erica Jong

Excerpt: Fear Of Flying
En Route to the Congress of Dreams
or the Zipless Fuck

"Bigamy is having one husband too
many. Monogamy is the same."
- Anonymous (a woman)

There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks' ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier.

My husband grabbed my hand therapeutically at the moment of takeoff.

"Christ — it's like ice," he said. He ought to know the symptoms by now since he's held my hand on lots of other flights. My fingers (and toes) turn to ice, my stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same level as the temperature in my fingers, my nipples stand up and salute the inside of my bra (or in this case, dress — since I'm not wearing a bra), and for one screaming minute my heart and the engines correspond as we attempt to prove again that the laws of aerodynamics are not the flimsy superstitions which, in my heart of hearts, I know they are. Never mind the diabolical information to passengers, I happen to be convinced that only my own concentration (and that of my mother — who always seems to expect her children to die in a plane crash) keeps this bird aloft. I congratulate myself on every successful takeoff, but not too enthusiastically because it's also part of my personal religion that the minute you grow overconfident and really relax about the flight, the plane crashes instantly. Constant vigilance, that's my motto. A mood of cautious optimism should prevail. But actually my mood is better described as cautious pessimism. OK, I tell myself, we seem to be off the ground and into the clouds but the danger isn't past. This is, in fact, the most perilous patch of air. Right here over Jamaica Bay where the plane banks and turns and the "No Smoking" sign goes off. This may well be where we go screaming down in thousands of flaming pieces. So I keep concentrating very hard, helping the pilot (a reassuringly midwestern voice named Donnelly) fly the 250-passenger motherfucker. Thank God for his crew cut and middle-America diction. New Yorker that I am, I would never trust a pilot with a New York accent.

As soon as the seat-belt sign goes off and people begin moving about the cabin, I glance around nervously to see who's on board. There's a big-breasted mama-analyst named Rose Schwamm-Lipkin with whom I recently had a consultation about whether or not I should leave my current analyst (who isn't, mercifully, in evidence). There's Dr. Thomas Frommer, the harshly Teutonic expert on Anorexia Nervosa, who was my husband's first analyst. There's kindly, rotund Dr. Arthur Feet, Jr., who was the third (and last) analyst of my friend Pia. There's compulsive little Dr. Raymond Schrift who is hailing a blond stewardess (named "Nanci") as if she were a taxi. (I saw Dr. Schrift for one memorable year when I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents' living-room couch. He kept insisting that the horse I was dreaming about was my father and that my periods would return if only I would "ackzept being a vohman.") There's smiling, bald Dr. Harvey Smucker whom I saw in consultation when my first husband decided he was Jesus Christ and began threatening to walk on the water in Central Park Lake. There's foppish, hand-tailored Dr. Ernest Klumpner, the supposedly "brilliant theoretician" whose latest book is a psychoanalytic study of John Knox. There's black-bearded Dr. Stanton Rappoport-Rosen who recently gained notoriety in New York analytic circles when he moved to Denver and branched out into something called "Cross-Country Group Ski-Therapy." There's Dr. Arnold Aaronson pretending to play chess on a magnetic board with his new wife (who was his patient until last year), the singer Judy Rose. Both of them are surreptitiously looking around to see who is looking at them — and for one moment, my eyes and Judy Rose's meet. Judy Rose became famous in the fifties for recording a series of satirical ballads about pseudointellectual life in New York. In a whiny and deliberately unmusical voice, she sang the saga of a Jewish girl who takes courses at the New School, reads the Bible for its prose, discusses Martin Buber in bed, and falls in love with her analyst. She has now become one with the role she created.

Besides the analysts, their wives, the crew, and a few poor outnumbered laymen, there were some children of analysts who'd come along for the ride. Their sons were mostly sullen-faced adolescents in bell bottoms and shoulder-length hair who looked at their parents with a degree of cynicism and scorn which was almost palpable. I remembered myself traveling abroad with my parents as a teenager and always trying to pretend they weren't with me. I tried to lose them in the Louvre! To avoid them in the Uffizi! To moon alone over a Coke in a Paris café and pretend that those loud people at the next table were not — though clearly they were — my parents. (I was pretending, you see, to be a Lost Generation exile with my parents sitting three feet away.) And here I was back in my own past, or in a bad dream or a bad movie: Analyst and Son of Analyst. A planeload of shrinks and my adolescence all around me. Stranded in midair over the Atlantic with 117 analysts many of whom had heard my long, sad story and none of whom remembered it. An ideal beginning for the nightmare the trip was going to become.

We were bound for Vienna and the occasion was historic. Centuries ago, wars ago, in 1938, Freud fled his famous consulting room on the Berggasse when the Nazis threatened his family. During the years of the Third Reich any mention of his name was banned in Germany, and analysts were expelled (if they were lucky) or gassed (if they were not). Now, with great ceremony, Vienna was welcoming the analysts back. They were even opening a museum to Freud in his old consulting room. The mayor of Vienna was going to greet them and a reception was to be held in Vienna's pseudo-Gothic Rathaus. The enticements included free food, free Schnaps, cruises on the Danube, excursions to vineyards, singing, dancing, shenanigans, learned papers and speeches and a tax-deductible trip to Europe. Most of all, there was to be lots of good old Austrian Gemültlichkeit. The people who invented schmaltz (and crematoria) were going to show the analysts how welcome back they were.

Welcome back! Welcome back! At least those of you who survived Auschwitz, Belsen, the London Blitz and the co-optation of America. Willkommen! Austrians are nothing if not charming.

From FEAR OF FLYING 40th Anniversary Edition: A Novel by Erica Jong. Copyright 2013 by Erica Jong. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company LLC.