Jaunted

Now we recognize that we're excessively skeeved out by in-flight porn, and so we're not exactly objective on the issue of airplane behavior. But the writeup quoted a victim's advocate who had trouble imagining how someone could get comfortable enough in public to view child porn, so let's see if we can crack that particular nut.

It seems like at some point people began acting as if sitting in airplane seats made them invisible. There's a degree to which we've all—collectively—become a little too comfortable treating flights as personal spaces. We're serious about this.

There's a "you can't see me" spectrum running from the mostly harmless stupidity of inflatable pillows through the gross spectacle of in-flight soft-core magazines through the public consumption of illegal pornography. And while there's obviously no equivalence between one and the other and the other—there really are simply no comparisons, implied or otherwise—there is that common thread about privacy.

There are people who really act as if putting on headphones and opening up a laptop makes the world go away. It doesn't.

On the other hand, maybe we shouldn't over-analyze this. Anyone who looks at child porn is so far gone that trying to reverse engineer their motives and psychology is probably a lost cause.

[Photo: Phillip Capper / Wiki Commons]