What’s To Be Done About Porn on Public Transit?

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  11.12.09 | 3:32 PM ET

Forget about the Mealtime Seat-Recliner or the Armrest Hog—now there’s a new breed of bad seatmate to worry about: the Porn Watcher. This Washington Post story provides a couple of horror stories as it takes a look at the ways in-flight wireless, personal video devices and other technological advances have brought pornography into the public domain. The most shocking thing about the article? In two of the incidents described, the viewers in question left the audio on for all their co-passengers to hear—in my book, that’s unacceptable even if you’re listening to something as inoffensive as Kenny G.


Eva Holland is co-editor of World Hum. She is a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a contributor to Vela. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


6 Comments for What’s To Be Done About Porn on Public Transit?

Mike Barish 11.12.09 | 11:35 PM ET

There is nothing inoffensive about the music (or hair) of Kenny G.

Rosanne 11.13.09 | 1:32 AM ET

Behaviors that are lude and vulgar; be it porn or even small infractions are only there to remind us of a culture that is sick and in decline. Rather than be offended I try to look at the bigger picture of an uneducated and/or maleducated society.  I believe many of these infractions are done so in public because the perpetrators are debased. They are not able to better themselves so they try to lower the standards of us all to try and even the playing field. These persons of ill repute are of no value to the world and in other time periods would have been seen as rejects. Certainly there would be a sense of shame because of behavior that detracts from us all, but because we have all fallen, at times, in our lives we accept this moral decline. The mountains in life are for dreamers like Martin Luther King or Helen Keller or George Washington. Those who have risen above the rest to look beyond, but who in our time can do the same.

TambourineMan 11.13.09 | 1:55 AM ET

Dang, I had no idea my “For Your Thighs Only” DVD was upsetting fellow passengers. I promise to be more mindful in the future.

James Moore 11.13.09 | 2:03 PM ET

Sadly, nothing to be done.  The train has left the station.  The genie is out of the bottle.  The likelihood of many members of our culture to get a clue is as small as the idea that we could ‘pacify’ a country like Vietnam with napalm or Afghanistan with more troops.

Grizzly Bear Mom 11.13.09 | 4:44 PM ET

I ride DC’s metro daily.  Just this morning a youth was playing his music without earphones (which is against the law.)  I thought of singing (awfully) to drown him, but but decided not to do so.  If he had been as lude and vulgar as to play porn, I would think that many people would have joined me in drowning him out. Are we allowed to throw his equipment under the train if he had done so?  Notice I refrained from throwing HIM onto the tracks.

daniel 11.13.09 | 8:55 PM ET

Wow, Rosanne’s comment might be the ridiculously bombastic comments on “the days of yore” that I’ve seen lately. It has nothing to do with ‘people these days’ being any more vulgar or ill-mannered than they were in New York in 1970s, Paris in the 1790s, or Europe in the so-called ‘dark ages’. It has to do with technology, pure and simple. I’m tired of people sounding like fans of Howard Beale, or for that matter Malthus, these days. It’s a tired argument of the old and bitter. There were no better days of yore, and there never will be.

That said, I’d be just as upset with someone next to me on an airplane playing Kenny G as watching porn, or heck, the soundtrack to the porno might just be Kenny G. If someone has headphones on and somehow a screen that no one else could see, then I really don’t care. Until that’s the case, I’d hope people refrain from doing that.

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