But this week, Charlotte Allen pushes the boundaries of incredulity by blaming feminism for bad service on airlines. I kid you not. In the anti-feminist world, there are only two kinds of women–you are either ugly, bitter and mean or young, pretty and compliant. In this tweaked view of reality, therefore, by preventing the airlines from imposing age and beauty standards on their flight attendants, you have reduced the level of service.
You may think this paragraph reeks of spoiled tantrum-throwing, but you should have seen the first draft. Thank god her editors gently reminded her that for now it’s not allowed for conservatives to carry on about having to rub shoulders in public with most “undesirables”, except of course that it’s always permissible to pick on women you see in public you suspect are making sexual choices besides getting married as a 19-year-old virgin.
At first, I thought she must be using the word “chivalrous” ironically, but upon re-reading this, I see that she is not. Well, at least for once an admirer of old-fashioned chivalry knows that the reality of chivalry is that while one makes a great fake show of respecting women in your class, you are free to treat women of lower classes like the dirt you think they are.
“In recent years, my flights to the Middle East have begun with a little US Airways twin-prop down to Boston or New York — no ’cabin service’ at all; they don’t have any on their bigger planes either, but at least on the twin-props there’s no hatchet-faced ’flight attendant’ in shiny stretch pants and flat shoes shuffling along the aisle doling out mini-bags of mini-pretzels to remind you of all the ’cabin service’ you’re not getting.”
Translation: For the price of this ticket, the cabin service should include a hummer from a nubile fashion model.
Anything less than having women pretend to swoon over at your leering sexist pig self for fear of losing their livelihoods is simply unacceptable.
He’s not sexist because he wants men as well as women to cater to his every whim and fantasy. But this is still the fault of feminism. Feminists made gay men refuse to look spiffy for Mark Steyn’s amusement when he’s stuck on an airplane.
Back to Charlotte:
Spoken like someone who’s never even been close to traveling by bus. But otherwise, it’s an airtight argument–airlines have to hire their service personnel based on their ability to do the job and not their generic fuckability as determined by some airline executive and therefore the service has gone down. As long as you assume the service is fuckability.
Spoken like a person who’s never actually had to compete for a waitress’s or stewardess’s attention when she’s fawning over some guy at another table that she thinks is hot. For the record, this goes both ways–I’ve also had the distinct displeasure of trying to get a male waiter to bring the ticket for my table when he clearly preferred to spend his time waiting on all-female tables instead of my mixed-sex one.
But then again, for all we know, Allen’s husband was able to get stewardesses to fawn over him back in the day as if he was god’s gift to women. And I totally believe she loved that. No, really. Why wouldn’t she?
Indeed. I’ll take the non-surliness of an anti-feminist griping about airline service any day. Could anything be more cute and charming?
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I least they’re completely transparent. I suppose the reason airline food has gotten so much worse than when I was a kid flying in the 70s is because those women robots refuse to make it.
I was going to say: well, what about international flights? I’ve flown to the UK a number of times and last I checked, this was a country whose feminist advancement was, if anything, equivalent to ours. Same thing with flying various Canadian airlines. Service is fine. I never really noticed whether the waiters/waitresses in the sky were hot, but, then again, I wasn’t looking to get laid. I was just looking to land safely.
But it seems the service I get internationally — even when I had to fly El-Al (complimentary prayer when you take off!) — is always better than the US. Now, maybe it’d be different if I were flying in Russia ….
But then the dude you quote pops out with his notion that a Brit accent — of whatever sort (not like he can tell them apart) — = some shitty movie he once saw …. He could have invoked Our Man Flint or maybe even Casino Royale instead, but I suppose he’s the kind of guy who likes the Bananarama version of “Venus” better than the version by Shocking Blue: a totally sheltered square. What a fucking dork. He reminds me of this guy I went to high school with who got a crush on the Australian exchange student (and, no, this really happened: I’m not mixing up the movie version of Grease with my real life, again) and whenever he saw her he’d start jabbering in an ‘Australian’ accent.
yeah, I’m sure that Charlotte Allen would willingly drop an extra 50 bucks for every flight if she knew the flight attendants were a pack of Stepford young’uns.
Since she seems to think airlines should try to compete using the fuckability of airstaff. and they should get more than just tiny bags of pretzels for air food.
that shit costs money. lots of money. for stuff no one cares about enough to pay money on.
of course, if she really wants cute airstaff, wait about 50 years, and the entire service sector will be replaced with robots. then, every flight attendant will be exactly the same. same face, same hair, same uniform (which can be uncomfortable and impractical for standing for hours at a time because hey, robots.)
I know I find nothing cuter than the precise uniformity of mass market consumer goods. which is what she wants, really.
I haven’t had any bad experiences with flight attendants on U.S. flights, actually. I’ve had terrible experiences with people on the ground, but the flight attendants have been nothing but lovely. And I’d chalk some of the rudeness on the ground up to the fact that I’ve flown United. I’d be surly, too, if the company was raiding my pension to cover their losses.
Why does feminism have to mean the triumph of the ugly and the surly?
Well, she’s figured us out.
Oh Amanda… I blogged about this too.
Want to see a pic of Charlotte Allen?
http://redneckfeminist.blogspot.com/2005/07/flabby-chins-are-sexy.html
Okay, okay. No other feminist would stoop as low as I have. But admit it, y’all, it’s funny!
Only last night, I was at the home of an alleged feminist, who–after ranting about some injustice or other toward women–told me something about a “stewardess.” It is to be expected that saying “er, ‘flight attendant’” is used to bash the profession. Whenever we change the name of something because it is offensive (referring to them as sky-high “waitresses”) and inappropriate (many of them are men), the more enlightened term is used against the people who request it.
Except people seem to be fine with “handicapped” or “disabled” instead of “crippled,” and they seem to be fine with “black” or “African American” instead of “negro.” They’re even starting to accept “native American.” But girlie terms stay in the lexicon forever.
Airline service isn’t bad because of the flight attendants, who I think do a fairly good job most of the time. It is bad because the airlines have no money. If the flight attendants were suddenly all men, passengers would decide that they were all gay and complain that that is what is wrong with the airlines. If the flight attendants were suddenly all robots, people would complain that the experience was “dehumanized.”
Missing the old days when the “stewardesses” were cute and sexy not only presumes that the job of flight attendants is to faun over and pleasure men; it presumes that females have no business being passengers, either. Or if they are, they certainly have no business having any sexual desires.
I say it every week; I’ll say it again. With regard to women, very little changes.
Penelope:
hahahaha! Fuck! hahahahaha!
I’ve been racking my brain for, oh, two minutes, trying to think of what that yellow fruit is that comes wrapped in some kind of foam padding, like a sock, with its wee little head poking out.
That’s what she looks like. Except one that’s past its prime.
Damn!
Has someone sent this on to tbogg? This is more his speed than pandagon’s…
Also, I don’t believe feminists have ever fought for the rights of rude workers. Not that I believe Allen’s story that they were actually rude. But what, exactly, is the relationship between rudeness and attractiveness? She offers no evidence that a prettier flight attendant would necessarily be friendlier.
If you check the latest ‘mailbag’ post on the IWF Inkwell, you’ll see that someone wrote in telling her to fly the Hooters Airways. But, according to her response, Ms. Allen is not comfortable enough with women who are THAT sexual. The women must know their place, after all.
Geez, and I thought that the reason service on airlines has declined was because the airlines are trying to save money. Silly me.
Airline service isn’t bad because of the flight attendants, who I think do a fairly good job most of the time. It is bad because the airlines have no money.
Ok, see, I think this is the subtext. The airline industry is in trouble, and they’re trying to deal with that trouble by squeezing their employees: not just flight attendants, but baggage handlers and pilots and everyone. And the unions aren’t very happy about that. I think that, in expressing nostalgia for a time when flight attendants were sweet middle-class girls on a lark before they got married, they are expressing nostalgia for a time when labor was supposedly sweet and compliant and docile. After all, if you’re just working for a couple of years to see the world before you settle down, you’re not all that likely to join a union. I think in this instance, uppity middle-aged feminist harridans are stand-ins for unionized workers who don’t know their place.
I don’t usually analyse things this way, because I try to be the kind of guy who can hold two concepts in my mind simultaneously while walking and chewing gum, but… these egregious essays seem to be about feminism only by convenience. It’s pretty clear that this is a class-based complaint about the quality of the service provided by one’s social inferiors, but since we won’t be to the point where pundits feel completely comfortable expressing a Louis XIV POV until somewhere around October 2005, the screed gets dressed up as a screed against feminism instead. It’s already PC to bash feminists.
Of course all those Prime Causes are intermingled like threads in a ball of yarn. The above is necessarily a gross oversimplification. But that “travel by bus” comment is pretty tellling. Why indeed would one use bus travel as a derogatory comparison if not in order to bash the poor?
I’m poor and cheap, so when I travel domestically I usually end up on NorthWest or Continental because they are usually the cheapest. With the smallest planes, and the worst food, and the worst movies. Because they are the c.h.e.a.p.e.s.t.
Now, if I can afford a ticket, then you’d best believe that Continental is *the* airline for cheap businesses trips and cut-rate vacations for the clueless. If the stewardesses are less than bubbly at all times, it might be because cleavage and lipstick are not effective weapons for crowd control. And god knows how many flights they were on that day…and if they;ve had a meal better than airline food in the last x hour…and about a thousand other reasons that makes this woman’s ‘I want Saks-Fifth-Avenue-service-at-WalMart-prices” sense of entitlment as nauseating as it is amusing.
Right, yeah, it’s obviously a “why is the help so bad these days” argument.
But ARE airlines losing money? Are they really cutting costs to SAVE money? I know that’s the public perception, but it could be that they’re cutting customer service to make the CEOs and stockholders richer.
Oh capitalism! Always bringing us the best in life…
Being a flight attendant is a horrible job. And therefore, the longer a FA has been on the job, the more miserable and customer-hating he or she is. Since older people are less attractive than younger people, there is a connection between attractiveness and customer service.
And to the extent that feminism has increased the amount of time a woman remains in the work force and opened the FA profession to men, it has lead to longer career lengths for FA. So I suppose you could say that feminism has had some role in making flying less enjoyable.
Penelope, don’t think I wasn’t tempted.
Slobber here is a perfect example of sexist thinking about women–younger is better because women go sour with time, like milk, apparently.
Good observation, Chris. I’ve noticed that about 70% of anti-feminist writing coming from the appointed women is actually veiled bashing of other women for being less well-off than they are. Witness the way Planned Parenthood is a magnet for anti-choice thought, a hat tip to the fact that the wealthy will always have access to abortion and birth control even as they take those rights from the rest of us.
Sorry Slobberbone, that’s a cop out.
People who are unhappy with their service are free to write or call the airline with their complaints. Blaming feminism is just another way to pass the buck.
Sally,
I think you hit it dead on.
Really, Slobberbone? All older people are less attractive than all younger people? All 35-year-old women are less atttractive than all 28-year-old women?
As for customer-hating, that depends on how you feel about your job. When I was waitressing, there were plenty of women older than me (and more or less attractive than me) who loved it and were great at it and had been doing it for years. On the other hand, after 4 months I hated every human being that walked through our doors. Old, young, black, white, couples, families, business travelers, vacationers, men, women…as far as I was concerned, everyone needed to die so that I could go home.
So do want to be served by the nubile 22-year-old who hates you or the older, less attrative waitress who knows a thing or two about faking some amount of concern for you?
No actually, Slobberbone, it is the fault of abortion opponents. If it weren’t for their ideas, then more women would have abortions. So those flight attendants would have never been born in the first place, and would therefore not be rude.
I mean, if you want to use that kind of ‘logic’…
Hey look! Isn’t this timely: United’s flight attendants are threatening to strike.
I actually suspect that young flight attendants are more likely to be pissed off than older ones. Schedules are assigned according to seniority: new flight attendants get the really brutal shifts. If they can stick it out, things get easier.
I love the “truth” that as you age (if you’re female) you grow uglier by definition. I think I’m better looking now than I was as a teenager–not awkward, no baby fat, know how to dress better, no acne.
“And to the extent that feminism has increased the amount of time a woman remains in the work force…”
Yep. Because feminists have made it illegal to be a housewife.
Oh wait…
Why does feminism have to mean the triumph of the ugly and the surly?
How typical. Here we feminists help her triumph, and she wants to pull up the ladder behind her so that other ugly, surly women cannot succeed as she has.
Funny. I had great service on my trip to China from the mostly fiftyish women on the flight staff, and terrible service on other flights from hot young women. I’ve also had great service from hot young women and horrible service from fiftiesh women.
Could it be that she’s simply clueless?
Could IWF be any dumber? Air travel is unpleasant because of deregulation. The marketplace spoke, and people overwhelmingly want crowded, austere, and cheap, rather than luxurious and expensive.
The unprecedented affordability of air travel is one of the few things that the Reaganites ought to be proud of; this column really takes cluelessness to the next level.
Could IWF be any dumber? Air travel is unpleasant because of deregulation. The marketplace spoke, and people overwhelmingly want crowded, austere, and cheap, rather than luxurious and expensive.
But Reagan was the perfect man and the perfect president! All of his decisions were right and good! He ended Communism! Communism, damn it!
Therefore, it must be the fault of feminists.
Could IWF be any dumber?
You realize they’re going to take that as a challenge.
Isn’t the biggest difference between US air travel and other countries’ air travel that theirs is government-supported? Do the conservatives really want to go down this road?
Given that morale in most US airlines is somewhere near that of the Somme trenches in 1916, I can understand why the overstretched staff aren’t so chipper all the time. Duh.
As for Mr Shit Steyn: sorry, the Virgin Atlantic attendants — who, I have to agree, are wonderful because they’re encouraged to let their hair down — aren’t going to blow you.
One thing I liked about flying with American a few years ago was that they didn’t discriminate against employing older attendants, especially on transatlantic flights. You could pretty much tell that some of them had been doing it for decades, knew their stuff, and actually didn’t despise the job.
wait about 50 years, and the entire service sector will be replaced with robots.
Wait about two years, and you’ll be serving yourself after signing a liability release.
“Being a flight attendant is a horrible job. And therefore, the longer a FA has been on the job, the more miserable and customer-hating he or she is. Since older people are less attractive than younger people, there is a connection between attractiveness and customer service.”
Oh, the heaping baloney. My experience is that the oldsters are a) still there because they like it and b) actually know what they’re doing, hence don’t have to be surly nearly as often.
Of course, if your idea of surly is someone who won’t smile at you when you try to cop a feel…
Mark Steyn lives in New Hampshire. If you’re complaining that the the 30 minute puddle-jumper flight to Boston or the commuter flight to New York does not provide the pinnacle of luxury food-and-beverage service, you are a 1st-class whiner.
This sort of short-length commuter service is just “greyhound in the sky.” If it were anything else, then you’d be wasting your money and wasting everyone else’s time. I suspect that Mark Steyn remembers flying in an earlier generation and laments that it is no longer regarded as a “luxury experience” and is now just as plebian as walking down to the corner store.
Obviously, transatlantic flights are longer and the planes are larger, so it is both necessary and more cost-effective to provide service amenities when you’re in the air for that long.
As even these soi-disant “Independent Women” should know, flight attendants’ primary job is not looking cute or smilingly taking abuse from the likes of Ms. Allen. Their main responsibility is seeing that the FAA laws and safety regulations are followed.
Incidently–why on earth does a presumably straight female like Allen care whether the FAs are hot-looking or not? I’m guessing it has to do with a recognition that any women who take their jobs seriously or have better things to think about than whether total strangers want to jump them, probably don’t share the rest of Allen’s snippy value system either.
I wonder if SlobberboneRIP was just trying to play devil’s advocate?
I suspect that Mark Steyn remembers flying in an earlier generation and laments that it is no longer regarded as a “luxury experience” and is now just as plebian as walking down to the corner store.
And again we get into the class thing. Now, they’ll let anyone fly!
Judging from her picture, she’d make the perfect FA she described.
So, woman facing away from the attendant, who was facing away from her. Add in some engine noise. Are we shocked that the attendant didn’t hear someone “beggingâ€ÂÂ? for a glass of water? Basic acoustics should dictate that we are not. But then, basic physical reality generally seems to escape conservatives…
Oh, the heaping baloney. My experience is that the oldsters are a) still there because they like it and b) actually know what they’re doing, hence don’t have to be surly nearly as often.
Well, we have been on different flights then. The old ones have always been more surly to me. Then again, FAs are safety officers first. When I’m on a flight and need a defrib, I am better off with an experienced older FA. But FFS, would it hurt them to smile a little?
Of course, if your idea of surly is someone who won’t smile at you when you try to cop a feel…
What is with the personal attacks on this blog? My idea of surly is someone who won’t smile at me, period.
Hey, physical reality is nothing you can’t ignore! In addition to the creationists and their fellow travelers, the Right also has folks who don’t believe in relativity, quantum mechanics and the Big Bang. Actually, many of the creationists don’t either, but then again some of them use the Big Bang as evidence for God. It’s all a bit confusing.
mwg, take a look at a book called The Final Theory–based entirely on the premise that if something is difficult to understand, it is clearly wrong. Included are such wonders: “gravity makes no sense because there is no known power source.”
given that Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty, isn’t Charlotte Allen inerently a wobbly chinned liar?
And why are these people expecting lowpayed service personnel to be submissive models who view the world as their dom? you want happier attendants? They get paid more and your ticket price goes up, you want happier attendants? You should maybe thing about losing the spoilt little attitude that they’re there entirely for your amusement and satisfying your tiniest little whim, that they have to be eye candy you can oggle as a sex object says way more about why they should be pissed off at you than anything else. They are women in a service role, they are not whores, they are not there for you to grope and fondle and hurl abuse out rather than do the Oh So complex task of waking your neighbour from their sleep when the cart comes around.
A few months ago, Matt Towery wrote TWO columns about how since the airlines were deregulated, people in tank tops and flip flops could afford to fly, and so did so for no real purpose, thus spreading their germs and creating delays and inconvenince for the people who paid full fare and so DESERVED to fly (you know, people like him). It was classism at its best. But at least he didn’t blame it all on feminism.
Here’s a link to the first of the two columns.
And an ongoing theme with Ann Coulter is that affluent blonde women (you know, people like her) shouldn’t be bothered with any airport security procedures. So, I think the basic problem conservatives have with airline travel is that it isn’t elitist enough.
My second thought about this column is: why the hell didn’t they press the flight attendant button and wait, oh, five minutes for a response instead of following the poor woman down the aisle yelling at her for not responding to a request she didn’t even hear?
Well, we have been on different flights then. The old ones have always been more surly to me.
I’ve noticed in many, many forums that men who continually deride women for the sin of aging then turn around and complain about older women not being nice to them. Makes one wonder if women, and I know this is hard to believe, respond badly to men who regard them as if they were looking at a piece of dog shit on the bottom of their shoes? Couldn’t be.
I particularly like the MRA-types who complain that older women aren’t fun to date because they won’t put up with a bunch of shit. Which of course, is tacitly admitting that they give women a lot of shit to put up with.
Complaining about the help is so 19th Century.
Amanda is right. If white-looking guys like me had to put up with the shit women go through for the sin of living and aging, plastic surgery would probably be goverment-subsidized. The French would be noted by some in not giving in to sexism and showing ‘older men’ who have flabby chests, big stomachs, three chins, etc. in their movies. American actors would migrate to England when they turn 40 if they didn’t want to go into the theater exclusively, take up teaching and/or directing, as the reign of King Victor demonstrated that male age can equal wisdom, stereotypes to the contrary in America.
I’d also be pissed off by all the women my age dating younger, better-looking guys, while I have to make do with the rare woman who’d be capable of looking past my few but increasingly common white hairs and wrinkles. Probably only someone raised by hippies would go out with me by then.
But FFS, would it hurt them to smile a little?
What’s this obsession with smiling? If they’re actually *rude*, that’s one thing, and you’ll be wanting to complain to the airline. But complaining that you didn’t get smiled at by a woman–well, I don’t have to tell you how that sounds.
Steyn’s up here? I wonder if I’ve ever run into him…it’s a small enough state, it’s entirely possible. Lessee, could he be the snotty guy who thought I should be impressed that he worked for some big finance company as I dealt with his order, or the jerk who got impatient when we were trying to find the book he wanted out back amid all the masses of stock and shelves - at Christmas - or just one of the guys who cuts me off in monster SUV (oblivious to the fact that doing so one of these days when it’s icy is going to roll him right off of 93-S…)
Or maybe he’s one of the passive aggressive faux-polite pseudo-chivalrous smarmy ones, who patronize “the help” and don’t realize that we think they’re lower than gum on the bottoms of shoes as they do so.
Oh, and Steyn should be grateful he’s up here *now* - I remember when the terminal was so small that to get to your plane for a regional shuttle flight, you had to go out a door and walk over the runway to climb a rollout-stepladder, instead of having a boarding tube. And that wasn’t all that long ago.
–Then again, I suppose it never occurs to him that his flight crew and staff might be stressed out for another reason - that they actually have a *legitimate* worry about terrorism, and not just the Boston connection - one of the killed 9/11 pilots came from the next town over where I used to work.
Ye gods, it must be nice to live in their insulated little bubble world… Idea for a bumper sticker: Why Yes, The World DOES Revolve Around Me - I’m A Republican!
I love the “truth” that as you age (if you’re female) you grow uglier by definition. I think I’m better looking now than I was as a teenager–not awkward, no baby fat, know how to dress better, no acne.
And if you keep at it long enough, you might end up as beautiful as Charlotte Rampling is today. In fact, I’m pretty sure all women who blog left and write well (Amanda Marcotte, Susie Madrak, Jeanne D’Arc, & c.) look like Charlotte Rampling, (but that’s just my fantasy). On the other hand, any woman who has been Republican Babe of the Week is probably headed here.
I wonder if Mr. Allen agrees with Ms. Allen, and intends to dump her for the Gingrich model trophy wife?
http://www.rochuswolff.de/weblog/linkdump/2005/07/#d06h00.04.09
Next week IWF blames feminism for global warming…
“I suppose he’s the kind of guy who likes the Bananarama version of ‘Venus’ better than the version by Shocking Blue: a totally sheltered square. What a fucking dork.”
What does that make me if I have no idea what you are talking about?