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Your luggage is checked. You passed the security points without losing too much of your dignity. You made it to the terminal with enough time to get a coffee and relax. You finally board the plane. You can't wait to sit back and put the hustle and bustle of life on hold for the next five hours. You're going to indulge yourself. You will catch up on some reading. Maybe even take a little nap. The possibilities are not endless, but they're pretty damn good.
"In-flight reading" via Shutterstock.
You squeeze into your row and settle in, your favorite guilty-pleasure magazine in hand. But no sooner have you taken off, leaned back and started to disappear into the article in your hands that an image catches your eye in the monitor of the person immediately beside you. Oh, dear Lord. The person next to you has plans for relaxation, too. Unfortunately for you, these plans involve watching porn.
You try to avert your eyes, but the images continue to flash on the screen. Suddenly, your options for relaxation disappear. Even turned away from the monitor, the images remain beside you, oppressing your choices, your space, your time, and your peace of mind. You realize with dismay that while this flight could have been a wonderful timeout from life, you're actually trapped, held hostage by the choices of those around you.
This happened to Sally, who brought the issue to Emily Yoffe and Farhad Manjoo on Slate's Manners for the Digital Age:
On a seven-hour plane trip, the man squished into the third seat in our row spent most of his time watching male porn movies on his DVD player. I was traveling with my daughter and her young child and it was almost impossible not to see from time to time the screen with some pretty raunchy acts being performed. Since he was on the aisle, I suspect that others were also sharing in his viewing.
Yoffe, who handles etiquette queries as Dear Prudence, responded to Sally: "You're not in your own private little space on a plane. You are inches away from other people, particularly if you're sitting next to a grandmother, mother, and a young child, it's absurd. I think you would've been perfectly justified excusing yourself, going to find a flight attendant, explain what's going on and say, 'Can you handle this for us? Either you need to move our family, you need to move him, or you need to tell him he just can't be viewing this on a row with a small child.'"
This is great advice, but as Jill at Feministe points out, a traveler should not only take into account mothers, grandmothers and children when viewing pornography in a confined space. Jill enjoys porn as well -- but just because people aren't against viewing pornography on their own time doesn't mean they want to view someone else's porn with them. Jill writes:
What's bad is watching porn in front of a bunch of strangers who are trapped in a small flying box and cannot get away from your choice of entertainment. I am neither a mother nor a grandmother nor a small child [...] but if I were sitting next to some dude on a plane and he was watching his favorite pornographic films, I would be majorly skeeved out, and feel vaguely unsafe. Watching porn in public so clearly violates basic social boundaries (and violates them in a sexual way) that I would be immediately suspicious of that dude's general desire (or lack thereof) to adhere to social and sexual boundaries in public places. And I do not want to be sitting next to the guy who likes violating social and sexual boundaries.
No one is inherently cool with porn -- not college-aged kids, not men, not a sex columnist whose work clearly indicates she’s extremely porn-positive. Viewing pornography is a personal choice that cannot be imposed on anyone else.
Almost a decade ago, I was in a similar position as the guy with the porn on the plane. Sort of. I was reading an amazing article my friend had written for Playboy. I don't consider this magazine particularly raunchy, but it only took me a second to pull it out and catch the expression on the barista's face as I ordered my Americano at the terminal to realize it wasn't appropriate. The magazine went right back into my bag, were it stayed. Should I have known better? Maybe. But then, I don't think
