Want to Watch Porn on a Plane? There's an App for That.

As this week ushers in the holiday travel season, you might notice some of your fellow travelers have eschewed the more traditional John Grisham novels and sudoku puzzles in favor of a different form of entertainment: porn.

"Secondhand smut", or unintentional viewing of someone else's porn in public, has been on the rise lately, especially on planes and trains. When porn can easily be downloaded and watched on iPhones, laptops, travel DVD players, and other mobile devices, it's bound to come into the public sphere. But what makes people think it's okay to watch Debbie Does Dallas in the Ft. Worth airport? And more importantly, will I be able to request a seat in a non-boinking section of my flight?

In a recent UK study, one in five iPhone users admitted to using their devices to download and watch porn. The headline speaks truth: there is an app for that. In fact, there are multiple apps. But are these apps being downloaded by adults or children?

It's incredibly difficult for devices like the iPhone to determine the age of the user. Smart parents might put a parental lock on the sorts of apps their teens can download, but with so many teens more tech-savvy than their folks these days, that's about as effective as hiding a stash of Playboys under the XBox. Potentially, teens with iPhones are walking around with a pocket full of unlimited porn; no generation in history has had access to so much sexually explicit and often violent material at such a young age. We don't know yet what the effects of a mobile porn culture will be on teens trying to discover sex and sexuality for themselves, but I would predict that unlimited access to porn for teen boys will form some unhealthy sexual ideas.

Even if, magically, everyone watching iSmut is over 18, there are still some serious privacy issues at play. I don't really want to sit next to someone on an airplane for 3 hours while he watches Blasian Sensation 4 or some other cinematic masterpiece. If I'm a mom, I certainly don't want my curious 10-year-old watching violent or degrading acts towards women over some guy's shoulder on the subway. People have a right not to be blind-sided with pornography in public. Have we as a society deemed sex and pornography so necessary that we have to consume it like food or water? Has porn become so common, so pedestrian that we shamelessly whip it out whenever we have a few minutes to kill? What happened to simply respecting other people's privacy?

Mainstream pornography is created for men, and it centers around the commodification of women as sex objects and tools of male pleasure. Porn is a conversation between men about women, and it's often violent, derogatory, and sexist.  The porn industry makes money off the idea of female pleasure and sexuality as a commodity, not an experience for a woman or a mutual act between two people. As Andrea Dworkin said, “One of the things that pornography has done, is changed the way women experience their bodies so that sex is what you look like, not what you touch or what you feel and do.”

When women become nothing more than tools for male pleasure, then it's ok to buy them, sell them, use them, enslave them, rape them, and traffic them. And now female sexuality is objectified and commodified to the extent that people can casually watch a film of a woman being coerced into sex in an airport lounge.

So if you happen to sit next to someone watching tiny, pixelated dirty movies you don't want to see this holiday season, feel free to exact the following revenge: talk to him. Ask him how he thinks the women in the film are feeling, and whether or not they chose to be there. Ask him if he knows that one in five pornographic images on the Internet are of children, and whether or not the people in his movie were kids when they were first filmed or photographed sexually. Talk to him about human trafficking and the millions of women and girls who are forced into the sex industry against their will each year, raped, and enslaved.

One way or another, you'll counter the effects of a pocket full of porn. Hmmm ... I wonder if there's an app for that?

Photo credit: William Hook