The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Coffee, Tea, or Reverse Anal Cowgirl

American Airlines created a tempest in a hot pot recently when it announced that it’s offering wireless internet access on its long-haul flights. Lufthansa already tried this, but found that its passengers didn’t particularly want it; Lufthansa is trying to get its in-flight internet service up and running again with T-Mobile. Similarly, United, Southwest and other airlines have long been working on offering wi-fi, without much success. The American test comes amid a flurry of announcements that “we’re working on it” from those airlines and many others.

In the meantime, the commentator pissoff over American’s announcement wasn’t based, as you might expect, on the fact that airlines are adding bells and whistles in a time when fewer and fewer people can afford to fly. Sure, the Dallas Morning News felt it necessary to reassure its readers: “Don’t worry. Officials for American and [wi-fi provider] Aircell say the ground-based system — called Gogo — won’t enable any voice-based functions, so you won’t have to listen to your neighbor yammering away,” which frankly wasn’t my first worry, since you still have to hear your neighbor yammering away to whoever they’re traveling with. This, however, was a small concern of the news media; the bulk of the coverage was given to the fact that American wouldn’t be censoring in-flight internet access.

That’s right, people would be able to consume porn on airplanes. Without, you know, bringing a DVD or a magazine or a digital file they downloaded to their laptop before they got on board. Now, even the most poorly-prepared travelers can still mainline sleaze while at 35,000 feet.

This is clearly not something a company like American does without thinking about it first. A Fox News story back in June quoted Doug Backelin, American’s Manager of In-Flight Technology, as saying “We already have policies and procedures to deal with inappropriate material that people bring on board, including magazines and DVDs.”

Tim Maxwell of Aircell was quoted by Fox News as saying “You’re free to surf wherever you want to, but there’s peer pressure and the presence of flight attendants . . . American has [a] clear code of conduct with passengers. If people are viewing pornography, being the best example, it is something American is empowering flight attendants to deal with.”

That last bit, relying on flight attendents, inspired CNN commentator Mike Galanos to blow his top: “First of all, filter out the crap! I don’t want my son sitting next to some pervert who’s watching porn.”

Flight attendants are not thrilled with this either, claiming that with airlines cutting back on the number of attendants and requiring them to perform increased safety-related duties, and the last thing they want to do is waste their time policing internet access. The Fox News article quoted Sara Nelson of the United Airlines union as saying “Flight attendants are already over-taxed. There is no way we can take on any additional responsibility here.” the article then went on to observe, in regular sky-is-falling fashion, that “ . . .Attendants will be grappling with such moral conundrums as: How many nude scenes make a movie too racy? When does an action flick become too violent? Can a mother complain if her child is seated next to someone watching an R-rated movie or shopping for a bikini on a Victoria’s Secret Web site?”

But as American already noted, this is already an issue, and has been ever since the very first traveling businessman held up a centerfold and told the chick sitting next to him that he reads it for the articles.

The airlines rightly figured that nobody was stupid enough to think you couldn’t already watch porn or shop for a bikini in the air, but news commentators don’t seem to have gotten that. I mean . . . these people fly a lot, don’t they? Have they never noticed anyone shopping for a bikini while sitting next to them, or did it just not bother them until the possibility arose that they might be doing it on the Internet!? Is shopping for a garter belt on a Victoria’s Secret web site somehow different than doing so in print, or glancing through Cosmopolitan with its headlines like “Your Va-Jay-Jay: Fascinating New Facts About Your Lovely Lady Parts” and “What He Secretly Hopes You’ll Do To Him In Bed”? For fuck’s sake, in the early 1990s I used to travel extensively for business, and still vividly remember the time a guy sitting next to me on a flight from Houston to Tampa wanted to compare notes on whether the knockers on this month’s Pet were real or fake. (They were fake). I, myself, have been guilty of reading porno on transcontinental flights, though invariably in manuscript form with a red pencil and a sour expression on my face, rather than a hard-on.

I’m not suggesting we should live in a boundary-less society — quite the contrary. Personally, I’d like a little more stringent boundaries in public — strange medicine for a porno purveyor. Maybe I’m a naughty Victorian at heart.

But the culprit here in the commentators freaking out is technophobia crossed with sexophobia, a familiar cocktail and the favorite libation of the mainstream media. The specter of a passenger watching streamed porn at 35,000 feet is scary to some because it represents the unbridled access to sexual entertainment that’s available with technology. It’s a stand-in for sexually suggestive entertainment showing up in places that might be uncomfortable for some people — online, on TV, on T-shirts, in Britney Spears videos . . .. wherever. Sexual mores vary, and seeing too much of someone else’s sexuality is at times uncomfortable. It’s not appropriate to watch porn everywhere, but this is a potential issue whenever sexual entertainment is available at all. I’ll be the first to admit that the more available porn is, the more likely people are to stumble across it and be pissed off by it — and their pissoff may be justified. But having unfettered internet access online is at best a minor development in the porn-is-everywhere department.

With the ubiquity of mobile media players, laptop computers, video downloads, adult DVDs and portable DVD players, any adult who can’t already figure out how to get his or her porn onto an airplane probably should not be allowed to fly.

And if that clueless person, given in-flight access to the net, sets out to invade his or her fellow passengers’ personal space with a graphic cumshot splayed across a 17-inch screen, then drop kick ‘em into the same row as the dude who buttonholed me to talk about Miss January’s funbags — I’m sure they’ll get along famously.

Thomas Roche’s erotic has appeared recently in Tasting Him, Tasting Her, Rubber Sex, Spanked, and other anthologies. He blogs about politics, Bigfoot, and the Mafia at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 2 September 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.