PCWorld examines an interesting problem: What to do when the jerk next to you is watching hardcore porn on his laptop? Or what can be done about jerks who let their kids watch movies with no headphones? Can the airline do anything to stop jerks?
According to PCWorld’s investigation into several airline’s “Contracts of Carraige”… not much can be done. From PC World:
Airlines do have rules regarding passenger conduct, however vaguely worded they may be. For example, American Airlines’ Acceptance of Passengers states: “American may refuse to transport you, or may remove you from your flight at any point, for one or several reasons, including but not limited to the following.” The document goes on to list seven examples of behavior that may cause you to be kicked off a plane, but only number six comes close to addressing the offensive behavior described in the Times: “Your conduct is disorderly, abusive, or violent, or you…refuse to obey instructions from any flight crew member.”
Is it disorderly to watch pornography on a laptop in full view of the person sitting next to you? It happened to one passenger, and she told the New York Times about it:
Recently, [a female airline passenger] was in a window seat on a full flight from Newark to San Francisco, next to a man who opened his laptop on his tray table and began watching a hard-core pornographic DVD.“It was hard to ignore, with him sitting that close,” said [the passenger], who finally got up and asked a flight attendant what could be done, since she didn’t want to engage the man. The answer: Nothing.
We guess that the only thing you can do is ask the jerk to quit watching porn. PC World asked a retaired airline captain of 36 years his opinion on the matter:
“The ticket you purchase gives you seat space on a flight in the cabin area for which you paid. If the passenger meets the criteria established during the financial exchange for that ticket and the flight departs, they have the right to go on that flight. The entire time on board the aircraft they must comply with the federal regulations governing passengers and crew on air carrier aircraft. The porn viewer does not appear to have been breaking any of those regulations.”
What do you think? What would you do?
Airline Passenger Code of Conduct, Part 1 [PC World]
(Photo: mamamusings)
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@everyone who is claiming their first amendment rights:
The First Amendment doesn’t give you the right to say whatever you want, or any rights at all. Rather, it removes several rights from the government:
Stating that you can “say whatever you want” because of the First Amendment simply isn’t true.
@G.Quagmire: “but they can’t make up rules as they go along.” Sure they can, and they can apply them inconsistently, so long as they don’t violate civil rights (e.g., racial or sexual discrimination). You have no absolute right to receive the service of a private company.
“could seat all the black people in the back of plane…” No, they couldn’t, because then you have grounds for racial discrimination, and a bona fide civil rights violation. You’re comparing apples and oranges.
If this happened to me, I don’t think I could stop laughing at first. Then, I’d be creeped out not by the porn itself, but because there was a strange man sitting in an airplane seat that practically violate personal boundaries they are so close, committing what he probably knows to be a hostile act, next to an unknown female. It’s this, not the porn, that is violating. Depsite the fact that the male passenger wasn’t masturbating, there is little difference between him and a man in a subway car rubbing one off in front of a woman.
If he worked in the industry, he’d have a privacy screen, folks. This guy was either mentally disabled or enjoying victimizing this woman.
@silenuswise: I would say that at least 2 of those examples (gay kissing & breast-feeding) fall squarely into a civil rights grey area. Personally, I can’t make the case that disallowing someone to watch porn on a plane violates his civil rights, but I bet there’s a lawyer out there who would be willing to try, and could probably make a halfway decent argument for it.
@valkin: Beat me to it. Some juvenile commenters on this forum throw around “retarded” like a funny adjective, but the man watching the porno may have been developmentally disabled, and didn’t have the social filters any non developmentally-disabled person would have. Thus, he rocked a porno in-flight.
Sorry, but it isn’t normal to sit in an airplane and roll out a porno, no matter what you “free rights” folks think. It’s ridiculous.
Man, some people have all the luck – in my DREAMS would I be stuck on a flight next to someone watching porn. I can think of a dozen fun things to do in that situation, each more embarrassing to the viewer than the last. I do have a flight tonight actually .. maybe I’ll get lucky!
You can watch all the pr0n you want next to me on the plane, just don’t be eyeballing me about my alleged flatulence, sir.
I would go back to reading my book. However, in the case of ‘no headphones’ I would say something or there might be some accidental soft drink spillage.
@The Nature Boy: I don’t think I, any of my friends, or (as far as I know) anyone I’ve ever met would disagree with you that it’s not “normal”. But at what point do you stop allowing people to view any potentially offensive (not just sexually explicit) content in public? And who gets to decide what is allowable & what is not?
In the specific case of the airlines, since you are on their property & they can make you obey a set of rules, I would say that it is their responsibility to define what is & what is not acceptable. If they don’t, then this is what you get: a guy watching porn on an airplane, a pissed off lady in the window seat, & a bunch of people on the internet debating whether or not he had the right to do watch it i.e. nothing gets accomplished.
Now that everyone travels with a laptop, iPhone, PMP or whatever & can semi-publicly view whatever content they please, how hard would it be for an airline to come up with a set of rules for acceptable content? Type up a document of do’s & don’t's, run it by the legal department, run it by the PR department, and done. Make it part of the fine print that nobody ever reads when they buy an airline ticket or part of the flight crew safety briefing that nobody ever listens to. Publish it in the in-flight magazine next to the list of snacks or in-flight entertainment. Just put the rules out there so that next time this happens, the flight attendant can point to something & say “see this? whether you know it or not, you agreed to it. now turn that shit off.”
@G.Quagmire:
No they woul not put the black people in the back of the plane.Thats the safest part of the aircraft,and probably the quietest.The black folks would either be up front(just behind first class)or not allowed on most flights.
So wait. For her to contact a flight attendant she had to climb over the guy watching the porno (do I give him the crotch or the ass?). Yet somehow she was too uptight to just ask the guy to turn it off?
I call BS.
Funny how we are ALL focused on the porn part of the original post and nobody had anything to say about kids watching DVDs on a flight without headphones (tho if someone did mention it, I missed it under all the porn). Porn is a distraction, but KIDS are an annoyance.
@deweydecimated: Seconded. At that point the airline should engage in some above and beyond customer service and provide an upgrade on the spot. Win-win for the passengers, and a win for the airline, because it will guarantee that this woman flies with them again.
I can understand why she didn’t want to engage the guy directly – if he became argumentative, she could end up hurt, or wrapped up in a situation that resulted in *her* getting in trouble with authorities.
That said, if the attendant wouldn’t help her, I think she should have stood up and said, “Is there anybody here who would like to switch seats with me? I’m afraid I haven’t much taste for the porn video my rowmate is watching, but I imagine there must be *someone* here who would like to watch it with him.”
Couldn’t you just put a magnet on his laptop when he’s not looking and hope that the hard drive shorts out?
This reminds me of the time my 80-year-old mother and I were flying, and the guy next to my mother pulled out his laptop and proceeded to watch his DVDs of “Oz.” He was in the aisle seat, and there was no way to not see what was on the screen. Thank goodness we both had brought books…
Yea I would go the route of asking the guy 1st, I meancome on, if it offends you to the extent that you complain, try and reason with him. After that just say loudly put the gay porn away.
But the laws of the land should apply, unless this flight went over canada then into international water then to LA.
As far as I’m concerned, this guy can watch whatever midget-fucking-a-one-legged-chick porn he wants IN THE PRIVACY OF HIS HOME. I truly am not interested in taking away his right to do what he wants, but it simply isn’t appropriate in a setting containing other people who didn’t opt in.
If you ask the guy to stop and he won’t, the answer is simple: take out your camera and take a picture of his face, explaining that you will be posting this on your blog, along with the details of the story. He can’t POSSIBLY object to this on the grounds of privacy, can he?
@jaredharley:
So essentially the first amendment reads that no law can be instituted to punish me for expressing my opinions.
That can easily be interpreted as “I can say whatever I want.”
The fun here is that we STILL don’t know what “porn” he was watching. Hardcore is a loose term (usually with loose chicks), and if it was just bare tits the chick beside him was just a prude.
In Canada, the porno movie Flesh Gordon has been dropped from the adult section and places in either SciFi or Comedy (depending on the rental place), and has been re-rated from american X to Canadian PG-13.
People who annoy you…
Politely tell the person that you are under the age of 18 and that what he’s doing is illegal.,, or if that’s an impossible prospect, tell the person that you’re extremely uncomfortable with watching that and after all the Taiwanese food you just ate, vomiting is a very real possibility.
food for thought: if the woman felt unable to confront him directly, seems the hostile environment case has already been made.
however, what the heck happened to manners & basic courtesy?! save the porn for personal time or get a privacy screen for it.
@Xerloq: best solution offered in this thread – love it.
People do this to make the passengers next to them uncomfortable. It’s sexual assault. Librarians get it all the time — some guy is looking at porn on the library computers and he calls over a (young) female librarian and asks her how to find more. It’s sexual assault, really — he’s using his sexuality to beliettle and intimidate her.
This is actually rather interesting. The last time I flew on vacation, my wife & I took Southwest from LA to Chicago. We both had our laptops & actually watched anime movies on the flight. Before takeoff, while we were setting our laptop up, I asked one the flight attendants what they would do if someone wanted to watch porn? He said they don’t do anything to stop them. If it bothers someone, they’ll ask the person to move to another seat – or try to move the person being offended.
I hadn’t thought about it until I read this story.
My take is, if they guy wants to watch porn, he can watch porn. If you truly cherish a free society, you’re going to have to put up with the fact that other people are going to do things that offend you. How is watching a sex movie worse than watching a violent movie?? People having sex is more offensive than, say, Saw?
Shine a flashlight in his eyes. After all, he doesn’t HAVE to look at it, he could easily look elsewhere, right?
Or kindly remind the guy that, if a kid walks by and takes a peek (hard not to in the confines of an airplane) he is a sex offender. Have fun announcing that to the neighbors!
While I partially agree that Americans are too uptight about sex, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re the standards of the country. Carrying an AK-47 isn’t a big deal in many middle eastern countries, but I’d rather not see one on a plane.
Two comments:
1) On the other end of the spectrum I sat next to a guy on a recent flight who asked the other guy in our row and me whether we would be offended if he ordered a beer during drink service. Sensitive to recovering alcoholics and/or LDS members I guess.
2) On the First Amendment, everyone does realize it goes waaaaaaaaaaaay beyond what the Constitution says, right? Basically the Supreme Court has classified speech into protected, unprotected, and less protected classes.
Political speech is the most protected, but may be restricted by the government in terms of the time, place and manner in which the speech occurs. You can protest the war and use the streets to do it, but the city government can restrict you from blocking the streets at 5:30 pm on Thursday.
Porn is among the least protected speech. Governments can’t ban it outright, but they can pass zoning regs to spread it out or keep it in one place. And although “protecting the children” and “porn leads to crime” might be stupid, specious arguments, those are the arguments that have convinced the Supreme Court.
But as was said many times before, the First Amendment sets limits on how *government* may limit speech, the Constitution sets no limits on what private entities may do to limit speech (because that’s the market’s job.)
In Tennessee it is against the law to watch porn on automobile DVD players so if he landed at BNA with the porn playing, he might get a ticket.
You say “Hey asshole, turn of the fucking porn or I’m going to complain to the flight atendant!”
Interesting note to add… I just got off a Japan Airlines flight from Vancouver to Tokyo and one of the films they offered on the seat-back entertainment was “300″. There’s a few boobs in there and an “implied sex” scene and it’s also fairly violent. Sure they have “privacy filters” on them so the person beside you can’t see them (they make the LCD look dark) but someone sitting on the aisle can see other people’s screens sitting ahead of them.
I don’t really see that as offensive material but I was surprised to see it on the flight.
he said fuck the in flight movie…literally
One answer might be found in the copyright laws, which only permit PRIVATE use of DVDs, but I think the better solution is to scream, “Stop it! Stop touching me!” It doesn’t matter if he did or not. Who’s going to believe the guy with the porn over you? They’ll move him next to the Sky Marshall in Row 1…where there’s no tray table.