Natasha Vargas-Cooper revisits Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying four decades after its publication:
[The] myopia of privilege and puerile rebellion afflicts the character of Isadora and her epic quest for the “zipless fuck,” the now duly canonized term for no-strings-attached sex—a notion that also belongs to another era, when sexual liberation had not yet uncoupled itself from aesthetics. “The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motive. 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.” But after this idealized litany of its effortless virtues, Isadora concedes that a zipless fuck “is rarer than a unicorn.”
No shit. That’s mainly because the idea that nobody has anything to prove in a zipless fuck simply isn’t true.
Indeed, the female partner is trying to prove a very specific point: that she can fuck just like a man, without the specters of rape, murder, pregnancy, or abortion lurking somewhere in her brain. The quite ideological point of the encounter is, in other words, to unburden herself from all the hang-ups that are so specific to the female experience in the sexual arena.
Meanwhile (and far more predictably), the male partner is trying to showcase his own sexual prowess; otherwise, why bother? Sex with strangers, sex without intimacy, once the first rush of new smells and hands wears off, is not an uplifting experience. It usually leaves a residue of shame and horror—that’s partly what makes it so thrilling at the time.
So for today’s readers of Jong’s novel, Isadora’s “problem” might well be restated as something like this: Why should a woman go through such emotional acrobatics to prove such a minimal and depressing point? That she can fuck like a man? That her orgasm, if she has one, is free from emotional attachment? Great! Now, darling, tell us how your orgasm will close the wage gap between men and women. The orgasmic economy of the ’70s is null in 2013. Jong recognizes that there’s a war between men and women, but she chooses the wrong weapon in the struggle.
The Dish 