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Malcolm Gladwell and Wendy Kaminer

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Re: God's plan

By Malcolm Gladwell
Posted Wednesday, June 10, 1998, at 3:54 PM ET

When I was at the Washington Post, we used to call the upper left-hand corner of the front page of any newspaper the "hype box" because it was typically the place where the most egregiously inflated trend story of the day always ran. The Southern Baptist story, I would point out (and with that, leave the subject forever) ran in the hype box. And so--perhaps even more appropriately--did the Wall Street Journal's airline-sex story. What do we have here? A bunch of airline attendants and officials who say they have seen more sex on board recently than before. This, curiously, is attributed to "air rage" (does this mean that pistol-waving L.A. drivers are also having more sex while stuck in traffic?) and to a general rise in public uninhibition. Okay. The key quote: Someone from Singapore Airlines says that behavior is a lot worse today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Twenty years ago there were an awful lot fewer flights and fewer people flying, so there would be less opportunity for sex, period. That's point number one. Point number two is that twenty years ago flying was so expensive that it was mostly the preserve of older, male businessmen who--until they were inclined to have sex with one another--wouldn't really have the opportunity to have plane sex. The big shift today is that we now have a lot more young people flying and a lot more women, of all ages, flying, so as a result we have the kinds of people flying who tend to want to have sex with one another in very small bathrooms (that is, young men and women). It doesn't signal some significant shift in social mores. This story fits neatly into one of the two hype-box conventions. The first, of course, is the can-you-believe-people-are-still(about to)do-this story, that is, the Southern Baptist story. The second convention, the airline-sex story, is the can-you-believe that-this-little-part-of-the world-is-now-beginning-to resemble-the-rest-of-the-world story. My personal preference, as a newspaper writer, was always for the second convention, because it typically meant that you got to go somewhere exotic and declare it not so exotic anymore (as opposed to the first convention, in which you went somewhere non-exotic and got to declare it, suddenly, exotic, which isn't nearly as fun.) anyway, vive la hype box!

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