Indian airline tests feature that lets women book seats away from men
cbsnews.com
India's largest budget carrier, IndiGo, is the first airline to trial a feature that lets female passengers book seats next to other women to avoid sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a man in a move designed to make flying more comfortable for female passengers, according to a CNBC report.
The airline's booking process is fairly standard except for the seat map which highlights seats occupied by women with the color pink. This information is not visible to male passengers, according to the airline, CNBC reported. IndiGo did not immediately respond to CBS MoneyWatch's request for comment on the new feature.
I wish this existed but for avoiding having to sit near children.
Unfortunately, kids can't go in the cargo hold. Something about needing air and warmth.
Overhead?
Restraints and a gag
The cargo holds on commercial flights are pressurized and heated. I can't imagine passengers would take kindly to their luggage being subjected to 0.3x atmospheric pressure at -55°C.
Or their pets...
Just poke some air holes in the overhead cabin, bingo.
They put dogs down there.
They could, the cargo hold is pressurized, if you fly with animals like a dog, they go in the cargo hold too. Just dont forget to give them something to eat on long flights
Yeah, sorry about that.
Edit: actually though, I wouldn't mind being seated in something like a "family" section. It really is hard to keep babies and toddlers still and quiet on a plane (or anywhere), and I always feel bad for the people sitting next to us.
You’d have to get airlines to treat people like something more than money making sardines before they will give you a family section.
Empty seats in that section they only view as lost money and really don’t care about your experience flying
I recently discovered movie theaters for kids and it's turned it back into a fun experience for me.
It doesn't help when airlines split people up for not paying the "don't get split all over the fucking plane" charge.
Then you end up with kids running between parents and standing all over people.
Honestly fuck airlines for making basic things an optional extra. It costs them literally nothing to sit a family all together.
Every time I book a flight I get so mad because there are so many little things that are up charges that should be default.
You mean you want to take bags? And you want to sit down?
You want the bloody moon on a stick, you!
I rather have a toddler continously kick my seat on a long haul flight than dealing with a overly "friendly" and intrusive guy who thinks its his right to bother me for 12 hours because I'm stuck there.
Or us fatties.
Would definitely pay extra for this.
Do Indian men have a reputation for being inappropriately forward with women? There was a meme that read “every app is a dating app if you’re Indian enough”
"Inappropriately forward" is a very polite way to put it. I feel like at least once a month there's a new story out of India about a gang rape or something.
To be fair India has the biggest population on earth, like 5+ times US population. Per capita statistics would be more interesting here.
With a topic as sensitive and biased against the victims as this, it's hard to get accurate data - see https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/rape-statistics-by-country
Have you like, ignored every second piece of information coming out of india the last decades?
They have a terrible issue with misogyny, there are countless stories of rape and other forms of assault on any kind of women (and girls). Indians, foreigners, none are safe, even with men accompanying them for protection. One or two guys can't do much against a rape mob.
India is probably the first country I would warn a woman away from if she were looking for vacation destinations. Followed by islamic countries.
My wife got invited to a wedding in India and I was not invited (long story). She asked the bride if it was safe to travel to the wedding alone and she straight up said "No. You should find a travel buddy."
Yeah my sister went to India a few years back by herself and while thankfully nothing terrible happened to her, she said she would never go back. Just walking around she said the streets are majority men and they are not shy about staring at any woman (especially someone who was clearly a foreigner). Of course, parts of the trip were cool but definitely not the place to be travelling alone as a woman.
Mm idk about that. Yes there is a lot of violence against women in India. Generally, the Indians flying are not gonna be the ones doing that. Secondly, there is a lot of violence against women all over the world, it's not just an India thing. Hell half the US political system is trying to give women the death penalty for the consequences of being raped. Or just for deciding they don't want kids.
Not denying violence against women is an issue elsewhere too, but you would be hard pressed to find such a staggering density of sexual violence, in rather public areas, committed by groups of men for little to no provocation other than a woman being in the wrong place.
Now I am not saying all Indian men are rapists of course, but there certainly is evidence of a system wide, cultural aspect creating and enabling this behavior in a way rarely seen elsewhere.
So help you if you’re a lady who wants to be out after 6PM in UP or South Delhi… RIP Jyoti
Yeah I mean I can agree with the second paragraph for sure
I dont know the statistics off the top of my head, I'm just wondering how it measures up considering the number of people
But you're right. Especially considering what's just happened this week
As far as I know, yes. The Internet has taught me to not bring a woman with me if I ever go to the Holi festival in India. I've never been to India, I hope the internet is wrong but I had an Indian coworker who told me the same thing.
As an Indian I'll say yes, but the people who can afford flights aren't normally the type of people who do that.
You could look up the gulabi gang. It's a group of women who fight to protect other women from violence.
Edit - I think it's best if we listen to Indian women speak on the problem. The first time I heard about the gulabi gang and why they exist I was horrified.
Others commented about misogyny etc. in India miss the fact that India is (a) not a monolith & (b) flights are too expensive for 80% of India's population (yes, wealth disparity in India is that bad). So the men on flights are less likely to grope women than let's say a man on a train.
I asked my Indian colleagues about this, and they said they'd use this preference for space (not purely safety). One of them also said men smell worse than women so she'd prefer a woman next to her.
Yes.
India is one of those cultures that still beats female rape victims to death
More like offer garlands and promotions.
It's not Indian culture, stop spewing bullshit.
Rape victims are treated poorly in most of the developing countries
That's a very friendly description of their reputation.
I don't think that's an Indian men thing, I think that's a predatory men around the world thing.
Indian culture is especially sexiest and repressive.
I've been on long flights where I wished there had been designated seating for introverts. But then I considered the implications of packing all the extroverts together in one place nearby and thought better of it.
So basically introvert are like the Boron control rods inserted into the crowd to prevent the extroverts from going critical.
Nice. I had been using the analogy that an introvert at a party acts as a sacrificial anode consuming corrosive extroversion until they are utterly exhausted. But I like your take on it!
I don't see the issue here. Most other indian transport has female sections. That is a normal part of public transportation there.
They do not "segregate". Its not like the whole plane is split into male and female zones. They just saying "Hey, if you feel more comfortable sitting with women, we got you."
I would probably not chose it on purpose, but i can see, how it can be a more relaxed experience for other women.
I also imagine for some women, the idea of getting plunked in a middle seat between two potentially creepy guys is a source of anxiety.
Not to sure(feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), but afaik Theres a quite big amount of rapes and sexual assaults happening in India so not being forced to sit next to a creep may be a good thing.
"They do not segregate, all they do is segregate"
This meant IndiGo Air and their new seating policy.
You don't have to make a fundamental discussion about it on how you perceive and generalised indian society.
How about "we let private companies segregate in whichever ways they want!"?
SINCE WHEN IS CREATING SAVE SPACES FOR WOMEN "SEGREGATION"??!!!
India is a country where you have to be careful not to look directly at men on the streets! Not to mention when you can't move away for hours.
Sometimes I find the rampant Misogyny on lemmy really disturbing.
Yes but I find all this both racist and sexist. Not all men in India are creeps, even if may be a rampant problem. Shouldn't they instead try to punish the weirdos?
Of course and in an ideal world we wouldn't need save spaces for women. But we don't live in an ideal world and while not all men are creeps, still too many are.
I don't think I don't know any woman who wasn't at some point in her life sexually harrased and/or assaulted. All over the world. And as long as the situation is like that, people like you, who feel offended or "segregated" by female safe spaces are part of the problem.
Yes you, crying "Not all meennn" are part of the problem and why the world isn't safer for women.
I would rather not sit next to a fat person if i had the choice
Sorry bro :(
If the seats had more space like they used to a long time ago, nobody would care. I blame the airlines.
You can apply thus logic 90% of bullsbit we face on daily but people preferto chimp out at each other instead of you know... The megacorps and their owners who treat working people as property and customers as brain dead idiots
Everything going ok India?
TBH even as a man I’d prefer to sit not with other men. They are bigger, for one thing. And overall less considerate, though of course they have no monopoly on that.
Though I'm sure the women wouldn't want to sit near a man who wants to sit with women lol
I want seats next to nobody. How hard will that be to pull off?
Just be a man on a flight full of women.
(No snark intended there - I'm neither a danger to any woman I sit next to, NOR offended if no women sit next to a strange man (me) they don't know on a flight - but I definitely see an upside where maybe in some circumstances I get an empty seat next to me that I would not have had.)
I feel rather conflicted about this feature.
On the one hand, I really am against any of these I don't want to be near men/women/brown people/minority, bit on the other hand, Indian men are the worst when it comes to showing respect to women. This ranges from reading the news on gangrape (reading any article you can assume "India" and be right about 60% of the time) to my wife walking on the street being followed by groups of Indian guys who apparently just never learned how to behave around women.
Honestly I think in most cases segregation is just not the answer.
The more far away we become based on fairly arbitrary characteristics, the less there is opportunity for a meaningful dialogue that would change the status quo around the issue.
On a practical side, I wish there were proper passenger safety measures and procedures against harassment. A man is trying to do that to you? Record it and report to the crew immediately, and let them deal with the perpetrator and call police on the ground when applicable.
I get what you're saying, but we don't fix the issue of men sexually assaulting women, especially in a country that has such profound issues with this like India, by forcing women to remain vulnerable.
If allowing women to avoid being seated next to men on flights reduces the chance of sexual assault from taking place during flights, then I am all for it.
It just needs to be understood as a harm reduction technique, not the solution to the overall societal problem.
This is like saying cars shouldn't have seatbelts because it isn't discouraging people not to crash their cars. Seatbelts don't solve this issue, they just reduce harm. Think of this airline's decision as implementing a sexual seatbelt for women.
You put it into words perfectly. Thank you.
In politics, this WILL BE the solution because a half-measure 'solves' it.
My concern is that the same men, frustrated at being unable to do this on flight, will do it somewhere else anyway. Also, some could be pissed off by this measure just enough to have a negative shift in mentality towards women (see incels that are driven by alientation). So does it really significantly reduce harm? I'd love to see numbers if anyone has got them.
What the fuck? You think that men are just hardwired to assault women, and if we stop them from doing it in one place they're just going to do it somewhere else?
What a self-report...
I'm saying those particular men who find assaulting women acceptable find it acceptable everywhere, on a plane or outside. Or should we isolate women from men in all spheres of life? This in itself can't be the solution. Also, alienation that comes with such segregation is a common driver for violence, and I'd love to see how it might translate to more abusive sexual behavior, too. I don't have the numbers, and would love to see if someone does.
The rest is your emotional outburst. I hate to see Lemmy going in this direction and I hoped we won't have this bullshit here. Try to understand another person's take first and judge later, not the other way around. And don't make it personal, this immediately degrades the conversation.
That's exactly what I said, you just countered with something that sounded suspiciously defensive of sexual assault.
I never defended sexual assault; I just said that:
Is a big "if". In your original sentence, on the plane, yes, it might reduce the risk of assault. But life doesn't end outside the plane, and I wonder whether such restriction could just lead to increased risk of sexual assault elsewhere, due to a)frustration of the same men who didn't do it on the plane and can probably still do it in any other place; b)influence of such measures on how abusive men treat the status quo and resist it - thereby negating all the benefit.
Which is why, if you feel my take "sounds" like something, I ask to clarify first and attack later. This is not a ragebait dumpster, and people are generally acting in good faith around Lemmy.
This isn't ragebait, you are just very easily enraged. Apparently the topic of women's safety really sets you off.
Another self-report.
This is a terrible take.
If he's saying "normalize people being next to one another so anti-social nutjobs can get over themselves instead of being violent" then I can see where he's going. It's like the "co-ed bathroom" craze we had for a while.
I'm not sure whether it'll help aggressive incels actually talk to gurls like people instead of sublimating from "I can list all the dinosaurs" to "you frigid ho" themes, but it could place other comfy male-company people in range or just someone burly to slap the actual shit out of someone who steps outta line. Equality has two sides.
I think either that solution or the segregation or the actual fix to the issue, they'll all take a lot of emotional growth, though; and we lack the people to help us do that here, let alone in places where misogyny creeps ever closer to the default.
I think it’s terrible because the take treats women as things that defuse incels. Like sacrificing some women is worth it. Feel gross and dehumanizing.
I'm not ever saying women are dispensable tools in this fight (something you imply I said) or that we should "sacrifice" someone - the safety of every person is hugely valuable - I'm just saying that going separate is not gonna make things safer in the long run. There are other factors at play here that will show up, and we should not strive for knee-jerk solutions.
I doubt that separation alone is gonna help much, and I'd love to see comprehensive evidence for or against my take, if any exists. I want to see what is the best evidence-based solution that would actually improve safety of everyone.
If anything, I want to make sure as little women as possible are ever victims of such accidents, I'm just concerned over whether this is a best approach.
You just speak about women in a dehumanizing way that removes agency. It feel gross. Reminds me of doctors from the 90s that said we need studies to tell if inserting IUDs causes pain.
Thanks for pointing it out. I will see what I can do to correct it.
Is it something about the way I put it, like if I decide for women how it would be better for them?
Because my real position here, outlined clearly from my point of view but maybe not from someone else's, is that we should better study the consequences of that approach to make a more informed decision.
One could come from a strictly individualistic approach, to allow and empower people to act as they see fit, but the moment we set examples of things already resolved, people start thinking otherwise.
I'm gonna get another hate wave for this comparison, but this is just illustrative example, so hear me out first: should we allow white people to make separate white-only spaces on the same planes? We can absolutely try and justify it by the same "giving agency" argument, all while pointing out people of color do more crimes and can be, on average, more "dangerous".
All of which would be complete bullshit that omits any nuance that the very segregation puts people in conditions that promote such behavior and there is nothing about being black or hispanic or whatever in itself that promotes it. So we should absolutely fight back against any such idea.
Similar themes here, except the conditions here are less material (in fact, men even have somewhat of an advantage here) and more purely social. Externally isolated communities often promote dangerous behaviors, and to combat that, we should avoid forming such communities by not alienating them by the arbitrary category of gender in the first place. Otherwise, we are gonna see communities similar to incels grow and get more dangerous.
I just suppose that the risk of alienating men and them getting more violent may outweigh the immediate benefit of increased plane safety, eventually turning against women themselves. But to prove or disprove that point, I'd love to see more numbers. Before that, I do not welcome radical solutions that are not informed by a solid body of evidence, as they often carry questionable consequences.
This is actually reasonable. If you explained it this way in the first place maybe people would have stopped being pissy and taken you seriously. Before this comment your position seemed flimsy, but comparing it to racist practice made it make a lot more sense.
While I don't agree with the idea that isolating someone from women on a plane will make them rape someone else somewhere else, I think your point about alienation driving extreme views is very pertinent. The more you try to vilify a group the more that group will try and make it a self-fulfiling prophecy, or otherwise go against the people vilifying them.
Thanks - in any case, I'm happy I've got my point across to someone.
Correct on interpretation, and solid wording :)
I am going to ignore the weird race stuff. I don’t agree with it but don’t want to spend the energy.
I will speak about this:
This again dehumanizes women and removes agency.
You are saying that women are the tools that are used to prevent male violence. By treating women as a means to reduce violence without considering the women themselves as people you are dehumanizing and removing agency.
Women are people just as men are people. Women are not the tools to reduce male violence.
You also say giving women the choice to sit with women is radical. Women having the chose to protect themselves is not radical. It is a basis for a moral society.
You shouldn’t need studies to prove how effective or not using women as tools to reduce male violence is.
Women are not tools.
Women are not tools - and I never said that. Women, as all people, may have to sacrifice this short-term benefit for the long-term effect and actually lasting safe environment - that's my point. In a world where people radicalize and suggest knee-jerk solutions, I want to step back to see if evidence is there to back them up.
I say that sometimes people make irrational decisions that hurts the bottom line for themselves and others, and game theory means sometimes we have to all sacrifice something to maintain a better position than we could achieve individually - in this case, a world where we don't have to isolate ourselves to be safe and live in fear of someone.
If allowing women to "protect themselves" by letting them choose male-free spaces is gonna cause the rise in male violence, this will undermine the very purpose of this initiative. And since individually every woman is still better off separated, this will perpetuate even further, even if collectively women lose big time.
I'm concerned about this particular risk. Should it be about men instead of women, I'd be same kind of concerned. This is not meant to be misogynistic (or misandric for that matter). This is rather collectivist, choosing a solution that could bring people together and let them actually solve the problem that requires both ends to solve. And a suggested initiative only makes this goal father away, proliferating the general issue that causes the concern in the first place.
Separating people based on inherent traits is never the solution, which we somehow understand in any case but this one.
Until you see:
I don’t think this discussion is worth having. I hope you are never used as a means to an end.
Big, "People will call me racist for this" energy. You knew what you were gonna say was gonna be racist and shitty, but you said it anyway...
Do you have a humiliation fetish or something? It's like you want the downvotes...
Not that I care of downvotes when I'm right.
Yet you don't seem to listen, instead going for labels and trying so so hard to make it personal in several threads at once.
I don't think this kind of conversation can remain productive.
Bruh they are making at least one good point here. Meanwhile you are trying to do a character assassination and make baseless accusations. Fucking stop it.
Yeah that's part of what I mean.
Another part is that this proliferates the issue on both ends - aggressive men don't learn to behave well as they don't confront the situation and don't learn self-control, and women turn more to fear and loathing, severing more and more contacts with men and alienating them, which ends up hurting men and limiting their exposure to women side of the story, making them more violent.
It's not the job of women to put themselves in potentially dangerous situations for the betterment of men. Women not wanting to be easily assaulted is "hurting men" is a disgusting take and says some truly awful things about you.
My take is exactly that the suggested approach might not improve women's safety overall. The "betterment of men", as you put it, is the key ingredient to a sustainable solution on male sexual harassment and violence, and segregation is a patch that can come with unintended consequences that will undermine this process and directly hurt women.
We may not ignore the social and psychological consequences of such actions for men, as their mental wellbeing is directly related to the probability of committing assault, thereby again, directly affecting women.
I'm trying to make a point to counter the immediate knee-jerk approach, and call to collect evidence on the efficacy of such measures to promote women's safety. Any policy should be driven by what actually works, not what we feel of it.
I urge you to stop assuming bad faith in everyone you disagree with, and to clarify first. Lemmy is very much a people-driven platform, and absolute majority of people here are well-intentioned. Thereby, if another person shares a different opinion, they probably come from a position of care as much as you do, they just have a different consideration in mind.
This
What you're describing is a big hassle, and at the end of the day a confrontation and poor customer experience still happened making that customer think twice before flying again.
Wake up babe, India mentioned on lemmy
only 5 more years before they're a Lemmywide superpower
Okay but then men are allowed to fart openly and take our shirts off in the no-women section while they drink chamomile tea and read thought provoking books about how they are okay just the way they are.
Are men allowed to buy a ticket to not sit around nude farting men
Yes, it's called business. They fart fully clothed.
No. It's a rite of passage.
You can have that, but only if you let the women take their shirts off and fart openly too.
What's to stop a man from claiming to be female to see the map of where women are sitting, and then booking an adjacent seat themselves?
They probably need to sign in to book, and required their data to be accurate to board.
On Indian flights you can pay to choose your seat or let the operator choose for you for free. I suspect the latter is where the preference choice comes in. So there won't be a question of seeing where women are sitting.
You pick your seat after the booking process, where you have to enter your details which does include sex. Even if you enter it wrong just to pick a seat you won't be able to enter the airport because they check that at the gate. Whether you are the same person whose ticket you are carrying.
I was thinking first would be the fake booking to find where the women were sitting, then switch browsers/clear cookies/whatever and book with the real details.
Yes but men wouldn't be able to book those seats unless all the other seats are taken.
At least that is what happens on the bus seats here.
Oh I see - yes, if the seats around the women are automatically reserved then that exploit doesn't work.
I'd assume Indian airlines has an ID check,l and men aren't going to get a surgery and go through the process of changing their legal gender just to creep on women. This is also the same argument used against trans people in the bathroom debate, and while you probably didn't mean to, you are parroting the ideas of transphobes.
Me I don't want to sit next to a republican.
The next feature they are adding is allowing female passengers to sit closer to any bears on the flight.
It's really sad that it's come to this, it's really bad over there just like here.
Just like "here", with "here" being where?
The return of smoking and non-smoking sections.
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I mean I don't want to sit next to a man either, for some reason they tend to be offensive even if they don't feel like they have to talk to me for some reason. I also don't really want to sit next to anyone because it feels akward trying not to make eye contact or feeling like I have to say somehing. Most of all though no kicking children behind me. Fuck just introduce boxed in seats so I can fly in silence and solitude. Or don't, I probably can't afford travel for the rest of my life.
It already exists. Business class.
What do you mean by offensive?
2 times had different guys that smelled weirdly like literal shit, one time ranting about dumb maga shit like he thought he could convert me, the other one just being all around invasive and reaching over me to point both air things at him and adjust the window multiple times without asking.
I’ve had the exact opposite experience. Every woman I’ve sat next to had way too much perfume, couldn’t sit still, constantly in and out of their purse, and violently flipping through their phone and sighing heavily every 5 minutes because there was no internet. 🤷♂️
That said, no one I’ve sat next to in a 3-seat aisle knows the proper ownership of armrests.
That sounds just as bad as dudes with unwiped asses and evangelical MAGAs intruding your personal space! Poor you /s