I don’t understand this. First, do you disagree that women are socialized differently from men? This is so fundamental that I think I would just drop the discussion if you think there’s any doubt about that.
And then the “sexual” part of the sentence I don’t understand at all.
Don’t you see what would have happened? Your mom would’ve pressed the button, the guy would have zipped up, the flight attendant would’ve come over and the guy would’ve claimed she was crazy and making things up.
And if he unzipped and did it again once the flight attendant had left, rinse and repeat. It would’ve looked very bad…….for your mom. Maybe the guy would point and laugh at your mother and tell the other passengers “That crazy woman is so hot for my dick, she keeps telling the flight attendant I whipped it out. Wishful thinking on her part, right?”
And your mom would’ve humiliated herself for nothing, unless she got in trouble for harassing her seatmate and causing a disturbance. Given the way an airplane is laid out, there was probably no other passenger in a position to see what was happening except for your mom, so it’s a classic he said / she said. The fact that the conduct was so outrageous works in his favor because it’s hard to believe that someone could be so brazen.
When something is hard to believe, people don’t believe it……that’s one reason men have gotten away with kidnapping young girls and holding them prisoner for years. If someone calls in a report and says “I see suspicious activity in my neighbor’s backyard, I see him bringing meals to a shed in the backyard and sometimes I hear a woman crying, I think maybe he’s holding someone prisoner”, the police probably aren’t going to give the call a lot of attention. The accusation is just too outrageous. They are probably going to assume the caller has an agenda.
Of course, you’ve probably never been sexually harassed, much less gaslighted over the harassment…….yet, you can pontificate like some moral authority over how this woman behaved.
I think she did the exact right thing, sometimes when you are being harassed, you’ve got to give the guy a little bit of rope and help him hang himself. If she had behaved like you suggested, nothing would’ve happened to the guy and she might have embarrassed herself or worse. Letting him go on until she could obtain photographic evidence was the right thing to do.
I mean no disrespect, but this seems like the plot of a bad movie, and not real life. There is no way that any flight attendant would react that way. Your view of the way that a flight attendant would react seems absurd.
Do you think he’d admit it? Of course not.
What do you think the flight attendant would do, absent an admission of guilt? Seriously, because if I were the flight attendant I have no idea what I would do. Maybe move the woman to an empty seat in another row, if available? Is she going to get into an altercation with him if he vehemently denies it? Tape his pants shut?
Bottom line is, no matter what happens, he is going to loudly proclaim his innocence unless there is evidence. And unless it turns out he has a history of this type of behavior, some people are going to believe him, not her.
And as for “bad movie plot”……dude……by the time we got to “guy whacks off four times on an airplane”, that ship had sailed. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, life has been a bad movie plot for about six years now.
It might not go down exactly as I described, but if she didn’t get real evidence, he would’ve claimed innocence and probably gotten away with it.
I’m not an airplane expert, but I would think a reasonable response would be to move the woman to a new seat. Okay, everyone calm down here, we don’t know what happened, but she is uncomfortable and we are moving her to another seat. Sir, we are not saying that you are guilty, but we are moving her to another seat and (if the plane is stuffed full) asking someone else to sit in her previous seat.
If the next person complains of jerkish (rim shot) behavior, then perhaps the airline has more powerful evidence.
In short, this doesn’t seem like a hard (sorry) problem to solve.
Except for the part where the guy gets away with it.
As I look at it, by purchasing a ticket on an airline flight, I have not been deputized as a federal agent to convict a fellow passenger of a misdemeanor. I think most reasonable people would just want to get away, and this person had ample opportunity to do so, which is why some of us are confused about why she didn’t.
So…NIMBY?
Why aren’t you blasting the guy for thinking this is appropriate? Take HIS parents to task for not raising him right?
I just reread the thread and there is a lot about how the woman may have been so horrified that she froze, unable to act.
That is a very real thing and it very well may be what happened. But also, maybe not.
I’ve been sexually harassed hundreds of times, no exaggeration. Most of it probably falls under the category of “sexually oriented comments or conversations made with the intent of causing psychological discomfort”, but I’ve dealt with worse. I’ve never had anyone masturbate in front of me in an enclosed space but I’ve dealt with obscene phone calls from men I worked with and men displaying graphic pornography on job sites. I was an attractive woman in male-dominated workplaces, in the entertainment industry, in construction, in sales- much of it in the days before I had any legal protection against harassment. I never worked for a company with an HR department.
Men that harass you are looking for a reaction. They want to upset you.They want to see you blush and run away and tell on them so they can gaslight you. And some women of my generation, we refused to give them that. Sometimes that meant just ignoring them at first and if it escalated instead of stopping, dealing with it strategically. That could mean a clear, well documented complaint. That could mean discreetly confiding in a couple of your male coworkers (the good ones outnumbered the bad) who would then have a little talk with the harasser.
But in the moment, you never let it get to you. You never let anyone see that it bothered you. You never blushed, stammered or ran away and you were careful who you told.
Then they would either stop, or escalate. See, harassers are gaslighters. That first pass, that first attempt to make you uncomfortable, it may be pretty subtle- which leads to people maybe thinking you are overreacting, which can ultimately work against you.
I wasn’t there, but I’m willing to bet that Mr.Jack Itoff didn’t just whip it out and flog it the first time. It may have been ambiguous……is he not feeling well?, is he adjusting his underwear?……then maybe the next time he was a little less discreet and I don’t know what he’s doing but it really looks like he’s jerking off, then the third time is OMG he is…. and then on the fourth time you take some pictures and ruin his life.
Good for her. Frankly, I think you might be judging her because she didn’t go all apoplectic at the sight of a penis, but good for her. There was an FOAF story going around when I was in college about a woman who was confronted by a man who exposed himself and said “What do you think of this, baby?” And she stared it down for several seconds then looked up at him and said “It looks somewhat like a penis, only much smaller.”
We all hoped we could be that smooth if that situation ever……you know……arose.
ETA: I was once at a bus stop when a man stopped and offered me a ride. The car was a off-duty stretch limo. I got in, made it clear I wasn’t a hooker, poured myself a drink from the bar at his invitation,let him drive me across town, gave him a fake phone number and went on my way. We all react differently.
A while back, a Doper got on here and wanted to know how he could disguise watching porn during an airplane flight. I’m not the only person who told him that if he couldn’t refrain from doing that for the length of a flight, he shouldn’t be traveling.
I think most of your post was very informative and I thank you for it. But you lost me here. Nobody has said to go “apoplectic.” Stand up, and calmly tell the flight attendant that is man is masturbating. He is not adjusting his underwear as you saw him expose his penis. You would like a different seat.
It is not my intention to diminish what you and others have experienced in the past, and those things were most horribly wrong, but this is a public thing on a commercial airliner. For whatever sins in the past our society has made you suffer, that thread is down the hall, third door on the left. There is no way that anyone on a commercial flight would tell her to shut up and sit back down, The very idea is absurd.
Well, I guess you gotta find something to keep you occupied on those long flights.
I’m not sure I totally understand the situation, all jokes aside. Did this guy have his hand down his pants? Did he have his swollen member out and was actively stroking the shaft for all to see? Did he…reach fruition all four times or were the first three false starts? How long (time wise) were each of these four sessions? If the guy had his member out, I can’t understand why somebody didn’t say something within the first ten seconds. So many questions…
Pretty sure he wouldn’t have done it at all had it been a man “observing” instead.
Good on her to get evidence though. As mentioned previously, it would likely have fizzled away in a he said/she said manner, as many of these cases do, sadly.
I’d hope if I was ever in such a situation I’d spam the Call button so much it’d sound like winning the big prize on The Price Is Right
… come on down, indeed
Few details in the linked articles, but IIRC they described him pulling down his pants such that his dick was exposed, and at least one suspected ejaculation after which he was licking his fingers. No clear info I recall as to time expired, tho a poster googled the flight time as IIRC just under 3 hrs.
Easier said than done. I’m a guy, but in that situation, I’d be shocked and very uncomfortable, but standing up and saying something would make me even more uncomfortable.
I don’t know what would actually happen, but I don’t think this is nearly as absurd as you do, at least if the guy hides it and denies it and you’re the only one who saw it. How could the flight attendant or anyone else tell whcih one of you was the crazy person?
There doesn’t need to be a judicial resolution of it. The solution is clear on its face. You move the woman to another seat; have her switch with some MMA type strong dude flying alone. If nothing else happens, great. If MMA dude says that the guy is wanking it, you now have two people and the woman is believed. If the woman complains that a second guy is wanking it, maybe you then think that she was making it up.
You think that if you move the woman and the guy doesn’t do it again, all is well and everyone can go home without making a fuss.
If I were that woman that would not be a happy ending for me 
. I would want the guy to face consequences.
hehe…tip your servers.
What you are saying makes sense, but it is not what others are saying. You seem to be saying that the woman is wily, keeping silent to gather evidence to make a case against him to officers once the plane lands. Others are saying she is too afraid to say anything.
I don’t speak for every poster in the thread, but from my perspective, I just want to get away from the guy and not be an unpaid air marshal.
Okay, that crosses a line. I can understand the guy’s need to rub one off but licking his fingers is too much.