Voices: Have Women Overcome 'Fear of Flying'?

It’s been 36 years since Erica Jong’s groundbreaking Fear of Flying flew off the shelves and into the limelight as a book that would change not just literature, but the lives of women.

Reading it now, it’s easy to appreciate it as a great read, but harder to see it in its original, revolutionary context. After all, what is so groundbreaking about a woman wanting (and having) sex? Or wanting (and gaining) success? We have a decade of "Sex and the City" under our belts and the lyrics of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” ringing in our ears.

Could it be that in this era of the Jezebel woman, who is smart and a bit cynical and doesn’t feel a wit of guilt about jumping from bed to bed, or about not jumping from bed to bed, that we’ve outgrown Isadora Wing, FOF’s heroin? Or do Isadora’s fantasies and struggles and “Zipless Fucks” have as much relevance today as in 1973?

The plot of the novel is little more than a series of episodes in Isadora’s life. It begins with her flying over the Atlantic to a psychiatrists’ conference in Geneva with her shrink husband, stricken by the fear of flying. Upon arriving, she meets what she thinks will be her Zipless Fuck—the ultimate fantasy, the “platonic ideal” of a sexual affair, in which “zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff.”

After a period of wrenching indecision, Isadora decides to take off with the ZF, a crass and narcissistic Brit named Adrian Lovegood, on an aimless road trip around Europe. She has no idea whether she will return to her strong, silent, and stone-cold husband Bennett.

The irony is that Adrian is terrible in bed. In fact, he is impotent most of the time. Clearly Isadora is not sure what she is really seeking, and if she is looking in the right places to find it.

It’s the kind of novel that any woman can read and proclaim “story of my life!” out loud at any number of points. Maybe we haven’t all married a psychopath—as Isadora does, fresh out of college, before getting hitched to Bennett as a kind of antidote—but haven’t we all sometimes wondered if we really want to marry and have children, and then felt guilty for wondering? Or hungered for success, and then cowered in its face? Or felt uncomfortable and painfully aware of being a woman alone?

The real achievement of the book is that it is the candid voice of a woman in all her complexity, honored in a way that it had not been previously. It is not a novel written by a woman about women’s things; the narrative middleman has been cut out. It’s nothing but the screaming, musing, crying voice of a woman—and a smart one— for 400-plus pages.

These are not just moments in the life of a fictional character or an author, but in the lives of all women, before 1973 and up to today. In writing such a text, Jong asserted that these moments deserve attention.

But the buck stops there. Fear of Flying may have started the trend of recognizing and validating the desires and struggles of women—we want sex! But also marriage! But also success! But maybe not!—but women still desire, still struggle. Not simply because they are of a certain gender, but also because they are individuals.

I read this text differently today than I would have as a young woman in 1973. I am not shocked by the easy, flippant use of the words “fuck”, “prick”, and “cunt”. I do not hear the repressed voice of womanhood, but rather that of a person and a writer, coming to her own and figuring out who she is and wishes to be. That is a struggle that will never be resolved in a feminist blog, in a pop song, or on a TV show. In this way, Fear of Flying will never be irrelevant.

--Allison Geller