The recent controversy between Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines has spurred a flurry of commentaries -- some thoughtful and others merely outraged. To recap: Kevin Smith, famous Hollywood director (he directed Clerks and Chasing Amy) is a very large man, and he was thrown off a Southwest flight from Oakland to Burbank because the crew decided he was too big.
Since the problems of Hollywood celebrities are, like Smith himself, often larger than life, newspaper travel sections and blogs have been suddenly flooded with stories of people who have been seriously inconvenienced by being seated next to people who are obese. Airlines are scrambling to try and make up rules as they go along: have the obese buy two seats, or pay a premium, or force them to fly in business class.
Let me be clear about two things: First, lest anyone mistake this as a case of special pleading, I am of average height and weight. Second, I log nearly 90,000 miles a year traveling to speaking engagements. I've been seated next to all kinds of people who made my flight less commodious. I really do sympathize with the passengers who are inconvenienced. It's unpleasant.
But why single out that unpleasantness to punish? Why would being seated next to a fat person worse than sitting next to someone who obviously has not bathed in several days, or hasn't brushed his teeth in what smells like a week? Or someone who talks constantly while you are trying to read or sleep? Or the person with obvious bladder issues who is seated by the window? Or, worst of all to some business types, the baby who might actually cry, as babies often do.
Once I was seated next to a skinhead with a swastika tattooed on his enormous bicep. I did not sleep.
I think that overweight people receive a special opprobrium, because we regard their obesity as a moral failing, evidence of lack of self-control. We're a culture that doesn't particularly like any visible sign of appetite.
There are several reasons that fat flyers are being singled out now. One is structural: flying has become so unpleasant - and more and more of us are doing it. Flights are full, especially on major routes, and seats are significantly smaller, and the crush for overhead bin space looks like Times Square subway doors at rush hour. Since there is no food on flights, people bring bags and coolers of their own. The phrase "leg room" is an oxymoron. Flying coach is like booking trans-Atlantic passage in steerage. We should be protesting the erosion of amenities -- like comfortable seats, free checked luggage and edible food.
Incidentally, that is not exactly the fault of the obese. But added to that already cramped anxiety of flying in the first place is the new current cultural concern about the national epidemic of obesity, which has encouraged some to declare war not on the condition but on the obese themselves. It's one of the few hostile prejudices left available to us. Imagine if Kevin Smith were simply a black man, and the flight staff acceded to passenger preferences not to have to sit next to a man of color? Or what about an orthodox Jew on Iran Air? Or a burquaed Syrian on El Al?
And that is important. Passenger preferences cannot determine these policies. That was decided by the U.S. Circuit Court in Diaz v. Pan Am, a landmark case in 1971 about a whether a man could become a flight attendant. Pan Am argued that passengers preferred being served their cocktails by attractive women, and that the sorts of men who would be attracted to the job would be effeminate anyway - thus, according to Pan Am's expert witness, the best selling author Eric Berne, might make a male passenger "uneasy" because the flight attendant "might arouse feelings in him he would rather not have aroused." Pan Am lost. Passenger preferences cannot set the ground rules for etiquette in the air.
If there are legitimate safety issues, let's debate all of them. What about disabled people, relieved of their wheelchairs, seated in aisle seats? What about other disabilities that might make swift and easy exits more difficult? The blind? The deaf?
In our society we are inconvenienced by a lot of different people. It's called democracy. It's noisier and messier that aristocratic systems - at least if you are an aristocrat. Everyone gets a chance. No one is held back. Democracy is inconvenient. It doesn't seem fair sometimes.
But though we are a democracy, we are also a very stratified society. And so I suggest that those who are inconvenienced by flying with the fat do what those who are inconvenienced by the unwashed masses: avoid them. You can live in a gated community, avoid taking mass transit, and vacation in an exclusive resort. And fly in business class. The seats are bigger, and the air is so much purer in the front of the plane.
If you choose to fly in coach, you fly with the masses. And the masses come in many shapes and sizes. We contain multitudes, often in one body.
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1. Fat people are discriminated against in a variety of ways.
2. Airlines punish (discriminate) against obese people because they are inherently bigoted.
3. Airlines’ service is awful in an endless number of ways and continue to get worse.
Let's take on number 1. I agree. Obese folks are often treated less well by the general public and in customer service situations than "healthy" weight people.
2. Sorry, but airlines do not have a prejudice of the obese. They have rules that assure everything is done to accommodate obese people (i.e. if there is at least one open seat on the plane the heavy person will be assigned the seat next to it in order to have two seats - even if it means separating family/friends.) Airlines in the U.S. are all struggling to stay in business. The last thing any of them want is bad press. They also want everyone flying them to have a good enough experience to come back (fat vs. skinny people's money - both are just as green). Airlines often lose money on flights that are full because the average fare paid is not enough to pay for the costs of the flight. So if seats were made wider, even if only 4 or 5 per plane - the economics would be devastating.
The author suggested that this was a case of prejudice equal to racism. Absurd. This is a case space, economics, and in extreme cases, safety. If someone is SO large that they will dramatically impede, slow, or prevent the evacuation of some passengers, it may simply be unfair to everyone on board. If you are so large you cannot fit through an over-wing exit, you are a hazard. It's not discrimination. I want everyone to be able to fly. The author mentioned the handicapped. There are procedures in place for non-ambulatory passengers, the blind, the hearing impaired, that the cabin crew act on that prevents these passengers from interfering with the egress of everyone else. There are no possible procedures that could create a positive outcome when a person is very obese.
The third point is pretty much unrelated. The author feels that flying coach has become a terrible experience. With regard to seat width and pitch, all major airlines in the U.S. are almost identical overall. And though I hear it over and over and over again, the width and pitch have been consistent for the last 30 years (with the exception of experiments by some airlines to offer more room for which passengers were not willing to pay even 5 dollars more for). He claims there's no food. It's true Southwest doesn't serve food, but most of their flights are relatively short. Continental still serves food to every passenger on longer domestic flights. Pretty much all the rest sell snacks on flight over two hours and sell healthy sandwiches and salads on flights over 3 hours. Other complaints.....overhead bins are too small.....overhead bins on most airlines have been expanded on mainline jets, and it's very rare now that any carry-on's must be checked.....seats are less and less comfortable.....most airlines in the U.S. have upgraded their seats to more comfortable ergonomic seats about every ten years - seats in coach today have adjustable headrests, lumbar support, and articulating seat bottoms. Caveat! I'm not saying it's always fun or as pleasant as laying on a seaside hammock. I'm simply offering the facts and correcting the author.
Take Tiger Woods for example. I have seen comments that lead me to believe that some people have no problem with Tiger's "appetite" for a veritable smorgasbord of women! Celebrities and other folks with an excess of money like to have the biggest Hummer, the most ostentatious jewels, for no other reason than because they want those things, and that's how they prove their worth to the rest of us. And we just eat that up, because we have an insatiable appetite for gossip.
Lets talk about cars and parking spaces instead of people and airplane seats. What if you paid $350 for a parking spot, a compact one since you can't afford the $1000 for one of those fancy premium spots. These spots are designed to fit a car of average length and width.
When you pull your car into the parking lot, there's a Hummer H2 parked in the spot next to yours such that two of its wheels are actually sitting in your parking spot. You just happen to drive a fairly nice minivan- not the smallest of vehicles, but it's small enough to fit into its spot without bulging out into the spot next door. If you were parked between two mini-vans, it'd be tight but you would still fit. Since that H2 is actually in your spot, you can't even park there. You paid $350 for that space, and you can't even use it. What about if two Hummers drove up at the same time, and neither could park in spaces next to each other. Who wins?
I don't think that you've truly thought your argument through all the way. Should I just chalk it up to "democracy" and pay another $350 because I was unlucky enough to be seated next to someone who took up part of my seat?
Do you agree with that? Do you have a right to part of my seat that I don't have?
I also believe medicine and government have been part of the problem, we certainly aren't getting thinner on their guidelines, which change every 15 yrs. Read up on the "grain turning into glucose" problem. I don't think people are being told to eat the right things.
/snark
Back to reality, just like Republicans attacking the poor for using emergency rooms, this hatred of obese people on planes is misdirected anger. The real villain in the story is the increasingly cramped, undignified way ALL of us have to travel (let alone to live). Fat people are just as much victimized by this as anyone else.
I'm not especially fat, but I have extremely broad shoulders. Flying is extremely uncomfortable for me, as I have to wedge myself into tiny seats and then essentially twist 45 degrees just to fit without elbowing the person next to me, of leaving my shoulder and arm in the aisle to be dislocated by a 300 pound drink cart. Just like many obese people, this is not entirely my fault, and yet you wouldn't know it from the glares of my fellow passengers.
Like cats trapped in a sack, we'll claw each other apart in our blind fury, rather than turning that rage on the people who shoved us together in the first place. It's sad, really.
I am one of those people relieved of a wheel chair during flight --
I was on a transatlantic flight when a group (15 or so) of people totally ignored the smoking ban, pushed past the flight attendant's beverage carts were rude and scoffed at any attempt to get them to sit down...
We the passengers were held hostage in a manner of speaking...
their only comeuppance was when we exited the plane to customs everyone except this merry ban was waved through...
Kevin Smith was singled out and embarrassed...