Social media videos reach saturation point Violence against women as popular entertainment

A short video I saw recently on You Tube compels me to write this. It shows a passenger, a man in his thirties, confronting an airline steward. The steward is telling him repeatedly, ‘Sit down, sir, sit down! Put on your seat belt!’

The man keeps warning, ‘Don’t touch me!’ though nobody’s trying to touch him.

Standing behind is a flight stewardess. Her face is blurred to avoid identification, but from her sari we know she’s a Sri Lankan Airlines stewardess.

The passenger has struck her. He grew furious when she told him to remain in his seat as the plane was going to land.  The male steward is trying to bring the situation under control, but the passenger defiantly refuses to return to his seat.

Finally, another flight member (could be the chief steward or the co-pilot) arrives, and the steward tells him that the passenger has struck the stewardess.

The video ends there. It turns out that the passenger was a Saudi Arabian. He was detained on arrival at Katunayake, charged and fined Rs. 10,000 by a court. There was no mention of any compensation for the flight hostess, or even an apology at the very least. If it was an outward bound flight and landed in the Middle East, he would have gotten away, free to brag to his friends how he taught an airline stewardess a lesson.

In the end, the man’s nationality doesn’t matter. It’s his despicable behaviour which matters. There was another disturbing factor. You can see the passenger’s wife in the background. She too, is dressed in jeans and T-shirt like her husband. She speaks only once, and doesn’t try to restrain him.

In what kind of society can a husband strike another woman in the presence of his wife?

Well, it can happen in any society. Male-female relationships are determined by innate qualities, not by race, religion, education or class. A member of the UK Royal family engaged in sexual abuse with the help of millionaire socialites, all very-well educated people with the most careful breeding. US President Donald Trump’s attitudes towards women are well known, but he was re-elected by American voters, which says a lot about Trump and his voter base.

Sri Lanka doesn’t have the best of reputations when it comes to male-female relationships. Women are vilified in parliament, a woman political candidate was stripped and humiliated in public and a tourist was raped in a hotel swimming pool. Domestic abuse is common, and I have seen men beating women in the streets.

But striking a woman inside a passenger airliner? That’s a first to me.  As shocking as this behaviour is, our own lack of interest in the story shocks me even more. Do people accept this as ‘normal?’ As a test, I discussed the incident with a number of people. Most of the reactions were lethargic. Some even refused to believe it actually happened, saying it could have been an AI generated video. But some people always tend to denigrate other countries and cultures based on such incidents. They could even say it’s ‘typical’ of Arab countries. But there is no evidence to back this. If we are to look for a generalisation, it would be more correct to say ‘it’s typical of some people in most countries.’ Long ago, I lived and worked in Jordan. Male-female relationships there were excellent. But I would not go so far as to generalise about all countries. We do not know. It would require painstaking research on violence against women from all countries, and it’s not known if such databases are available.

Violence against women, minorities etc. represents the dark side of civilization. How do men and women get along in so-called ‘primitive’ societies – in the Amazon forest, among Australian Aborigines, for example? Does such violence occur among our own Aadivassi people? As far as I know, it is very little or non-existent. It’s the more ‘civilised’ societies that suffer more from it.

The shocking apathy over that video highlights another disturbing phenomenon – the proliferation of social media videos about violence against women. For example, ‘Shorts’ are the most popular video format on You Tube these days, and the mass are nonsensical ‘entertainment.’ 

They love to portray erratic behaviour, and such videos garner hundreds of thousands, even millions of views. A huge number shows violence against women – women struck by strangers or husbands in the streets. Many originate from India. I’m not trying to portray India as the main culprit though our neighbour ranks high when it comes to violence against women. 

Lucrative filmmaking

These videos are mostly staged. One can see the same ‘victims’ and ‘attackers’ in more than one video. This has now become a kind of lucrative filmmaking. When films costing millions struggle in cinema circuits, these You Tube ‘filmmakers’ can churn out these videos at low cost with a greater assurance of getting some money.  But the law of diminishing returns is at work here. Eventually, viewers reach a saturation point and then move on to something different, and even a genuine video such as the one depicting that ugly incident on board an airliner will not have the impact it should. People even refuse to accept it as genuine, and the debate is not about what makes people attack women in public (limiting ourselves to that for the sake of this article) but whether the video is genuine or AI generated.

Another problem – many of these ‘entertainment’ videos show women attacking women. As such, the role of gender in the violence is neutralised. If women can attack women, men can do it, too. Or so this warped logic goes.