So the woman is only believed if an “MMA dude” can corroborate her story otherwise the guy faces no consequences? And you think that would be a good outcome?
Probably both are true.
I see what you did there with the “happy ending.” I think sleepyhead was the only one who got one on this trip.
Very much this. I think most people are loathe to “make a scene”. Way more uncomfortable for a woman to face this (and much more likely to be assault (not necessarily in a legal sense but in a “lets mess with this woman” way that is less likely to happen to a male seatmate)), but I think a lot of people would be figuring out if they could just ignore it.
Or just maybe women have had so much experience not being believed about sexual harassment that that’s the default assumption.
Reason #139 Why I Don’t Fly
I’ve got a strict Per Mile Quota. Can’t keep up with Air Travel
Nash Bozard is discussing the event on his Radio Dead Air podcast tonight.
Seems he’s not alone (heh) in his endeavors .
I see a Samuel L Jackson sequel in the near future
Age 76. I wonder if he’s got dementia of some kind.
Dementia was one of my suggestions in Post #2.
~VOW
Equal rights for women doesn’t mean only that women have equal rights to behave exactly as the men have been used to behaving.
It means that women have an equal right to take part in deciding the rules of behavior.
This isn’t of benefit only to women. Nobody, of any gender, needs to be continuously and perpetually able to defend themselves, at any moment, from the actions of somebody who’s obviously grossly (in either or both senses of the word) violating basic standards of normal public behavior; no matter what their relative size is, no matter what their physical condition is, no matter what their social or physical skills are, no matter to what degree they are or aren’t capable of producing calm coherent sentences to a stranger under pressure, no matter what their experiences have been over their lifetime, no matter whether this is just one more thing piled on top of a particularly bad day. Pull it off when you can, whatever gender you are; but you can still be a Manly Man (or a Womanly Woman, or just plain a Functional Human Being Worthy of Respect) if on some particular Tuesday afternoon you can’t.
Aside from that part of the issue:
The article doesn’t say which of them was in the aisle seat. (I’m presuming it wasn’t three across because there’s no reference to what a third person in the row was or wasn’t doing.) If the wanker had the aisle seat: then in order to get out past him she’d have had to step over him. Since he was already massively violating social custom, there’s no reason to think he’d have politely pulled his feet back and sideways to let her out; she’d have had to quite literally step over him. While he was masturbating. Think about how that would have to work, physically, for a minute.
So if he had the aisle seat, she was physically trapped. Push the button, you don’t know how long it takes for a response. Start yelling, he yanks his hand out, says you just started yelling for no reason, and you look like a damn fool.
If she’s got the aisle seat, she can stand up and walk away. But until she does that, probably nobody can see what he’s doing; and after she does that, all he has to do is pull his hand out. What’s she going to do then? Complain of behavior there’s no longer any sign of? Try to change seats on her own, which is no longer normal airline behavior? Go sit back down next to the wanker and wait for him to start up again?
And in any of those cases – even if she stands up from the aisle seat and is immediately granted a new one with no hassle, or pushes the button from the window seat and is immediately moved on request – the wanker has gotten exactly what he wanted: he made the woman next to him uncomfortable, and he knows it. That’s what he’s getting his jollies from.
What she actually did was probably the only thing that stood any significant chance of making him at least equally uncomfortable in return, at least without also getting herself charged with physical battery; and the only thing that stood any significant chance of preventing him from doing it to somebody else next time he got on an airplane. I’d like to think I would have had the presence of mind to do the same thing.
According to the probable cause affidavit which was linked earlier in the thread, she was in seat 11E and he was in seat 11F. According to the Southwest seat charts I could find, that would put her in the middle seat and him in the window.
Which does make me wonder: what about the person in the aisle seat 11D? Because I can’t imagine anyone sitting in the middle seat if the aisle was free.
Does add details to the overall situation. Not saying this person should have acted in any specific manner, but trying to put myself in that situation, I wonder how the aisle person would have been unaware - or how/why the center person would not have at least elbowed the aisle person.
I commuted by train for years, two seats on one side & three on the other. you have three people all in a row, with a person between them. Especially if the aisle seater is doing something to pass the time - shuteye, reading, watching a movie, or working on a laptop/tablet if Mr. window seat isn’t making big arm motions that would get caught out of the corner of one’s eye or loud noises it might very well be out of the field of view of the aisle seater.
But the schlong, dude. Hard to keep the schlong hidden.
He was both sitting & wearing clothes, both of which make certain parts not as noticeable as if he were naked & standing
I can’t believe that almost 200 posts into the thread and nobody has posted the relevant Seinfeld clip:
