Whatever happened to those gorgeous stewardesses?
Why did they wave bye-bye?
Used to be that one of the most noticeable aspects of the commercial flying experience was the really spectacular good looks of those uniformed young women who demonstrated the oxygen masks and exit routes, and performed such quaint and now virtually defunct offices as passing out meals and distributing assorted magazines in plastic binders. For the most part they wore uniforms far spiffier than today’s (always featuring, if memory serves, sheath skirts, fitted jackets, and perky little hats), and their jobs were looked upon as glamorous ones, whatever the reality may have been.
Glen Whitman, Megan McArdle, and Daniel Foster all take a turn at explaining why it’s come down to today’s far less pulchritudinous and friendly skies. Whitman thinks deregulation priced the hotties out of the flight attendant market, but McArdle points out (rightly, I believe) that it was unions and feminism:
Stewardesses used to be subject to all sorts of extremely strict rules: they couldn’t be married, couldn’t gain weight, couldn’t get pregnant, couldn’t be much over 30. If you fire everyone who violates those rules, then yes, you will select for a much “hotter” group of women than the current crop.
You could probably still get a large group of young, hot women to take a job that involves free flights all around the world. But those jobs are no longer open, because airlines stopped firing all the old, fat parents. Thanks to a combination of feminist shaming, union demands, and anti-discrimination laws. Moreover, once they no longer fired people over a certain age, union seniority rules immediately started selecting for older workers, in two ways: layoffs are usually last hired first fired, and older people have a lot of sunk costs in terms of pension accrual and seniority, so they’re less likely to leave. If you fly a major airline, you’ll notice very few stewardesses in their twenties.
This, like Whitmans’ explanation, is probably correct as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. McArdle is too young to remember flying way back when. But my first flight was as a child in 1960, and I do remember. And the stewardesses in those days were not just today’s attendants with all the older and fatter ones weeded out; they were, as a rule, far more lovely than the very youngest and slimmest among today’s crop.
It’s Foster who touches on some of the other factors that have changed since then, important parts of the picture:
I’d add another factor (one McArdle starts to get at) that is likewise probably interdependent on the other two: The labor market for young women has changed. Since the 60s heyday of Pan Am, women have vaulted past men in educational achievement at the same time that a variety of professions requiring college degrees have become more accessible to them. Thus many of the young, attractive women who might have opted for a career as a flight attendant now have more options available to them. Also, flying has become a decidedly more mundane ”” even dreary ”” affair in the last few decades, and thus is probably less appealing as a career than it would have been to a young woman in 1965, when the idea of the jet-set lifestyle was probably more alluring.
It’s apparent to anyone who remembers the olden days that not only have the stewardesses changed, but the flying public has changed as well. For example, whenever I used to fly, as a teenager and a young woman, I got all dressed up, pretty much like those stewardesses. No, I didn’t wear white gloves and a hat, but I always wore a dress, hose, and heels. And so did just about everybody else (or the masculine equivalent). Flying was special, very different from taking a Greyhound bus, and one dressed for the role.
In this drawing, take a look not only at the stewardess, but at those all-important passengers in the background (climbing that flight of stairs):
What’s more, the specialness extended to the experience itself. Planes were more often half-empty (or even less) rather than full to the brim. The methods airlines now use for making sure they don’t waste a trip and precious fuel by flying a plane that is less than heavily loaded with passengers were not as highly developed, and probably the profit margin per passenger was higher (the cost of a flight for the consumer was certainly higher in relative terms). I would guess that a stewardess’s job was a lot easier; if they served the customers with greater charm and a more dazzling smile it was probably because it was a lot more pleasant to do so.
What’s more, some of the perks must have seemed perkier. Nowadays it’s not that hard to do a great deal of traveling, if you get a lot of frequent-flier miles and points, and shop well to get the bargain seats. In the early 60s we ordinary folk couldn’t afford to do much traveling, and one of the great attractions of being a stewardess was the chance to do just that. Stewardesses joined the airlines to see the world; now there are a host of ways to accomplish the same feat.
[NOTE: For those looking for more photos of the olden days, a four-part illustrated series begins here. It’s a bit heavy with photos from the mini-skirted late 60s rather than the era I’m primarily talking about, but it’s full of eye candy for the guys and retro fashion for the ladies.
Here’s another look at flying back in the good-bad old days.]
They’re all on Emirates. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/business/emirates-airline-bets-on-glamour.html?_r=1
Oh, that was weird.
eye candy for the guys
One reason I have no complaints about the addition of male flight attendants to cabin crews is that many of them are definitely eye candy for the ladies.
One other reason is that flying has become a lot more of a chore. With TSA inspecting your every nook and cranny, the waits at security checkpoints, all the rules, it’s not fun anymore.
back in the day flying was a “special event”
my mom made us dress up in our suits and we were constantly reminded to be on our best behavior
going on the airplane was a privilege and the whole operation was classier
classier times/classier stewardesses/classier passengers
I don’t know anything about flying in the 50’s, 60’s or 70’s but I used to fly a fair amount in the eighties.
When I first started, I’d typically board an MD 80 that was about 30 percent full, and roar off into the sky with a bunch of other self-contained guys in suits.
After a while, a good looking woman would come up, place her hand on your shoulder, and ask what you wanted to drink or eat. The pilots all seemed to be solid citizens who you could respect.
By the time I stopped flying, it was in overloaded dingy sardine cans that seemed as if they’d never get up enough runway speed to lift off. Planes were crammed full of frustrated, apparently boundryless, and often angry and annoying people. Riding in a plane became about as pleasant as standing in line in a holiday rush post office while receiving a lecture by a diversity training expert.
Something similar seems to have happened in restaurants. A couple of associates and I walked into a middling bar and grill chain awhile back for a quick dinner and drinks.
I wasn’t expecting to be waited on by a young Elizabeth Shue, and none of us are in the habit of trying to chat up waitresses anyway.
But what we got, I didn’t expect even more. A 30 something fellow with a quizzical voice, saunters over to the table and announces with lots of gesticulation that he will be our server. Then as if he is emceeing an event in which he is the featured attraction, he inquires about drinks.
We order drinks. And, with our requests successfully in hand, he pirouettes, and mercifully disappears.
Unfortunately he returned with the menus.
Kneeling beside us he placed his fist on the table and his chin on his hand, and after smiling sweetly, began a comprehensive review the menu and its features.
I don’t remember reacting. And no one else must have either. It was like seeing something that politeness demands you pretend not to notice. But eventually after some period of bewildered silence on our part, he stopped, stood up and mumbled something about returning later.
After a decent interval, we signaled someone who seemed less theatrical; and making sure not to select anything he could get this thumb into, placed our orders with her.
The world is full of restaurants … and there’s always vending machines if it comes to that.
However many reasons there may be, whatever economic efficiencies rule, this much is certain — the women were beautiful, the experience was wonderful, there was a human grace and charm to it all.
Surely air travel as it is now is a manifestation of the end of a civilization. The phrase “back in the good old days” may be taken most times as absurdly untrue, hyperbole, or nostalgia. On those few occasions when it is patently true — well you don’t really want to be around then.
1. I’m not at all sure that, even in the 70s and perhaps later, the hotness trope was used as widely as it is today, movies like ‘Some Like It Hot’ notwithstanding. Adults were presumed to understand about sex without having it blabbed everywhere and plastered over every screen.
2. Being a stewardess was a good way to play the marriage market. Both genders got to see a lot of good catches. A male who flew, especially a regular flier, was likely to be prosperous and successful. A female who qualified as a stewardess was manifestly attractive and certified as competent. A bit like pre-screened speed dating?
One reason I have no complaints about the addition of male flight attendants to cabin crews is that many of them are definitely eye candy for the ladies.
I think in many cases you’re barking up the wrong tree there, Pat, unless hairdressers and interior decorators are also eye candy for the ladies. Remember that Patient Zero was a male flight attendant.
Remember that Air France flight that burst into flame on landing in Toronto, or that plane that landed on the river? Remember that thanks (in part) to the cabin attendents, not a single person died? Would those passengers have been better off with babes?
Deja vu.
In 1954 when I was a young, bachelor geologist based in Salt Lake City, Western and United had “stews” domiciled there. It was a junior base, so most of the young women were nearly fresh out of school. The normal thing was for them to band together and rent a big house. You normally found six to eight young women living in a three bedroom house. It was like a college sorority house, just smaller and with fewer rules. They were called “Stew zoos.” Once you met one of the ladies and had been approved of, it became a kind of social center where parties were held several nights a week. It was a lot of fun, but lasted a bit less than a year for me, because I was bound for the military.
Most of the stews were looking to travel, party and have a good time for a few years because the “career” ended at age 30. They also had their radar on seeking possible mates. The first class section of an airplane was a good place to find a man with prospects. I think the statistics were that only about 20% worked until they were thirty. They found a husband and were gone. There was a lot of turnover, but the airlines didn’t mind. No pensions were needed and it kept the ladies young and fresh.
Fourteen years later (after many twists and turns in my life) I moved into the pilot’s seat for a major airline. By that time, the world was changing. For one thing I was a middle-aged, married man and the flight attendants were now allowed to fly as long as they could pass the physical and the weight checks. However, the airlines were still serving meals on any segment longer than 45 minutes and on china with real silver and glassware. The “flight attendants” (it became the equivalent of the “N” word to call them stews) earned their money. I remember flying a segment from Detroit to Chicago where the cabin crew served a breakfast. It was a race to get it done, but they managed unless the air was too choppy. In my early years there was usually a good rapport between the cockpit and cabin crews but as time wore on and the cabins got fuller, there was less good feeling – kind of a mutual tolerance born of necessity.
We had a few of the old time stews who, for whatever reasons, didn’t marry, stayed svelte, glamorous, and continued to fly. I got to fly with a couple of them in the later years. They were a kick to fly with. They would always treat us in the cockpit like royalty and could tell jokes that would make a sailor blush.
PSA, based in California was most famous for pushing sexy flight attendants. However, they fell afoul of the discrimination laws and finally had to tone things down. Many of the sexier pics in the link are of PSA stews.
When deregulation became a fact, the business went from a high end experience to a race to the lowest common denominator. Yes, it’s cheaper to fly than it was then and many, many more people are able to travel by air. But it’s an agonizing experience. It’s a shame. My feelings about the job were that we were providing a necessary service to people that was good. Seeing families meeting their loved ones at the gate used to give me a warm feeling. Knowing businessmen were getting to places where they could make important deals was satisfying. Flying people to Hawaii on vacation gave a sense of providing some fun in people’s lives. Then the high-jackings and terminal security began. That was bad enough. The security since 9/11 has been like a big brother nightmare. Well, at least I have memories of those old, better days.
The foreign airlines like Korean Air have real beauties because they seem to respect the traditional standards. I’ve worked for Delta when it wasn’t (and hopefully will never be) union, and the women were mostly middle aged or older gay men.
I flew IcelandAir to Europe once. Their staff, like pretty much everyone in Iceland, is still gorgeous. If you go for blondes, at least…
I wonder how other non-US carriers rate on stewardess hotness?
1950s and 1960s???? The cool way to fly was via the Pan Am flying boats of the 1930s.
Smoking. When they banned smoking in airplanes is when it all went to hell.
Actually, I’ve never flown commercially. At age 53 I’ve only been in an airplane twice, both in single-engine private planes.
The first time was at age 16 and I was very excited and had a great time. The second time was around age 30 and it was sheer white-knuckle terror all the way. The reason for that was because I knew the plane was much, much older than my car, and I was well aware what a POS that was.
Oddly, I’ve been an aviation buff since childhood.
Derek Flint is missing in the photos?
It’s hard to think of an occupation and work setting that has not become more unpleasant over the years. Whether it is teaching (all levels), health care, law enforcement, retail, the law, or whatever, jobs have become more demanding and less secure. In return for getting beat up people have more stuff, and that is becoming dicey.
LTEC — ”Would those passengers have been better off with babes?”
Is it a stereotype you allude to or has it been proven that ‘babes’ are beyond being trained to deal with emergencies?
It was definitely the feminists and unions..
and the same is going on now in trying to force the fashion shows to have a few fatties (as in spain).
while there is always people who will fantasize, the other point about how everyone likes a pretty face and beauty makes them feel good is lost on people who spend their time arguing both sides of an issue till they win.
they never realized that the view they adopted that tells them its sexism and not trying to compete using a sampling of personal beauty in the population, is how they think, how they rationalize it. without all their liberation rhetoric, and all the other nobel dressings,
they would mostly be the judgmental prudes and narcissists giving bad advice to the other girls for schadenfreude on tap.
its sexist and wrong to look at stewardess, but its ok for preteens to learn how to pole dance and to use a condom and to have a slut walk every year.
IF one opens their eyes and jots a bit on paper you can find them a contradictory mess producing schadenfreude all over. a kind of very quiet confusing form of social mayhem that has no real order to it, except that it makes us all feel like things just aren’t right, and we need to fix it and so on.
our kids are a mess, our schools dumb them down, crime is always high, girls need vaccines for stds, broken homes, dysfunctional child adults, exterminated family lines, and on and on…
the stewardess issue was an old one that most forgot… will we connect how contradictory and just anti life enjoyment (hell) that is? i doubt it…
by standing for everything divisive they stand for nothing really… their choices of whats bad is just what itches the scratches of the times to never let us have what they promise we would have if they had more power to itch more scratches…
and so, we give em more and wonder why the itching gets worse…
neo: For example, whenever I used to fly, as a teenager and a young woman, I got all dressed up, pretty much like those stewardesses.
as to your comment as to flying was special and so forth… well so was goung out, going to work, going to church, etc…
there was a time when most wore suits, and ladies looked great in smashing dresses. the dress stores like macys and bloomies would have dress departments. you girls didnt work, no… you packed the kids off, and went to the stores to shop…
(there isn’t enough work for 100% of society, which is why it dont work otherwise… there really IS a reason… or haven’t you noticed one way or another 50% dont work. you can have 50% of your mates not working which makes us happy and we resent it less, or 50% of another mix of your population and large resentment, strife and the desire to give up freedom for a bit of order)
anyway i digress as usual… you would sit in chairs and there would be mini fashion shows… beauty parlors were big… many women went several times a week, more so than today… they got together, they sat, and chatted… clothing stores had real dressing rooms with tables…
windows didn’t have bars on them. you could go window shopping.
people looked forward to their lives, and had family around
but those where the oppressive years where children could be children… where they really didnt curse, or kept it among themselves. where most got married, worked hard, wanted families and good things for themselves and others too… (we were a really charitable nation without the state)
those where the years when we just didnt realize we were living in a comfortable gulag.
before our children from grade school were turned into little revolutionaries by watching nickelodeon, and green channels…
when people were responsible enough that they sold 22 guns to children in the backs of comic books…
http://www.lileks.com/institute/funny/comicads/guns/index.html
to think how much better it is with holidays dying away having no real familes any more to celebrate them. family histories and stories of life, gone in a rattled whisper with no body there.
just think of how much better it will be in another 40 years of this kind of advice…
by the way…
since none have ever lived the way they proposed, these social gamesters experimented on anyone who would listen to their advice. not even consistent advice, and ended up lab rats that couldn’t be new soviet woman (mini man the ladette)…
technically its moot… its demographically nearer the end than some beginning…
The antithesis pinnacle of roman and Greek aesthetic beauty is what? the dark nihilist hole where nothing is pretty and everything is equally bleak i guess…
I’m just old enough to remember flying in the 1960s: we dressed for travel, back then: skirts and dresses were de rigueur, and ladies Always wore hose (no bare legs; that was considered tacky). The male passengers wore suits and ties. And it was a lot more expensive, factoring in inflation, than it is today. Seats were wider, the planes weren’t crammed; there was actual legroom. Middle class passengers flying as a rare treat or for a long-distance haul, and upper-middle class and rich folk only. Never the hoi polloi.
Now it’s like traveling steerage.
I’m reminded of a real funny commercial years ago for an “all one class” airline, don’t remember which: they had a vid of one of their rivals’ planes with the first class passengers carousing in togas, drinking wine and feeding each other grapes; then the stewie yanked the curtain aside that separated them from coach, revealing a sullen crowd packed in cheek by jowl like Ellis Islanders.
George Pal Says:
“Is it a stereotype you allude to or has it been proven that ‘babes’ are beyond being trained to deal with emergencies?”
What I meant is that emergency ability and babeness, while not opposites, are hardly the same thing; and to the extent that we select for one of them, we will not be selecting for the other.
However, since you brought it up, let me conjecture that emergency ability, that is having the “right stuff”, is indeed close to the opposite of babeness. The typical TV police-woman looks like a model holding a gun. With apologies to Emma Peel, typical femininity is rather inconsistent with a strong, powerful alertness. And strength matters. A stewardess on the flight that landed on the Hudson had to quickly shut an emergency exit that a passenger had opened, against the water that was flooding in.
DNW, I thought I was the only one to ever experience this bit of freakishly unprofessional behavior:
A 30 something fellow with a quizzical voice, saunters over to the table and announces with lots of gesticulation that he will be our server. Then as if he is emceeing an event in which he is the featured attraction, he inquires about drinks.
We order drinks. And, with our requests successfully in hand, he pirouettes, and mercifully disappears.
Unfortunately he returned with the menus.
Kneeling beside us he placed his fist on the table and his chin on his hand, and after smiling sweetly, began a comprehensive review the menu and its features.
I had this very same thing happen to me in a restaurant in Seattle recently, and it was the most disturbing encounter I’ve ever had with a waiter. As he knelt by our table, all I could think was “What the hell is he doing this for? Does he think we’re children?”
As far as air travel goes, once the airlines started viewing passengers as cargo (actually worth less than cargo when it comes down to it) air travel became a decidedly unromantic experience.
The entire experience now, from parking at the departure A/P, to exiting the plane at the destination A/P, collecting your things and renting a car is trying. I still fly often for work, and hate it.
I check all my baggage because of the people who carry all theirs on. It takes forever to get off the plane while people are pulling the belongings from the overhead compartments and hitting other passengers in the head with their baggage. The emergency exit aisle has the most leg room, and the window seat in the emergency exit aisle, the most overall comfort – unless you fly business / 1st class. It’s a bus ride. And a yellow bus at that.
Although I was too young to remember it if you looked at the ads from the 50s for the transatlantic liners you saw the same thing. Travel was promoted as a luxury, stylish event. The Italian and French liners in particular were sexy.
Today’s cruise lines while claiming to be luxurious are not sexy or stylish
Obviously Richard Branson didn’t get that memo…
And I need practise with these tags
Virgin Atlantic: 25 Years, Still Red Hot
Yes, the stewardesses probably complain about the fat ugly passengers in sweat pants now. It’s not like the good ol’ days when only well-educated, wealthy people could fly. Sigh…
By the time I took my first aircraft flights in the early 60’s the elegant, glamorous world of travel by air that I had seen in old movies–things like the “Panama Clipper,” were long gone, and, generally, the stewardesses were far from glamorous. I was in the military then, and several memorable flights were on Texas headquartered Braniff Airlines, that–from what I saw– had an older, very “rode hard and put up wet” set of stewardesses, women who I wouldn’t want to have as opponents in a bar fight.
Nowadays, I try to avoid air travel if I possibly can, and often just put off long distance travel because, as so many others have commented here, what had been a very interesting, luxurious, and pleasurable experience has turned into an infuriating, nasty, and highly unpleasant equivalent of an 19th century steerage class passage across the Atlantic.
Ahhhhh…… the Late Great 60’s and Stews…….
Coffee, Tea, or Me?
We used to dress up to travel because, as Mom reminded us, you were going out in public. And people would judge. (Back then, they still felt they had a right to!)
My sister answered a newspaper ad and was interviewed by Pan Am– this would have been mid-seventies. She was sent up to headquarters in NYC for more interviews. She didn’t make the final cut– but pretty heady stuff for an eighteen-year-old!
Femininity in flight a labor history:
femininityinflight.com/laborhistory.html
In 1945, a group of stewardesses at United organized the first labor union of flight attendants in the United
States, the Air Line Stewardesses Association (ALSA).
from wiki:
Since 2004, AFA has been part of the 700,000 member Communications Workers of America, an affiliate of the 9 million member AFL-CIO. AFA is also an affiliate of the 5 million member International Transport Workers’ Federation.
Guess who again!
(if you pick almost anything you dont like about society, you will almost 98% of the time end up back to the same sources over and over and over again! freaky)
Leaders map jobs fight at Amistad Awards event / http://www.peoplesworld.org/leaders-map-jobs-fight-at-amistad-awards-event/
from another location:
CPUSA’s webzine People’s World reports Olsen was given the award at the Voices for Jobs, Equality & Peace — People’s World Amistad Awards Concert celebrating the 90th anniversary of the CPUSA.
from here on in, communists dictated what work and employ would be like.
its now to the point where the state now asserts that such laws give it the right to dictate to the church who can be a preist or not… and that if they insist on their own desires, they lose tax free status…
and its INTERNATIONAL..
so what you have is external agencies manipualting and controlling american business.
it was one of the reasons for outsourcing!!!!
ie. make it hostile here, and have socialists their make it seem friendly…
DUH!!!!
and as the catecnism of the revolutionary says, you need to get the most gullible with power.. ie women with families… (now they have destroyed their power base, how much do they have to say on anything? i hear obama ignores women, the way putin and the leader of the chinses do..)
note how they say, never been applied to other airline employees. but baggage claim doesnt work with the public…
the SAME labor laws are now being applied so that these women can remove the prettiest women from runways…
THE SKINNYON THIN: GETTING TO A HEALTHY RUNWAY / http://tinyurl.com/3nffqu7
whose fault? men don’t like women that look like their from the graveyard. WOMEN do… or rather women who run the fashion industry do..
now watch how two socialist ideals and laws class and become inoperable because they are not there for any REAL reason, they are there as WEDGE ISSUES…
that is what i was describing up there when i was showing that kids pole dancing like strippers for liberation kind of makes no sense when you want to stop airlines from hiring who they want!!! does it? where will those pole dancers get work?
so there is no cogent whole to it, despite the claim and all that… ALL THERE IS ARE OPPORTUNITIES TO CREATE WEDGES TO POUND ON TO DISMANTLE CULTURE AND INDIVIDUAL DESIRE AND WILL.
so pole dancing for children like strippers is a wedge issue.. IF you take the side of stripping children..
removing pretty stewardess pitch the many who are not so pretty against the few who are so pretty… its a wedge issue… and a chance to blame men, another wedge issue
lots of girls want to be models.. so doing this to modeling gets the not so pretty ones to be vindictive and claim moral high ground… a wedge issue
family politically correct issues and law have allowed them to break up family in favor of species domestication, by using wedge issues to divide up the target races and groups…
they dont take any cogent side towards some goal… they take the side of the wedge… then pound it to divide… while claiming collective solidarity…
they also tell not to bright people that they are smart for following them.. that way, narcisistic personalities whose lifes revolve around their looks and so forth (women) will refuse to oppose them and be called stupid by the in clique of girls…
(unless your palin i guess)
here is the wedge contradiction:
so they want to forbid mostly gay selected socialist women selected anorexia models who get women in the world to starve themselves and blame men for the condition…
off the stage… why? well with an obesity epidemic which group is larger? (no pun intended)…
in the 1850s, which group was largst? white people… when their work and immigration shifted popualtions and demographics showed a decline faster than replacement for decades. they switched sides and pretended that they were not the enemy of who they called friend…
and now that blacks are not big enough numbers, they are shifting sidfes to spanish..
thats ALL they do… use up a side till it declines then jump ship to the other side which is larger… a ladder stepping up to power. you step on X, to get higher with Y… when Y declines for listening to you, you step on Y to help X.. but since X is already a victim before Y, you open borders to give you a Z…
now that chrisitanity is on the bottom and men dont ahve mates… bring in islam.. the men will side with aht for fertility reasons… the feminists will lose power.. and voila.. the larger base is who they pretend to be with.
we just dont notice that they have such zero loyatly… we are too busy enjoying the licenstiouuys nature of their advice and such, and women are enjoying that someone is giving them permission to do bad, and not tellikng them no.. so they drive off a cliff… (thelma and louise!!)
so now you have a wege between things.. and they are miling BOTH sides of it… once again pretending to fight for each…
but the sides are too stupid to see that if they represent everyone and both sides, they represent no one, and only their side
and in order for the stupid to be smart they ahve to accept being stupid… why should they? theya re popular and considered trendy to be ignorant and stupid, gullible and manipulable…
why give that up for a list of NOs…
Second, different ethnic and racial groups may have different height and
weight characteristics. The Italian manifesto makes some allowance for this.
In the U.S., however, a limitation which has a disparate impact on a racial or
ethnic group can be unlawfully discriminatory, opening the door to liability
under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act as well as state and local law
so aint it great? contradictory laws that only employers cant get away from…
yes… you HAVE to hire the obese woman who picks her nose in public as a receptionist…
you HAVE to hire the gay man who gets down to his knees to be intimately friendly with strangers…
but you also have to not hire them too…
either way, a lawsuit…
better not to be a capitalist… oops…
its no longer a mans world any more than this is a bush presidency… BOTH cant stop blaming their predecessors to get the truth away from themselves…
Sitzpinkler
German women have availed themselves of a new battery-operated device that issues a stern warning whenever the toilet seat is lifted.
According to The Telegraph, 1.8 million of the devices have been sold in German supermarkets.
One version of the device features a voice imitating Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder that warns, “Hey, stand-peeing is not allowed here and will be punished with fines, so if you don’t want any trouble, you’d best sit down.”
The Telegraph observes that in German, the term for a guy who urinates sitting down is “Sitzpinkler” – which also means “wimp”.
Offering a taste of what EU integration may hold in store for Britain, an English-speaking prototype for the UK market has been developed.
[its really because women cant stand up, and to be equal men must sit down! i can show you the feminist papers discussing it… they now have the power to make men sit when peeing… how much more totalitarian can one get before there is totalitarian existence and nothing else]
1950s and 1960s???? The cool way to fly was via the Pan Am flying boats of the 1930s.
I have a 1937 copy of Esquire magazine. It has an ad for flying (Pan Am IIRC) where passengers have an option of a bed. Wake up at your destination on the west coast.
As far as stewerdesses go, yes, PC feminisim and unions played a part in killing that off.
And why would hot 20 year old ones do a worse job saving passengers in a crash then the current middle age ones?
“Hong Says:
October 13th, 2011 at 8:14 pm
The foreign airlines like Korean Air have real beauties because they seem to respect the traditional standards. I’ve worked for Delta when it wasn’t (and hopefully will never be) union, and the women were mostly middle aged or older gay men.
Same for Cathay Pacific, at least back in ’06 (last time I took one of their flights).
Thing is, flying now is rapidly becoming the equivalent of Greyhounding: It’s not a special experience, it’s something to be endured. People dress down, not up. It’s the epitome of commoditized service.
And why would hot 20 year old ones do a worse job saving passengers in a crash then the current middle age ones?
they dont..
this is why they move me on a plane and ask me to sit by the door and then ask am i willing to die before i jump out and help others…
i am 6’3″ and they want my 230 lbs by that door.. 🙂
now people want that door for leg room..
It was pretty humorous reading this at 30,000 feet last night…
Way, way back in the early days of commercial passenger flight – the Pan Am clipper, etc – the stewardesses had to be qualified as nurses.
And speaking of early stewardesses, on my bookshelf is a book that was a Christmas gift to my mother, in 1945 – an adventure novel about a young stewardess in the early months of WWII, having adventures on regular runs to South America. “Nancy Naylor Flies South”, by Elisabeth Lansing. It looks as if it was part of a series, and at the end she goes off to serve as an Army nurse.
One of the very first air-evac flight nurses was also the first stewardess hired to work on commercial passenger flights – Ellen Church.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Church
I have spoken to a number of flight attendants in my capacity as a physician. People like to talk about their jobs and I use it as a way to allow them to relax a little in the process of treating them. The stories they tell about rude passengers make me cringe in horror at times. One thing I learned is the little known fact that an important tool in their equipment is a set of handcuffs.