Check your privilege!
Here’s a little ditty that went everywhere, a woman throwing her seat back on a plane and a bespectacled man with over-tweezered eyebrows responding with an insistent drum-beat on her head rest.
The little clip got sold to an agency, hit millions of views, tens of thousands of retweets and got turned, naturally, into a men-brutalising-woman thing.
Sadly, neither party had an abundance of melanin thereby removing the important racist angle; a mistake, I think, as the reclining woman represents unthinking colonialism occupying foreign territory and the over-tweezered man the brave native with only his hands to fight such advanced and overwhelming weaponry.
That video of the woman in a reclined seat on a plane and the man in the seat behind her punching her chair:
1. He’s a piece of shit
2. He’d never do that to a male passenger
3. Men are socialized into owning public space.
5. This is what happens when a woman owns it— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) February 13, 2020
The common conclusion, among reasonable citizens, I think, would be: two pests both as annoying as hearing the scurry of critter feet on the ceiling boards at night.
I’m not a recliner.
Take it back an inch, maybe, long-haul, but the good citizen wedges a pillow against the wall or on the head-rest and deals with it. A smart traveller will bang a foursome of sleepers and wake up in Denpasar, Singapore or half-way across the Pacific.
If you want to sleep, buy a biz ticket.
Once, on a fifty-minute puddle jump, a clown threw his seat into full recline with a contemptuous thunk as the plane started to climb, jamming me into my seat.
Couldn’t eat, couldn’t move.
I didn’t respond with a gentle tattoo on the head-rest.
Now, you, friends, some countrymen.
In what camp do you fall?