March 24, 2007
Stewardesses IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST Fredric Smoler writes, “But I do not think that regulation can account for the stewardesses being touted in the way they were. There were a lot of regulated industries before Alfred Kahn came along—telecommunications, for example, and trucking, but no eroticization of the labor force in those cases.” I don’t think regulation made the eroticization of stewardesses inevitable, simply possible. Without regulation, the airlines would have competed on price and convenience. With those off the table, they looked about for something else to compete on, and, as I wrote, there wasn’t much available except eye-candy stewardesses. Once it started (perhaps in the fertile brain of a Madison Avenue ad man), of course it took on a life of its own, as these things tend to do in both economic and biological ecosystems, and went about as far as it could go in those more restricted days. As for other regulated industries, telecommunications was a regulated monopoly, not a regulated cartel, so there was no competition at all. Further, the personnel in telecommunications are, the opposite of well-behaved children, largely heard but not seen. (The plot of a 1950s Broadway musical, Bells Are Ringing, turns on this very fact.) The exception is the telephone repairman, a job category that would have been hard—not to mention socially dicey—to eroticize. Nothing much can happen on an airplane, after all, but milkman stories have been around forever. Trucking, in turn, is almost exclusively a wholesale business, with businesses, not individuals, as customers. So sex appeal would not have been a very effective draw. Plus there is the problem of turning truck drivers into the kindling of sexual fantasy for the largely male hirers of trucking companies. Mr. Smoler writes, “Now that airlines can and do compete on the basis of price, there is no reason for them to have stopped competing on other fronts.” Indeed, but with the rise of modern feminism at about the same time as the rise of deregulation, the disappearance of stewardesses touted for their sex appeal rather than their competence was surely inevitable.
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