Here's the whole thing:
Oh Captain, My Captain by Meghan Daum
The obvious theory behind my fetish is that, since I'm basically afraid of flying, I desire the man who controls the object of fear. For the fearful, flying is an unnatural act, something less than logical. Therefore, an encounter with a pilot is an encounter with an alien, a liaison with a god, an abduction of sorts. The credo among pilots is that you're not truly a member of the mile high club unless you have sex with the pilot while he's flying the plane. This is an unlikely possibility for most of us, but it's the reason that I prefer the small planes to the jets. There's always a sliver of a chance that I'll be the only passenger, always the hope that everyone else on board will fall asleep and the pilot will turn to me and say "Wanna ride shotgun?" I like the puddle jumpers, the twin engine props, the tiny eight-seaters that make your stomach sink when you walk out on to the tarmac. "This is our plane?" the tourists gasp, beach bags in hand, flip-flops already on the feet. Even as my stomach sinks I'll run to the front so I can get a seat right behind the pilot. I will not look out the window, only at his neck and shoulders. He is the embodiment of my safety, every gesture keeps me alive. As a phobic and a fetishist alike, I know that sex with the pilot is the safest sex there is.
To most people, the commercial airline pilot seems sexless. He is Leslie Nielson in Airplane rather than Tom Cruise in Top Gun, a company man rather than a cowboy. With his polyester uniform and company-issued luggage, he is not a man, merely an extension of the aircraft, as neutered as a Ken doll, as plastic as the plane. But commercial airline pilots are the kind I love best. It's as if they're made of synthetic materials, inflatable dolls that won't pester me with the boorish habits of real men. I love the hybrid of nerdiness and machismo that emits from the sight of two pilots going through their checklist as I board an airplane. There they are: hunched over, collaborative, actually writing things down with a pencil and paper. (Writing, like eating, seems all wrong for them — it's too normal an activity for someone who picks 250,000 pounds of metal off the ground.) They look like kids doing homework together. But then they turn on the engines and become something else entirely.
Even if I'm seated in the back of the plane, I'll crane my neck and watch the pilots' hands all over the controls until the evil flight attendant shuts the door on me. There's something about the way a pilot reaches up his arm to hit those buttons on the cockpit ceiling that I find irresistible. It's an intensified version of the kind of unconscious male gesture — the slip of a wallet into a back pocket, the sound he makes scratching his chin in a movie theater — that men have no idea how much women love. I love the way pilots, most of whom seem taller than regular guys, have to duck as they climb into the cockpit. From the main cabin, my pre-flight view of the pilots is limited to the shoulders on down, so by default the forearms and hands become erogenous zones. I'll watch them take off their hats and place them next to their seats, watch them reach for their bottles of spring water, watch their hands on the throttle as we taxi. The pilot is the only man who can wear short sleeved dress shirts without looking like a used car salesman. He has a way of pulling off all kinds of tackiness. Unlike the rest of the human race, polyester becomes him.
Some people arrive at the airport two hours early because they're afraid of missing their flight. I show up early because I like to hang around. Pilots gather in clusters at the terminal like boy scouts waiting for the bus to take them to camp. They are identical packages with different faces, so ineluctably male, so obviously able to hold their own were some hostile situation — hijacking, hydraulic failure, camp-ground grizzly bear attack — to arise. They also look so lonely that you want to walk up to them like a Hare Krishna and give them a flower. They are victims of the split personality that's necessary for the job. They are explorers as well as God-fearing family men. They are both Lindbergh and Limbaugh, Christians with staggering divorce rates, former hot shots who disproportionately seem to lose their kids and their houses. We've all heard the stories about how they mess around with flight attendants, about how, like good military men, they marry young, start building the family, and then get caught in the vortex of stale hotel rooms and boring cities and the quandary of not ever being exactly sure what time it is. Pilots always strike me as essentially decent men drowning in cheap perfume. They all seem to live in cities like Dallas and Atlanta, big-haired towns, places where women are etched with boob jobs and shellacked in hair spray. When I lived in Manhattan, I used to wonder what would happen if they moved to my town. Would they shift their tastes over to something more bookish? Would they worship at the altar of Patti Smith rather than Pamela Anderson Lee? Would such a change of allegiance make them unable to fly?
So when I see a pilot in the airport, a handsome thirty or forty-something who's still rubbing his finger where the ring used to be, I always have the urge to save him. I want to take him home to my little apartment with the uneven floor and the chipping paint and put him in the bathtub with a cigarette and a glass of wine. I want to drive him out to the country and rub dirt all over him, reacquaint him with the surface of the earth, then swaddle him in natural fibers. In exchange, I want him to talk jargon to me. I want to hear about airspeed and fuel pressure and, my favorite, yaw. (When the aircraft rolls slightly from side to side, that's yaw.) I want to him to bring me to work with him, let me hang out with the crew in the bar of the Des Moines Airport Ramada while they talk shop.
There's an aphrodisiacal quality to the aviation dialect. It's slightly southern, slightly clipped at the ends of sentences as if anticipating the cut-off of the radio. It conveys a sense of being at once distracted and calm. The pilot voice is both preoccupied with more important matters and so relaxed you'd think he could go to sleep right then and there. So for the pilot fetishist, air traffic control is its own kind of erotica. I try to fly United Airlines whenever I can, because it's the one carrier that lets you in on this orgy of conversation. That's because the real essence of the pilot lies not in the physicality of the body in the uniform or the hands on the controls but in his voice. His public persona is the soothsayer on the loudspeaker, the apologist for turbulence, the man who calls everyone "folks." But the air traffic frequency is private listening. "United 607 descending to two-zero thousand," "Northwest 189 checking into Kansas Center," "Continental 36 requesting a right turn in approximately two minutes for weather." So casual and yet so much a matter of life and death.
A male friend once told me that the reason men want to have sex with just about every woman they pass on the street is that they want to see how each is different from the other. A thousand different women with the same fundamental anatomy can respond to sex in a thousand different ways, and this is something that men enjoy being reminded of, first hand, again and again. That's how I feel about pilots speaking to air traffic control. There are Southern pilots, British pilots, pilots who don't enunciate and pilots whose voices have a cadence that remind me of the first time I was really kissed and the crashing clarity with which I understood, for the first time, the meaning of arousal. Through the hiss and static, disembodied men are waiting to speak, waiting to descend, waiting for permission for every conceivable act. I want to discover each one, to unearth the individuality behind the monotony.
I can only imagine what would happen if those sterile voices said something less than sterile. What if a pilot tossed aside the F.A.A. regulations and talked dirty? Of what obscenities would that low, rumbling voice be capable? When the woman he treats like a lady becomes his whore, when the manners he learned in Sunday School and the Air Force Academy mutate into raunchy, delicious locutions about what he'd like to do and where and how and why he'd like to do it (there's no waiting for clearance, no inquiries as to traffic ahead, no consideration for weather), when he relies not on the instruments but gauges the lift and speed and landing on instinct alone, the pilot makes an erotic demand that only a pilot can. He dares his lover to steal his vocation. She must rob him of his control. She must take the pilotness out of him, make him lose his place in the sky, work him into a state where he could not possibly be responsible for two hundred lives sitting behind him. She must make him forget he's a pilot, which is like making a bird forget it's a bird. Unlikely, but possible, at least for a moment or two. She must unlearn all she knew about lovemaking. She must bring him back to the earth rather than sending him above it.
My wife told me to tell y'all she agrees with this statement 100%!
lol
