Since these stewardesses were all lovely young things, are we to accept that some of the best and brightest would...pimp out their children, let alone somebody else's in this fashion? Wouldn't those born "after launch" been schooled? A ship full of scientists and researchers-who came up with this as being someone's lot in life?
They started in the '60s. In the '60s, this was seen as a woman's role -- to be an object of romance and sexuality. Even single women in the workplace were assumed to be in pursuit of potential husbands, and it was taken for granted that they'd give up their jobs when they got married. (Even in
Star Trek's supposedly progressive future, this was taken for granted -- see the opening-scene discussion of Carolyn Palamas in "Who Mourns for Adonais?") It was expected and normative for men to flirt with their female coworkers; what we consider sexual harassment today was seen back then (at least by men) as simply being polite and flattering.
In fact, I was thinking that when the captain gave that speech about Lorelei at her funeral -- it struck me as inconsistent with the '60s-based milieu that he didn't stress her physical beauty among her assets. In the '60s and '70s, even the '80s, it was taken for granted that if you wanted to praise a woman, you called her beautiful and stressed her femininity. Even if you were also acknowledging her skill or strength or intelligence, you'd still make sure to compliment her looks and her feminine charms. It was assumed that that was what she herself would most want to hear: that she was desirably feminine and a good marital prospect.
We can't forget that contact with Earth continued well after the mission began. They might not have experienced the social turmoil first hand, but they shouldn't have been in such an isolated vacuum as we're presented, that this Mad Men male fantasy would have taken root.
I gather that Word of God is that they stayed in touch for about a decade, or until c. 1973. Women's roles in society had gotten somewhat more progressive by then, but the old patriarchal value system was still very much in place, and the attitudes toward women's sexuality still held true. If anything, the perception among men at the time was that the sexual revolution meant that women were even more sexually available to men than they had been before. Look at the 1971 Roger Vadim/Gene Roddenberry sex comedy
Pretty Maids All in a Row, for example -- a film in which virtually all the young female characters are totally uninhibited and throw themselves sexually at Rock Hudson (even though he's their high school guidance councillor -- at the time, that wasn't even seen as creepy), and in which Hudson convinces his fellow teacher Angie Dickinson to "help" an inhibited male student by seducing and sleeping with him.
