by idtm

Created on: August 27, 2008

Flying is increasingly being held responsible for both global warming and global dimming. To these sins should now be added encouraging moral turpitude.

There is something inherently dodgy about flying.

After, "May I see your ticket and passport please?" the next question from the Check-in staff is, "Could anyone have interfered with your bags?"

It is wholly unclear to me if interfering with bags is a form of sexual deviancy. I imagine that these days it is perfectly legal among consenting adults. I am certainly not aware of anyone who knowingly interferes with bags or would admit it to a total stranger if they did. There is undoubtedly a tax-deductible charity dedicated to the welfare of bags to which such behaviour can be reported.

Assuming you can satisfy the Check-in staff that your bags remain virtuously chaste, you still have to run the gauntlet of airport security. Leaving aside the improbability of running through security when the queues last longer than Methuselah's lifetime, the security guards' obsession for removing shoes is almost as disturbing as bag-molestation. There is something very unsettling about public displays of mass foot fetishism at an airport near you.

The impression that the security area is some kind of fetishist convention is compounded by the unfortunate requirement of security for the removal of various additional articles of clothing. This applies especially in front of a congregation of travellers when the removal of leather belts with metal buckles is concerned.

Of course you should be pleased that once the sanctuary of aircraft has been gained the airline is now concerned with your "Wellbeing". The thought that flying includes chased bags and foot fixationists to satisfy the more alarming appetites of adult passengers cannot yet be safely dismissed.

By the time you get to the safety video it is all rather too late - you are a captive audience and you have been reassured that if the aircraft falls out of the sky everything is going to be alright. You can hide your face in a little yellow latex mask "and breath normally" until the danger is over. The little yellow latex masks, thoughtfully supplied by the airlines, will be dangled tantalisingly in front of you, rather in the manner of apple-bobbing. In the Halloween children's party game participants try to catch a suspended apple in their mouths, in the airline version the apples are replaced with latex masks. This avocation of asphyxiophilia combined with pederasty and sitophilia, especially in the absence of oxygen, cannot be considered normal behaviour.

To add to the air of watching some kind of more extreme adult movie, the safety video goes on to encourage dressing up in inflatable rubber wear and blowing alternately into red rubber tubes and white plastic whistles. As the plane falls out of the sky, if the adrenalin rush induced by arcane sadomasochistic practices advanced by the airlines qualifies as a new form of "safety", it is one that has, hitherto, passed by me.

Flying is clearly the new pornography.

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