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We Really Move Our Tails For You

Service update:

WeReallyMoveOurTails.jpg

Today is a travel day, and judging by past experience, blogging will be either logorrheic (trapped in the airport) or spare (peacefully zonked on airline vodka).  Normal blogging (or normal for this place) should resume tomorrow.

Posted by scott on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 6:27 am.

22 Responses to “We Really Move Our Tails For You”

Well, at least you left an attractive if sexist filler…

Left by actor212 on July 29th, 2009

PSA. Ah, memories. . . I remember they painted a smile on each of their planes.

Left by gainsayer on July 29th, 2009

PSA?

If the second word is sweat, I don’t want to know why they’re wearing skirts.

Left by he flips on July 29th, 2009

Yes those smiling planes rattling my fillings as I worked in a hole-in-the-wall FX shop in North Hollywood. As they came in to land at Burbank, they were so low over near Laurel Canyon and Sherman Way that they filled the sky.

Left by Capmconnundrum on July 29th, 2009

Now those are some sky muffins. BTW, sky muffins is a term from my former flight attendant friend.

Left by acrannymint on July 29th, 2009

Well, please do post when you can, Scott. I’m still useless as tits on a boar hog, as my Google-censored blog more than shows, but we NEED WoC, dammit.

No experience with airlines, PSA or otherwise, but did they really make the flight attendants (or “stewardesses”) wear the go-go-dancer shtick??? That’s almost as fucked-up as “he flips’” vagina-hating comment.

Left by Anntichrist S. Coulter on July 29th, 2009

I remember the stewardess outfits from my youth of flying TWA, which was done often as they’re hub was in St. Louis and they went everywhere.

My aunt was excommunicated from the family in the early sixties because she quit college (where she was to become a concert pianist — or preferably marry a wealthy med student) and became an airline stewardess. My grandma called her a slut and wouldn’t speak to her for eight years.

Yes, it was a southern family where the misogyny runs as deep and as murky as the old Mississippi river.

Left by kate on July 29th, 2009

That’s almost as fucked-up as “he flips’” vagina-hating comment

Let’s call it a love-hate. Hell I didn’t even shower today so who am I to throw stones (wash stones?).

Left by he flips on July 29th, 2009

My aunt was excommunicated from the family in the early sixties

Growing up, the most glamorous person in my life was my stewardess aunt, who served United Airlines from the early sixties into the eighties. That was the “Coffee, Tea or Me” era, but I’d prefer not to think about that.

Left by Nom de Plume on July 29th, 2009

My aunt was excommunicated from the family in the early sixties

Some old school southern baptists out in frontier west texas have an attitude of “your business is your business.” I’ve seen pastors stealing a square after service. My mother was dropped by her family for having me as a teenager (after both her parents died) and the only people that treated us like family was our church.

As an atheist now, I chide these mega-church idiots that live around me for not acting like jesus (and my old church) tells them to act. But they are too busy crying martyrdom.

Sorry I’m drinking. :)

Left by he flips on July 29th, 2009

Just watch that toe tapping in the men’s room, buddy.

Left by heydave on July 30th, 2009

Wow. kate’s grandmother was an asshole. (Well, at least for 8 years anyway.)

Left by Bill S on July 30th, 2009

I used to work with a woman who used to be a stewardess way back when, and although she wasn’t employed by a carrier that made her wear mod miniskirts, all of the “girls” were inspected before every shift, with random snapping of their stocking garters to be sure they were wearin’ em. Which I don’t get at all, because back in the pre-pantyhose days, it was garter belts or knee socks or slutty bare legs, and surely that could be found out without snapping. But I guess nothing says “we own you” like a random garter snap.

Left by Larkspur on July 30th, 2009

I remember the sixties PSA stewardess uniforms, and thought they were way cool at the time. It was like flying around with a plane fulla Emma Peels.

I’m just glad there aren’t any pictures of me in some of the ridiculous clothing I wore back then… I hope.

Paisley, stripes, polka dots (don’t ask, some sort of an op-art deal), too-short flared pants, and let’s don’t talk about the hair, okay?

Left by Chris Vosburg on July 30th, 2009

Larkspur:

The logistics of your story interest me. These garters are accessible how?

Are we talking about a hand up a short skirt? That would tend to send a message.

Sorry, just confused about how that, uhmm, worked, exactly.

Left by Rhodo Zeb on July 31st, 2009

She just said they’d grab the fabric of their skirts and verify the presence of garter belts like that. No hands up the skirts. Kind of how girls get their bra straps or bands snapped. You know the general vicinity, so you grab there. Now, I do not recall what, if anything, my friend said about situations in which the stewardess’s garter was not easily snapped through the fabric. I guess my mind just kind of stalled at the stupid.

BTW, she also said that after she was married, and her husband was being considered as an associate in a law firm, she had to go in for an interview as well. I guess they had to be sure that he had chosen his helpmeet wisely, and that she would not embarrass the firm at company functions. Or maybe it was just to show him that they had the power to make him jump through any damn hoops they felt like setting up. Sometimes I forget how mean men can be to each other.

Left by Larkspur on July 31st, 2009

I dunno, Larkspur, mebbe it was just another form of dick-waving, as in, welllll, buddy if you think you’re gonna be one of US, welllll then, you’d better be prepared to bring yer pretty young wifey wif ya to those KEY PARTIES, and we wanna get a look at ‘er before you get the gig!

Or, y’know, more of the same misogynistic shit of “she’s YOUR property, so since you’re not OUR property, that means that WE get approval rights over your livestock, boyo!”

No, I wasn’t born yet, but there are very few things about that era that I feel like I’ve missed-out upon. The music, sure. The writers, the poetry, the art, the protests, absofuckinlutely. But the Good Ole Boy network (which still reigns supreme here in Vatican West!) — I’da been in prison right quick, if I hadda put up with a motherfucker snapping MY garters. And that little “Harper Valley PTA” meeting with the wifey before hubby got his partnership in the law firm… nah, he’d never have made it, and it would alllllll have been my loud-mouthed, hussy fault! Your aunt hadda be one helluva patient, strong-willed woman with a cast-iron constitution, Kate.

When I read back and look back and think back over the women who were down in the trenches, working not because they CHOSE to, not because they went to Barnard or Wellsley or Brown and sought a “MEANINGFUL CAREER,” but because they HAD TO WORK IN ORDER TO LIVE, *these* are some of the women that I think of as being the REAL front-line infantry. Oh, sure, everybody THINKS that they had it posh, but imagine the pure-dee, class-A, steaming piles of ripe BULLSHIT that they had to plow through on a daily basis! Gloria Steinem can bitch and whine about her heels and her bunny suit all she wants, it’s not like she depended on that gig TO LIVE.

My grandmother taught public school in an un-air-conditioned one-room schoolhouse in Back Bumfuck, Louisiana, with an outdoor privy and FORTY-FIVE KIDS PER CLASS, no planning periods, hardly a WHIFF of a union back then, and SHIT PAY for the greater part of forty-three years, but do you think that the hoity-toities, the rich librul yankees would see HER as a feminist? No, ’cause she worked FOR A LIVING, not to prove a fucking POINT.

Women who do such dirty-handed work as that never get credit for making an assload of progress in the “war between the sexes,” which still seems like a GAME to the guys, who still get paid 40-50% higher than we do.

And my grandfather, bless his heart, was one of the last true “christians,” a man who put in a 12-hour work night in the R&D lab @ Ethyl Chemical for 30-some-odd years, just to keep his little working-class, dirt-farmer baptist church up and running. He put clothes on the backs of his (FIRST) Great Depression-era flock, he grew a garden in his back yard to help feed their children, he gave it his EVERYTHING just to help those people hold body & soul together, but they don’t make preachers like him anymore. Those are never gonna be the famous or rich preachers, they’ll never be remembered like an Oral Roberts or a Jimmy Swaggart or even the rare GOOD evangelist like Billy Graham (who somehow spawned the jizz-spit of satan himself in that neo-nazi neo-con “son” of his!), but dammit, they did the work and then some, and gave it everything they had.

But then, that’s when people thought that being a “christian” was about being LIKE Jesus, not thinking that you were better THAN Jesus, or that your cult affiliation somehow made you exempt from all forms of manners, civilization, law and common decency. Kinda like Senators in airports, huh.

Left by Anntichrist S. Coulter on July 31st, 2009

The bit about garter checking is very interesting – I’m guessing that was somewhere between the 50s to the early 60s, because (as the photo shows) the, ahem, “classic” miniskirt of about ’65 onward was getting way too short to wear with anything but pantyhose. In fact you could say that it was the advent of pantyhose, which became common around 62 or so, that made the mini possible for the regular woman or girl.

The assumption behind the garter checking is a more 50s-ish one anyway. They were checking for *decency* – and maybe they felt they had to because the “stews” were starting to respond to the winds of change in the very early 60s when skirt length first reached the knee. (I’m betting the airlines had duenna-like female supervisors for the attendants.) 50s-style lingerie decency standards for younger females dressed for work meant you were wearing a bra, panties, a full or half-slip, and either a full girdle, a garter-belt, or (much more common by the late 50s) a brief panty girdle with little removable garter clips attached to loops on its leg openings. Stockings had gotten longer since WW2, so the tops came almost all the way up the thigh.

The importance of the girdle in the 50s sex-schema, as opposed to a simple garter belt that only held your stockings up, was that it confined your flesh into a static, smooth, undivided shape. Jiggling was forbidden, as was any suggestion of butt cleavage, and really decent girls would try never to wear a skirt that was tight enough to follow the lower curve of the buttocks. A very weird fashion era morally and philosophically, when you consider the obsessive pointed bras and B&D level waist cinchers. It was like everyone was grinding in blatant, dark, fetishist sex on the one hand and on the other trying to deny organic reality with a suburban fantasy of decency and togetherness and cleanliness.

(Does a lot to explain the birth of rock & roll…)

You could say the miniskirted flight attendants weren’t much better off , but at least they weren’t being slowly garrotted by their underwear. I speak from painful personal memories, and subsequent memories of liberation.

Left by Li'l Innocent on August 2nd, 2009

…”(I’m betting the airlines had duenna-like female supervisors for the attendants.)…”

Yup, they used Marthas as the enforcers.

Annti, you are back! And in fine form. Yay!

And I am awesomely old. Another friend of mine, a few years older than me, said that although her parents encouraged her to go to college (something many parents didn’t), they had no other path in mind for her than being a teacher or a nurse. Thank all of the goddesses for teachers and nurses, but damn. To think that for a while, for some, that (and a good marriage) was the highest aspiration, while for the vast rest of womankind, the aspiration was more like “don’t die in childbirth” and “try to survive by picking vegetation, hauling water, and/or caring for the offspring of others” – well, I am permanently astonished at the womens’ voices that still managed to get heard. (Like, for example, Sojourner Truth.)

Left by Larkspur on August 2nd, 2009

Also – one good part about being older is that no one expects me to be chic or whatever. As God is my witness, I will never wear girl-shoes or pantyhose again. (Well, pantyhose I might wear, but only if I were competing in a ride ‘n’ tie event. They are useful for that.)

Left by Larkspur on August 2nd, 2009

Another wonderful part about ageing(and I’m 56) is that I can say “no” and not feel guilty.

Left by Gappy on August 3rd, 2009

Thanks, Larkspur! And hey, Gappy! How go things out at Gargoyle Acres?

A lotta Baby Boomers piss me off, ’cause they HAD IT, they held a big part of the world in their hands at one point, and they pissed it all away for disco, navel-gazing, cocaine and POLYESTER. But y’all make me glad that I haven’t killed ‘em all yet. Though the shit-kickers (and no, Larks, I am not using that in a complimentary fashion here, though at some point I surely will) & other draft-dodging slackers of the Sticks REEEEALLLLLYYYYY need to get offa my planet, ’cause they contributed NOTHING to this world but MORE DEBT, MORE GREED, and MORE SEXIST-PIG RECIDIVIST BULLSHIT. Every time that teh Dick opens his mouth, I wind up, at some point, clenching my teeth and screaming, “JUST GO DOWN TO THE FUCKING *COURTHOUSE* AND ***CHANGE*** YOUR FUCKING REGISTRATION TO ***REPUBLICUNT*** ALREADY!!!!!!” ’cause he’s about as far away from my librul feminist ass on the “democrat” scale AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. Stupid fucker DIDN’T EVEN VOTE in the last election, he’s such a fucking knuckle-dragger.

Anyway, I mention all of that crappy shit to say that I’m glad that I’ve gotten to meet Boomers like y’all, in a wild melting-pot joint like this one. I almost said “potpourri,” but that implies dead, dried-up things, and we ain’t there YET, dammit.

Though I do honestly wish that somebody would yank my uterus out with a crochet hook, and I will throw a fucking PARTY on the day that my ovaries die. The Fallen Uterus’ Translucent Werewolf genes kicked-in on the day that my former GP (THAT YUPPIE-SCUM SKINNY BITCH!!!) took my birth-control pills away. That was the ONLY reason that I was STILL ON THEM, dammit.

BTW, there’s some 20-ish little blonde girl allegedly from Louisiana doing “stand-up” on Ferguson right now, talking about how she doesn’t “understand Wall Street,” ’cause she’s “used to BOURBON STREET.”

Right.

Fucking redneck republicunt, prolly from “DUKE COUNTRY” Mandeville on the Nawth Shaw. Oh, but she blames her hubby for her stupidity, “He fucked me stupid!” Her accent sounds like a Jewish American Princess from Queens, though, so she must be from Kenner. Same thing as the Nawth Shaw, same klan-wannabe-but-lack-the-initiative white trash mentality, but with no money. Unless they’re mafia, and though she IS married young and bleached to the roots, she ain’t THAT kinda “funny.”

Not surprised. A cutesy little blonde talking about how lazy & stupid she is, and she’s got a gig on network TV! Oh, and wearing a fucking MATERNITY TOP. Just like that slanderous SHIT that HBO is filming in Shreveport, that abortion of a “TV show” about “vampires.” Here’s hoping that the little “comedienne’s” water-headed, monobrow republicunt spawn doesn’t grow up to be like Mommy. And that karma will finally catch up to the yankee carpetbagging scum who are defiling the entire South with that HBO-funded clusterfuck, and that we all get to watch them die a slow, ugly, painful death of scrotum cancer. Including the chicks.

Left by Anntichrist S. Coulter on August 3rd, 2009

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