Fear of Flying (novel)  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Redirected from Fear of Flying)
Jump to: navigation, search

"There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul."--Fear of Flying (1973) by Erica Jong


"German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything."--Fear of Flying (1973) by Erica Jong


"The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one."--Fear of Flying (1973) by Erica Jong


"So how does Fear of Flying stand up as literature today? In my view, very well. Although she may not have known it, Jong was writing in a long tradition of American female novelists who used the semiautobiographical form of the Kunstlerroman (artist's novel) both to tell the story of their generation, and to redeem women's fiction from its demeaning associations with sentimentality, domesticity, and self-sacrifice. In novels from Mary Virginia Terhune's Alone (1853) and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855) to Mary Hunter Austin's A Woman of Genius (1912), Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915), and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), writers described the struggles of gifted women with their families, with their societies, and with themselves."-- Elaine Showalter via [1]

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Fear of Flying is a 1973 novel by Erica Jong, which became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality, and figured in the development of feminism.

The novel is narrated by its protagonist, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing, an unpublished poet. On a trip to Vienna with her second husband, Isadora decides to indulge her sexual fantasies with another man. The book resonated with women who felt stuck in unfulfilled marriages, and it has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide. Jong has denied that the novel is autobiographical, but admits that it has autobiographical elements.

Zipless fuck

In the novel, Jong coined the term "zipless fuck", which soon entered the popular lexicon. A "zipless fuck" is defined as a sexual encounter for its own sake, without emotional involvement or commitment, between two previously unacquainted persons.

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game . The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife . No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

Jong goes on to explain that it is "zipless" because "when you came together, zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. For the true ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never got to know the man very well."

The term has seen a resurgence in popularity as third-wave feminism authors and theorists continue to use it while reinterpreting their approach to sexuality.

Dutch translation=

"Het ritsloze nummer is volslagen puur. Er kleven geen bijbedoelingen aan. Er komt geen machtsstrijd aan te pas. De man 'neemt' niet en de vrouw 'geeft' niet. Geen van beiden probeert een echtgenoot te bedriegen of een vrouw te vernederen. Niemand probeert iets te bewijzen of iets van iemand gedaan te krijgen. Het ritsloze nummer is het puurste wat er bestaat. En zeldzamer dan een eenhoorn. En ik heb het nog nooit meegemaakt."




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Fear of Flying (novel)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools