Sex and the Stewardess

LYNN — The Now Girl

Lynn is a slender girl of medium height with lustrous brown hair, quick brown eyes, and a low-pitched, almost husky voice. She has been flying for two and a half years and often remarks that she will go on flying until she is grounded. At other times, though, she will talk of marriage as something that might happen to her at any moment. Lynn does not plan in the usual sense of the term. Her involvement is very much with present time, not because of a pathological incapacity to conceive of the future as real (a common aspect of the sociopathic personality) but because she feels strongly that life can be more enjoyable and effective lived in this fashion.

I found her extremely pleasant to be with and surprisingly difficult to interview, not because she was reluctant to discuss personal matters — quite the contrary — but because she tended to wander off on conversational tangents. She was particularly good at small talk. Most stews are; they have to be adept at prattling inoffensively with total strangers. In Lynn’s case, a facility with lightweight conversation made conversation on a deeper plane nearly impossible. An observation would remind her of a joke, a trivial anecdote, and the point of it all would get lost in the shuffle. This might have been disconcerting had she not been such very pleasant company.

Lynn grew up in a town in central Illinois where her parents still live. Her father is a moderately successful dealer in home furnishings. Both parents are active in community affairs. A younger brother attends the state university. An older brother has joined the family business. “It all sounds very dull, I’m sure,” she said at one point. And, in another conversation, “They don’t have interesting lives, do they? When I visit, you know, it’s always good to be home and I love them, I’ve always felt very close with them. And whenever things get mean and blue I’ll think that I belong there. But I really don’t and I know it. I can’t stand for things to be dull. I visit them at home and I want to cry for them, for what they’re missing. Of course I guess they want what they have and wouldn’t be comfortable having otherwise, but God, one year after the other and it’s all the same, isn’t it?”

LYNN: I don’t think I really thought much about sex before I got to stewardess school. Oh, that sounds just super, doesn’t it? The airline would be thrilled to hear me say that. What I mean is that I didn’t think about sex as a part of a stew. I went steady the last year and a half in senior high. Did I tell you I was a cheerleader? Isn’t that just too typical? My steady was on the basketball team. He made all-county. He was certainly tall...

JWW: You had sex with him?

LYNN: That was about the only thing we did have, actually. There wasn’t anything to do or any place to go, the same places to drink or dance and the same movie theaters. And the same people all the time. We had about, oh, fifteen months of Everything But.

JWW: Everything but intercourse?

LYNN: Well, I thought so at the time. Everything covers a lot of ground, doesn’t it? I’ve learned a few things I didn’t know about then.

JWW: I’ll bet you have.

LYNN: Well, I’ve had some crazy teachers... What we did, oh, not to get physical, but we would neck up a storm and then handle each other until the rains came. Handle with care. This was what most couples used to do. About two months before graduation we started going all the way. The traditional thing was to wait until the senior prom but we rushed the season a little. Oh, when I remember! In his father’s car. Not even the back seat. The front seat of a car. My God.

He’s married now. I could have stayed around there and not broken up with him and I might be married to him right now. I could have had that if I wanted it. He’s a veterinarian and he’s making a lot of money. He isn’t stupid. I may have made him sound stupid before, but he really isn’t. I could have had that and by now I would have a few kids and we would go to Chicago once a year. “Look, Lynn, a bus! Whoopee!”

JWW: You say you didn’t think of sex before stew school.

LYNN: Oh, right. See, I guess I was very naïve about this. I had absolutely no idea that stewardesses were supposed to have a reputation. All the jokes about sitting on the pilots’ laps — I had heard about that, there was the scandal in the papers then, and I was such an idiot I didn’t even think that what they were talking about was sexual. I thought it was a matter of kidding around, a little necking or something. I thought of the whole business of being a stewardess, I thought of it as completely asexual, like flying nuns — not like that goopy television program, this was before that program, but asexual like nuns...

JWW: Didn’t you think about meeting men?

LYNN: Oh, of course. We all do, you know. It’s really impossible not to because one of the things the recruiters kept throwing at us was that we would be likely to get married within two years. I didn’t mean that I wasn’t up to my ears in romantic ideas about the job. I imagined myself falling madly in love with some pilot or some passenger... What I didn’t think about at all was the fast sex, which is really not so much sex as it is a part of the whole fast way of living. Of being a fast person.

JWW: Do you think of yourself as a fast person?

LYNN: There’s no question about it, is there? I mean, I am. I don’t mean the word the way a Sunday school teacher might. It usually has a dirty sound to it, and I don’t feel dirty. I felt worlds dirtier with my high school steady whether we were doing Everything But or Everything Too, and that wasn’t fast at all, you know. That was perfectly acceptable so long as you did it in private and no one knew about it. But it certainly wasn’t fast. It was slow enough to put a person to sleep.

What I mean by fast is getting a fix on things in a hurry. The plane lands and you don’t have to say, Christ, here I am in Los Angeles and I just left Chicago and I have to get my head used to being in California because of jet lag, so I think I’ll go someplace for a cup of hot chocolate and a nap. Instead of that you can say, Well, this is L.A., now let’s find out where to go and what to do and then just do it.

And it’s exactly the same thing with people, with relationships. I can get to know someone in a hurry. You, for instance, I can talk to you this way and tell you things and actually how long have we known each other? See? People who don’t work this way have to feel each other out forever and you just don’t function that way and enjoy life as a stew. You can’t. There really isn’t time. It’s always new people, and if you can’t size them up fast and relate to them fast you don’t enjoy them at all.

JWW: And the same thing goes for sex?

LYNN: I’ve found it that way. Now I certainly don’t mean that what works for me works for everybody, or that all stews are fast sexually. You must know that’s not true at all. There are girls who don’t seem to do much of anything, and there are girls who have to be in love, and there are all sorts of girls with all sorts of hang-ups.

For me, sex is a part of life. Life is having fun and sex is a way of having fun and part of a fun evening. I think — oh, you don’t want a murky speech on Lynn’s philosophy of life.

JWW: Go ahead.

LYNN: Well, I think being happy is better than being sad and having fun is better than sitting on your fanny and counting your fingers like Little Girl Blue. Women always say they like a good cry. Well, I’m funny, I don’t. I like laughing and fun. As far as I’m concerned there’s no such thing as a good cry.

I don’t understand why people take sex and tie it to other things. It was always tied to marriage. Maybe that made some sense when sex meant having babies. But now when it doesn’t have to, people still tie it up — if not to marriage, then to love.

I know girls who dearly love to screw but who insist that you have to love the man. You have to be in love. You have to want him forever in order to want him for half an hour.

JWW: Can you enjoy sexual relations with a total stranger?

LYNN: I don’t know.

JWW: How’s that?

LYNN: I’ve never tried.

JWW: But—

LYNN: I always know the guy, John. I may know him briefly and I may not see him again afterward, but that doesn’t change the fact that I know him at the time.

JWW: I see.

LYNN: In fact my roomie insists that I only have sex with men I love. She just says that I have a very low love threshold. That I fall in love over dinner.

JWW: Think she’s right?

LYNN: I don’t really think so because I’ve known girls that I would say are like that. The expression is that they fall in love at the drop of a pants. They date a man and instantly get carried away with a fantasy of being in love with him and having this magic with him and being his forever and ever. That’s something very different, I think.

JWW: Yes.

LYNN: Maybe I just have to like a man.

JWW: And you fall in like over dinner.

LYNN: Falling in like. Oh, I like that. Oh, super.

Lynn “falls in like” easily. This does not mean that she goes out with or to bed with every man who asks her. No stewardess would have the time, let alone the inclination, to accept all the propositions tossed at her. Lynn likes to have fun, and she accepts dates from those men whom she thinks she will have fun with. Her idea of a good time includes dining well, going to night clubs and parties, and generally living it up. She thus prefers to date men who seem likely to enjoy the same sort of evening. Deep conversations put her off, and at one point she herself suggested that she might be afraid of them, afraid that a deeper probing of her feelings might lead her to some unspecified upsetting discoveries about herself or life or whatever.

Lynn’s ideal date is a first-class passenger, divorced, between thirty-five and fifty. She has no particular moral qualms about dating married men. “If a man wants to cheat on his wife, that’s not a girl’s responsibility,” she said. “If he’s over twenty-one he ought to be able to decide this sort of thing for himself, don’t you think? And if he’s younger I’m not interested.” But she is not often interested in married men anyway, as it happens, “Some girls will tell you that the married ones only care about sex. I don’t think that’s it, exactly. Of course some of them are like that. The very ones, the ones with dirty eyes. The winkers and the fanny-pinchers. The ones who go to great lengths to let you know that they want to screw you, but who most of the time aren’t even serious about asking you out. I guess it’s a virility thing, they want to show off a little. They would be just as much of a drag if they were single.

“But there’s also the kind of married guys who I could have fun with, except that they’re so married they can’t have fun. They’re so busy being guilty, you see. They’ll try to keep me from knowing that they’re married, which I really resent, frankly. Or they won’t want to go anywhere with a date because someone might see them. They take you somewhere because they know they have to, it’s the right thing to do, and then they skulk around and you can sense that they’re nervous about it and that puts you off as well. You would think that a man a thousand miles from home in a strange city could either stay faithful to his wife or, if he’s going to cat around, that he could do it openly and cut loose. Some of them can, but they’re the exceptions.”

Lynn occasionally dates pilots, but doesn’t do this often. Pilots, she said, tend to want their sexual involvements quick and simple and without going anywhere first. Most of them are either married to an ex-stew or having an affair with a current stew or both, all of which makes them less than ideal as far as Lynn is concerned. “Most of the time they want the three B’s — a broad and a bottle and a bed. Some of them just want you so they can cut another notch on their gun, and others hate to sleep alone. A lot of them are great guys and I love them dearly, but I usually have more fun with a passenger. Pilots and other airline types are fun if you have a mob scene, a drunken blast where everybody cuts loose and maybe you wind up in somebody’s bed with a guy and maybe you don’t. but as far as dating pilots regularly, let’s say there are better ways to spend an evening.”

LYNN: One of the things I love about this life is that when things are dull or unpleasant they don’t stay that way for very long. If a captain is nasty or a grouch you’ll be flying with someone else the next day, and by the time you see the grouch again he may be in a better mood. If it’s raining in New York it may be clear in St. Louis. If your home base apartment is a mess — mine always is — you can get away from it and forget it.

So many people just can’t take things as they come. “Oh, New York’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.” Well, that’s nice, dummy, but like who ever asked you? This corporation lawyer took me to an Indian restaurant in San Francisco the other night. Great food, I mean really great food. And the idiot kept going on and on about how he couldn’t handle it as a steady diet. And I thought, I couldn’t stand him as a steady diet, as far as that went, which was why I would date him but not marry him. But only dating the kind of man you would want to marry seems as ridiculous as only eating the same kind of food every day for a lifetime.

JWW: Do you mean that sexual variety is as important as any other sort?

LYNN: Not exactly that. More that there are things you could like for a short time, so why not enjoy them on that basis.

JWW: The interesting thing is that so many men have this attitude toward sex. They want brief hit-and-run affairs with no strings attached.

LYNN: Especially married men.

JWW: Yes, of course.

LYNN: But they can’t understand it when they meet a girl with the same attitude. They absolutely can’t...

Well, here’s an example. A very open, very friendly guy. Late thirties, divorced, his wife is married to somebody else, he misses his kids but not so that he can’t stand it, a very steady heads-up guy. A marketing man with a big manufacturer. Lots of money and status and all of those good things. I had him on a New York-L.A. non-stop and he was very friendly and we hit it off and he asked if he could buy me dinner. Well, fine, why not?

We wound up doubling up with another girl who was dating an advertising guy. We had dinner with them at an intimate French restaurant in Hollywood and then the four of us went to a jazz club. Lots of drinks and bright conversation, plenty of laughs.

We split from the other couple after we left the jazz club. We had done a little hand-holding in the club, none of the knee-grabbing nonsense but enough closeness so that each of us knew that the other one was alive. In the car he kissed me. I’ve always felt that a kiss is a question, and I did like him and he was a nice guy, and I had a feeling for him.

JWW: How do you mean?

LYNN: Not an irresistible hunger. A nice warm feeling. He turned me on in a comfy way. Anyway, I responded to the kiss in a way that answered the question for him, and we went to his hotel and had a couple more drinks and went to bed.

It was good. We... I really hate to talk about it. Doing it is one thing, but I hate post-mortems on lovemaking. Who did what and how and where and what it felt like, I hate talk like that. Some of the girls like that more than the sex itself, I think. They come home and talk your head off. I don’t like to.

JWW: All right.

LYNN: But without getting photographic about it, we had what was a fairly trippy time. I love to get sort of high on sex and just let my body do what it wants to do. When it’s right you turn your mind off completely and just go with your body, and it happened to be right that night and it was kind of super.

It is a lot of the time for me.

But the point is that in the morning he was acting odd. Strange, weird. He wanted to make a date to see me again, he wanted to explain how he would be busy for a while, he — I can’t explain exactly, but his attitude was odd.

At first I thought it was that he had fallen in love with me, which happens once in a while, but that wasn’t it. And then I got it. He was trying to set me down easy because he was afraid I was in love with him. I told him right out, “Look, don’t be silly about this, you don’t have to play games with me. I’m a big girl and I’m not in love with you and thank you for a lovely evening and a good time was had by all. And no strings.”

And he said, “But how could you, you know, do all those things and enjoy it so much without loving me?”

I asked him if he loved me. No, he said. He liked me, he respected me—

But he didn’t love me, right? He agreed he didn’t.

“Well, we were both in that bed,” I said, “and neither of us was tied or drugged, and if you could do it without being in love what makes you think I couldn’t?”

He said, “Women are different.”

JWW: The double standard.

LYNN: I know, but isn’t this too much? I’ve been through the same general situation before, John, but not with it all spelled out. I think, well, to be very frank about it, I think he figured I had to be in love with him because I went down on him. You know, orally?

JWW: Uh.

LYNN: Which I suppose is a very loving act and I suppose I felt something for him at the moment, but the idea that just because I would do that and dig it I would expect him to marry me or some such crap...

Anyway, with this man I made a point of letting him know I wasn’t in love with him because I thought he was really unhappy about it and I wanted to put his mind to rest. Well, all this accomplished was to make him very anxious never to set his eyes on me again.

JWW: Really?

LYNN: Oh, absolutely. He thought I was terrible. Maybe — this is just guessing, but maybe he felt I wasn’t a real conquest, see, because he had seduced me into bed but not into love. Maybe I was playing some very special role in a private drama of his in which he was getting even with his wife for leaving him by taking advantage of me. You probably understand more about how that sort of thing works than I do.

JWW: It could be almost anything.

LYNN: Or he felt I wasn’t feminine. Or that I was cheap. I hate that attitude.

JWW: Being regarded as cheap?

LYNN: Not just that. If people want to think a girl is cheap because she does what she wants when she wants to, then that’s their problem and God help them. I don’t even like the word, to tell you the truth. I think it’s a very stupid expression.

A girl, a stew, will explain that she doesn’t like to ball too many different men because it makes her feel cheap. A girl shouldn’t give herself cheaply — that’s a phrase you hear all the time. Well, what’s the opposite of giving yourself cheaply? Giving yourself expensively, I suppose. You know the old joke — we’ve established what you are, now we have to settle an a price? Cheaply or expensively, if you think of it in those terms you’re a whore.

But what really bothers me is when a girl — not necessarily a stewardess, but any independent girl — when she is just what a man wants her to be and this disappoints him. A guy picks up a stew and prays he’ll be able to take her to bed, and when she goes to bed with him he’s disgusted. Or this marketing guy who was really concerned that I might have fallen in love with him and then despised me because I hadn’t.

I don’t usually brood about it like this. Thinking back got me going on the subject. I generally have other things to think about. And I know that when a man does act like that it’s a reflection of the fact that he has sexual hang-ups of his own.

JWW: And you?

LYNN: Pardon?

JWW: Do you have sexual hang-ups of your own?

LYNN: I have a fetish for writers who ask personal questions.

JWW: No, seriously. Do you ever get to feel, oh, cheap? Immoral?

LYNN: Oh, shit. You too, John?

JWW: No, I never make judgments. I’m asking. To put it this way, you’ve come a long way from the middle of Illinois. Instead of marrying the veterinarian you’ve gone off on your own and had a sex life that would stand Illinois on its ear.

LYNN: Oh, not quite that, I don’t think.

JWW: Really?

LYNN: Maybe you’re right. Not in terms of how often but of how many men. If a wife had intercourse with her husband once a week that would be a low level of sex, wouldn’t it?

JWW: I think it would probably be on the low side statistically, at least in the early years of marriage.

LYNN: Well, you certainly wouldn’t call her a sex pot, at any rate. But if a girl had relations once a week, with a different man each time, but still just once a week, that would mean she would be sleeping with fifty men a year, and I guess that would knock their hats off in Illinois, wouldn’t it? Hell... let’s talk about something else.

JWW: All right.

LYNN: Not really. Do I ever feel immoral? No, I honestly cannot say that I do. I just can’t think of myself as a tramp and I don’t feel that men take advantage of me and I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong in living as I do because no one gets hurt by it. Not even if I have relations with a married man. What a horrible expression that is! Not even if I date a married man, let’s say. It would bother me if a man left his wife because of me, or if I seduced him into cheating. But that never happens. No, I don’t feel immoral.

JWW: Your sex life would have been something very different if you hadn’t become a stewardess, wouldn’t it?

LYNN: That’s pretty obvious. I would have married the guy, or some other guy. And I would have missed out on everything.

JWW: Would you have cheated on your husband, do you think?

LYNN: How do I know? If I married someone like the boy I went steady with, and if I stayed in my home town, very likely not, I suppose. But I suppose I would have wanted to, wouldn’t I? I’m sure I would have spent a lot of time thinking about what I was missing and sex with other men would have been one of those or a part of them, anyway. But I don’t think I would have done anything about it. Of course you can never be sure about something like that. People never know who they’ll meet or what will happen with them. When I think of all the girls I know who become stews and swear they’ll be true to their old boyfriends — either they want to save up for the wedding or the boy is doing two years in the army and they want to spend the time doing something interesting. Of course some of them know all along that they want adventure and romance and meeting men, but others honestly think they’ll be true to old Stanley Steady back home, and the next thing you know they’re burning up the skies and balling anybody who asks. I’m exaggerating, but you know what I mean.

JWW: Have you had many proposals of marriage?

LYNN: Not many. A few. There have been guys I’ve hit it off very well with, and there would be the feeling passing between us that they might propose if they thought I was really interested, but I never have been so I always changed the mood.

JWW: Do you think you’ll be interested someday?

LYNN: When the right one comes along. Oh—

JWW: What?

LYNN: I don’t know... just that I guess maybe that’s something that does bother me, sort of. The idea that maybe I never will meet the right guy at the right time. That I’ll be too hipped on some party or some fun thing that I’ll never quite get around to marrying someone.

JWW: You want to be married.

LYNN: Eventually, yes. I still haven’t stopped loving everything about my job — well, almost everything — but I know that it’s not the kind of work a girl could do forever, even if the airlines would let you stay as long as you wanted. It’s not a career that grows, see. It doesn’t go anywhere. I think every woman really wants to be married and have children. That’s a terrible cliché, I know, but I really believe it’s true. I think biologically that’s what we’re all here for and if we don’t get with it sooner or later we’ll feel empty. My God, listen to the girl go on and on!

But I’m afraid of it, of getting stifled I suppose that’s why it has to keep on being fun and new men and fresh places, and why I find something else to talk about when a man starts getting a long-range look in his eye. I want it but I’m afraid of it. I suppose that’s what you call a hang-up, isn’t it?

JWW: At your age, it’s probably a good defense mechanism.

LYNN: Something I’ll outgrow when the time comes? That’s what I think, too. And in the meantime fun is better than misery and going places is better than staying home, right?

JWW: No doubt about it. When the right time and the right man comes, do you think you’ll miss all this?

LYNN: Miss all the fun? I hope not. That’s not my idea of the best kind of marriage for me, anyway. I’m sure that the man I’ll eventually marry will be a passenger, the kind of man I enjoy dating now. Maybe more serious and deeper, because he would have to be someone I could enjoy not for a night or a week but on a steady basis. But he would be a part of my kind of world.

As far as the sex goes, missing the variety and all, I don’t honestly think I’m hung up on sex. For me it’s a part of life and not something all by itself. This may be a minority opinion, but I consider myself a pretty healthy and sensible girl where sex is concerned.

JWW: I’ll go along with that.

LYNN: As the actress said to the bishop. Oh, I just thought of something. If I’d married the veterinarian I said I might never cheat on him but I was sure I would want to. Well, I have a theory that for some girls, and I think I’m one of them, the fast pace and freedom of being a stew is a way to get a whole lot of things out of your system. I think this is true for girls who go really wild. And I do mean wild, John. I may fit that category by my home town’s standards, but now I’m talking about girls who go for threesomes and orgies and all kinds of really kinky scenes, and I think it may be good for them in the same way.

JWW: You think girls have wild oats, too?

LYNN: I know they do. I think it must have always been so, but especially nowadays when women know that sex is something they can get a kick out of, too.

JWW: So if you were to marry now—

LYNN: Uh-huh. Not right now, not now now, but when the time comes, I think I would be a lot less likely to get itchy feet. Oh, it would happen probably if something was wrong with the marriage, but that’s something else. I know from what passengers and other girls have told me that a lot of men with good marriages start cheating, and they seem to be the ones who married early and didn’t have much sex beforehand. So they had this wild picture in their mind of the special thrills they could get by playing around, and they had to try it even if their marriage was working out fine for them...

Oh, I don’t know. But I do think I’d be much less likely to screw up a marriage after a few years in the air than if I hadn’t had this experience.

JWW: Well, having a variety of premarital experience isn’t exactly the same as being a stewardess, even if the two occasionally overlap. Couldn’t you have played around in the same way without getting your wings?

LYNN: No.

JWW: Some girls do.

LYNN: Plenty of girls do, and even in little towns in Illinois. And those girls are called tramps. People talk about them, people have no respect for them, and the girls themselves can’t maintain any respect for themselves. The town I grew up in may not expect a girl to be a virgin but it can’t tolerate a girl who takes sex casually. You have to be very serious about it.

I personally don’t want to go back where I came from, back to that particular world. But the point is that I could if I wanted to. I’ve led what the people back home would think of as a pretty wicked life these last couple of years, I guess, but the point is that they don’t know about it. I didn’t do it back home, you see. And a lot of the girls I know do want to go back home eventually, and some of them will, and they’ll be able to do it because they sowed their wild oats with strangers and pilots all over the country instead of messing up their own backyard. You don’t want wild oats in your own backyard.