Fear of Flying at 50: Erotic fiction then and now

Erica Jong's 1973 book was funny, opinionated and honest about lust, taking desire into the mainstream, no longer a raunchy Vs respectable debate.

Now that Fear of Flying is 50 years old, one wonders if Erica Jong’s 1973 bestseller would impassion us today as it did then. Caught between the ban of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928 and the explicit blogging that took the ‘forbidden’ tag off every fruit, Erica’s debut novel spilled into a ripe world. With porn so omnipresent and steamy writing flowing into the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, timing was everything for Fear of Flying.

Sex has made its way out of the boudoir into memoirs, interviews, tapes and books. Englishman Edmund Curll (1675–1747) published many of the Merryland books, a genre of erotic fiction. Writers Automedon, Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Martial and Juvenal, Philodemus, Marcus Argentarius, and Priapeia blushed up the Hellenistic and Roman times. It was only in the Middle Ages that erotic fiction as a genre began to undulate. The printing press was invented in the 15th century and R-rated literature wasn’t far behind.

Kamasutra set 1883 on fire, with its graphic instructions on positions. Sexual repression in the Victorian and the Edwardian eras saw many a corset unlaced in print. Pauline Réage wrote the Histoire d’O (Story of O) and Anaïs Nin gave desire a literary finish. Girl With a One-Track Mind by Abby Lee and content that directly address the reader added a saucy note to the 20th century. What they did was combine foreplay with feminism; sex went beyond the act to an attitude.

More recently Candace Bushnell gave us Samantha Jones in Sex and the City, who got to mention ‘Lawrence of my labia’. Heroines who signal the arrival of the confident, sassy woman about town, for whom sexual freedom is just one of the freedoms. Erica’s debut book – she did write two sequels – sets the tone from the first chapter: the story was going to be about many things, but mainly it was going to be candid. Polyamorous was still a twinkle in the monogamous eye then. To quote from the Fear of Flying: ‘I was not against marriage. I believed in it in fact. It was necessary to have one best friend in a hostile world, one person you’d be loyal to no matter what, one person who’d always be loyal to you. But what about all those other longings which after a while marriage did nothing much to appease? The restlessness, the hunger, the thump in the gut, the thump in the…’ Erica kindly filled in all the blanks in an era when even the blanks were kinky.

Thanks to Erica, the days of impatiently thumbing through a Harold Robbins or Wilbur Smith to locate the dirty parts were over. Her book was funny, opinionated and honest about lust, taking desire into the mainstream, no longer a raunchy Vs. respectable debate. The sexual revolution by women shook up a patriarchal readership too prone to lazy one-sided characterisations.

Happy golden birthday then to a book that reminds women of a certain generation where they were and what they were doing when they began to read it.