One of the most interesting weekends I ever spent was in mid-July 2001, when I flew onto the the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy as a guest of the Carrier Group admiral, Lewis Crenshaw. During the two days I spend on “Big John,” I and the other guests were led up and down and through and all over the ship, which is, as the cliche has it, a floating city, filled with thousands of people doing hundreds of jobs. And, based on my informal observations, about a quarter to a third of them were women — young women, of course, because most people in the military are enlisted and most enlisted people are young. One such young woman said “Excuse me, sir” and I turned around and realized that she was wearing a bathrobe, and was asking to get by me because I was standing between her and the doorway to the women’s bathroom. It was around four in the afternoon, but it was explained to me that because of the different shifts that keep the ship manned — as it were — 24/7, people were getting up and going to sleep, and thus, showering — naked! — at all hours.

So there it was, a floating city, with not a lot of windows, and very few ways off of it, and little privacy, and close quarters — I, a VIP guest, slept on the topmost of three bunks, and shared a private bathroom with six other guys — and you had young men and women everywhere, all of whom, we presume had the same  urges that heterosexual people are heir to, and yet, strangely, everybody seemed to be getting along and nobody was creeped out by the fact that another sailor might be checking them out or not checking them out or crushing on them or not.  Of course, people aren’t perfect, and female sailors become pregnant from time to time and are removed from the ship to shore duty.  I don’t know what, if anything, happens to the happy, expectant fathers.

So everybody seemed to get along, and the ship still floated and launched its planes even though the thing was a veritable floating, enormous steel tank filled with sexual tension. Weird.

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