On Monday, July 2, 2018 Alaska Airlines passengers were settling in for the four-hour flight from New York City to Dallas. Houston Hardaway, the boyfriend of Rosey Blair, was assigned one row ahead of her so she asked the brunette beauty [herein “B.B.”] next to her to switch seats. This simple request made B.B. the new seatmate of a handsome hunk, Euan Holden, a fit model and a former professional soccer player.
Having gone this route in order to sit side by side, Rosey and Houston could have resumed their canoodling. And had this trip taken place before Twitter was a temptation, the Texas twosome would probably have chatted, cocktailed, and chilled all the way to DFW Airport.
During air travel, the cabin once contained you fully, barring access to telephones, shielding anyone on board from certain distractions. But as soon as cellphone usage was permitted in 2013 within the USA, an opening was cut. Nowadays it seems that this once controlled air is newly arranged by busy bees.
In this case, after positioning herself to be closer to her main squeeze on the first Monday in July, Rosey ignored him and spent the trip obsessing over B.B. and the dark-haired stranger one row ahead. These are her words:
Last night on a flight home, my boyfriend and I asked a woman to switch seats with me so we could sit together. We made a joke that maybe her new seat partner would be the love of her life and well, now I present you with this thread.
—Rosey Blair (@roseybeeme) July 3, 2018
Her tweets glistened with promise: the two good-lookers were conversing with gusto, no wedding rings were visible, family photos were exchanged. A “We excited!” update included a picture of Rosey and her beau, grinning like lottery-winners. Her dramatic playback, broadcast in boldfaced red and black across a portrait gallery of cellphone snapshots, sent smoke signals across the Twitter-verse. Some reacted by recounting their own serendipitous airport encounters while the romance-starved requested more details.
When this tweet-by-tweet soap opera began, many readers such as Monica Lewinsky found it charming and relatable. Hardly surprising, according to a new study from British bank HSBC; they polled 2,150 travelers from 141 countries and discovered that 1 in 50 airplane passengers really have met “the one” while 30,000 feet above. “The other 49, presumably, just annoy the heck out of each other as they travel,” joked CNN Travel pro Francesca Street [CNN on August 29, 2018].
Apparently, if you’ve not met the love of your life on a jet, your heart can still skip a beat via second-hand snooping. As Rosey Blair played ringmaster to this virtual circus—juggling blurred images of these unidentified passengers laced with provocative captions like “Breaking: They BOTH headed to the restroom at the same TIME!”—her thread went viral, amassing 900,000 likes. Questions! Questions! Who were they?
#PlaneBae is born
Ever-obliging, nosey Rosey gave the fitness buffs hashtags; he became #PlaneBae, she was dubbed #PrettyPlaneGirl. To stoke the bonfire, tantalizing tidbits were tossed on the flame. Inquisitive Rosey posted that they were vegans who worked in the fitness field. Since the strangers ordered a cheese plate to share, the veganism detail was inaccurate—but who cared what was real or invented?
Revealing body language fueled the fantasy: the two seatmates touched elbows and she put her head on his shoulder for a second. Perhaps this in-flight fantasy of a budding romance between two attractive thirty-somethings made TV hosts and news outlets tune in. #PlaneBae quickly went around the world.
Then came the crowning touch. Rosey’s photo finish of two “lovebirds” wheeling luggage towards the exit, sweetly hand in hand—newsroom gold during the sleepy interval that preceded Independence Day, earning her and #PlaneBae a seat on “The Today Show.” Embracing the moment, Euan Holden identified himself on TV, Twitter, and Instagram with his new moniker.
Determined to let her merry minstrelsy continue, Rosey Blair held the spotlight with her glittering eye, tweeting, “I’m an actress, comedian, and a writer and so is my dude. Also if anyone wants to send us plane tickets we are more than happy to try and find your very own #PlaneBae.” Lest anyone forget to tip the messenger, she button-holed Buzzfeed for a job and begged for freebies. Alaska Airlines obliged, agreeing Rosey Blair did a “good deed,” and offering her a free flight. T-Mobile granted nosey Rosey free Wi-Fi for her hours-long sky marathon.
#Tailspin begins
Then the fairytale lost its sheen. The comely brunette in the thread reached out to Rosey Blair, and then gave a statement to “Today” declining to appear, saying the tweets were misleading, and she wanted to be left alone. Please. Despite that bid for privacy, Rosey Blair and her boyfriend posted a (now deleted) video encouraging their followers to out the woman, cooing, “So we don’t have the gal’s permish yet, but I’m sure you guys are sneaky. I think you might…” As her voice faded, Houston Hardaway quipped, “Don’t encourage them!”
Did no one hear the hush of quiet misgiving? Not unlike airline hooch, such intoxicating curiosity offered a straight shot to the thrall, that ungainly fall to the lower depths. Unfortunately, when the hordes sniffed out B.B., trolls outnumbered well-wishers. Some savagely seized upon the more tantalizing tweets such as “Breaking: They BOTH headed to the restroom at the same TIME!” and decided she must be a whore. A screen capture from B.B.’s (now deleted) Instagram displayed taunts along these lines: “You blew him in the bathroom, didn’t you? LOL” Cornered and scorned, B.B. deactivated her accounts and went dark. Then she hired a New York-based attorney, Wesley Mullen of the lawfirm Mullen PC. On July 13, he released his client’s statement to Business Insider. It read:
I am a young professional woman. On July 2, I took a commercial flight from New York to Dallas. Without my knowledge or consent, other passengers photographed me and recorded my conversation with a seatmate. They posted images and recordings to social media, and speculated unfairly about my private conduct.
Since then, my personal information has been widely distributed online. Strangers publicly discussed my private life based on patently false information.
I have been doxxed, shamed, insulted and harassed. Voyeurs have come looking for me online and in the real world.
I did not ask for and do not seek attention. #PlaneBae is not a romance—it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent.
Please continue to respect my privacy, and my desire to remain anonymous.Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free
[Note: Doxxing, i.e., posting an individual’s address, phone, or other private info online, is a prime form of online harassment. For trolls, it’s a nasty, impactful way to abuse or endanger a target, especially a single woman who lives alone.]
Meanwhile, after Rosey Blair’s appearance on “Today,” she was kept busy, blocking critics and, eventually, apologizing to B.B., whose life she up-turned for two days of ballyhoo. The Twitter-verse wasn’t through with the topic either— even after the #PlaneBae thread itself was deleted. As people shared article links about Euan Holden and his mysterious seatmate, opinions were re-evaluated.
Monica Lewinsky, for one, was quick to tweet regrets: “I owe an apology to #PrettyPlaneGirl + to people who follow me here for my anti-bullying + anti-public shaming stance.” Ms. Lewinsky added:
Maybe because my parents met on a plane. maybe because i love a good rom-com. maybe because i was tired. maybe because i myself got caught up in likes and retweets in that moment, i retweeted it and also joked about the next leg of my flight —though i winced from a few of the posts in the thread, i thought because their faces were blocked out it wasn’t too harmful. i know better than anyone that sometimes we can’t foresee the long-term consequences of our choices. . . .
Contemplating these “consequences” inspired me to write the poem “The Blair Switch Project” [see below].
Internet trolls and Twitter busybodies have often turned others’ lives into a public spectacle regardless of their will or the assumption that we are all entitled to some privacy. And what did B.B. do to become a target suddenly? She didn’t make a scene, hurt a passenger, nor abuse an attendant. Non-famous when she boarded her flight, she was but one more fitness instructor who had spent less time at the hub than on the rim. Nevertheless, when she deplaned, reality was spinning out of control. The bandsaw chorus of Twitter chatter had sliced away her life’s simplicity.
#Slut-shaming
The real problem is the way society simultaneously sexualizes females for entertainment or profit—and then vilifies them for it. Despite the raised consciousness of the #MeToo movement, women are judged on their sexual activity, while men are not.
Both men and women engage in slut-shaming, albeit for different reasons.
Men don’t confine it to jocular locker-room talk about strippers and sex workers. Just this week, a prominent GOP senator and Donald Trump Jr. made light of Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations and sneered at his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University in California.
When she covered Amber Rose’s “Slut-Walk” for the Washington Post, reporter Soraya Nadia McDonald analyzed why males resort to slut-shaming, explaining that this behavior is “reinforcing centuries of cultural hegemony by using women’s sexual histories, both real and imagined, to castigate them as moral failures.” Last month, in her column for an Australian audience, Kerri Sackville expanded on this. She wrote:
Slut-shaming reduces her to a sex object. And men employ slut-shaming when they are intimidated. They employ it when they can’t defeat a woman using wit or brains or ideas. They employ it because powerful women terrify them, and they will use any dirty tactics to keep women from standing in that power.
Why did women lash out at #PlaneBae’s seatmate, too, labeling her a “skank,” and lambasting her on social media? Clearly, sluttiness to some women indicates a female who asserts herself, sexually or not. In 2014, a research study published in Social Psychology Quarterly studied the behavior of co-eds whose slut-shaming—a form of bullying—pushed some teenage girls to suicide.
“Viewing women only as victims of men’s sexual dominance fails to hold women accountable for the roles they play in reproducing social inequalities,” Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology and organizational studies professor at the University of Michigan, said. “By engaging in ‘slut-shaming’—the practice of maligning women for presumed sexual activity—women at the top create more space for their own sexual experimentation, at the cost of women at the bottom of social hierarchies.”
Pondering the #PlaneBae saga, one man on Twitter wrote, “Nobody told us that our ‘15 Minutes of Fame’ would include shaming, insults, threats, etc. And that we might not have even asked for it.”
Currently, there are 107,000 daily scheduled flights. If you are booked on one, proceed with caution.
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Photo Credit: Pixabay