Questions for the People Who 'Had Sex' On a Flight to Ibiza

The main thing this week (*1) is that Someone Allegedly Shagged Someone Else on a Ryanair Flight to Ibiza, and as VICE's main correspondent on things going wrong on airplanes, it is my duty to detail that, pick it apart as content, and theorise as to whether we, too, would also shag someone on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza.

Would we? Would we shag someone on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza? Would we? Would we? Would we, though? That, my friends, is the question.

Let's just spool through the headlines regarding Someone Allegedly Shagging Someone Else on a Ryanair Flight to Ibiza, just so we have the facts straight, just so we can dive right in from a strong springboard of truth. The story about s/s/s/e/o/a/r/f/t/i mainly broke over the weekend, but it became more pertinent today when various tabloids identified one of the alleged shaggees and doxed him, exposing his name, location and relationship status (engaged! With a six-month pregnant fiancé! Uh oh!).

UPDATE 13/06/17: The woman in the video has said she is "mortified" the video has gone viral, and has said she was merely giving the man a lap dance, and not having sex with him.

I am going to do my best to censor all that because the guy in question is probably having enough awkward phone conversations today re: shagging someone else on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza, and those phone calls are almost certainly rinsing his data and calls abroad package with EE, and also there's really no need to pour petrol on the flames, is there? In the olden days, if you shagged someone on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza, you'd more or less get away with it. No one beyond the three or four surrounding rows would really know. But now, with these smartphones, these youths. With this internet. Now you can't. Anyway:

This is from the Sun, yes.

And then:

Then:

And also:

Here's a video, if you want a video:

So those are the details; those are the details we know. Here are the questions we have.

– The important context here is "Ryanair flight". Have you ever been on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza? In many ways it is the closest thing we – civilised society in the year 2017 – have to the Old West. There are lots of unshowered men with three-day stubble demanding single servings of whiskey. Lots of floppy cleavage on display. Quite a lot of spitting. It feels like one of those fights that is just a whirlwind-dustcloud of exploding stars and fists and violence could break out at any time. There are a lot of tensions, still, when it comes to air travel. There are security checks and weapons pat downs and a tight, inescapable half-feeling of dread. And then you get on a Ryanair flight and that all melts away. It is, essentially, the toilets in a small-to-middling town's only nightclub that has got a bit out of control. Like: how can I put this? I have never felt more capable of procuring a £30 gram than I have on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza.

And so we have set the scene.

– Bang the gong now, this is the start of summer. This happens every year, and though the date is changeable the feeling is still the same, a little like a hornier version of Easter – Brits Go Abroad, and in doing so open like a tin something demonic inside them, and bald men immediately turn red inside their Ralph polos, and tanned women with thigh tattoos get very publicly arrested for shagging on beaches, and Britons vomit and puke and fall over, 200 people at once, during a bad wave on a booze cruise; and they do lurid neon-coloured shots and start fights with Majorcan strip kebab guys and get roughly beaten up by Russian football fans, and the entire flight home is just this sort of crowd-sized hangover, everyone wearing sunglasses and snuggly hoodies, everyone with eyebrows tattooed at odd angles across their heads, or with black eyes, or with £500 surcharges from the hotels they trashed, everyone somehow sore and wounded by their own excess, something unique only to British people only when they leave the country, some insidious monster that lives inside all of us and slithers out only on four-night package holidays that end in an STD check – and that is to say that these people who allegedly shagged each other on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza banged the gong for an entire summer, that the season has been heralded now, just as fresh buds and young lambs herald spring, so shagging holidaymakers on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza bring with them the passionate heat of the summer, and as such these two should be anointed King and Queen of summer, forever and ever anon;

– Is "jelly" the absolute best term for a condom ever in history? I've always had a soft spot for "French letter", and "rubber" has a certain charm too, but still in the grand scheme of things, yes: "jelly" is the absolute best term for a condom, ever in history. And there are two threads to this: firstly, that a man being mounted by a stranger on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza has the mental wherewithal to demand some sort of sexual protection against what is about to happen to his dick and the rest of his crotch; and also, this quote–

Which just puts me in mind of a man, half-frantic with his need for a jelly, nearly forgetting the word for condom with his urgency, his neck being pashed, saliva over most of the top half of his body now, squirming through arms that clench him like snakes, already half in, the man, and yelling, almost as if shouting through rubble for help in the immediate desperate aftermath of a disaster: "Does anyone!" he says, repeatedly, "Does anyone! Have a jelly!"

There is no evidence that anyone did have a jelly – I mean, imagine if you did have a jelly, stashed in a wallet or a pocket, and you were on a Ryanair flight, and you sort of suspected that two people were very openly about to have sex on it, but they can't, can they, they can't? Human decency must prevail, but still you would not actually pass them a prophylactic, would you? You do not want to be directly responsible for sheathing a stranger's penis as he shags another stranger on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza, but then – but then you would also feel bad if he didn't sheath his member while putting it in a stranger on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza, which again is probably up there amongst the most sexually inadvisable things you can do, so it's a quandary, isn't it. But yes: there is no overwhelming evidence that the man's desperate demands for a jelly were ever actually met;

– None of these were questions, sorry.

I suppose the moral of this story is, though it is a very spectacularly bad idea to do so, and it almost certainly will rock any relationships you may or may not have at home with six-month pregnant fiancés or, like, normal human beings and friends and family you might ever want to look in the face, apart from that and it being a bad idea: sure, have sex with someone on a Ryanair flight to Ibiza. I mean, it is basically a British tradition to get exxxxxtremely raunchy on holiday.

We are in Brexit, our country is a mess. Now, more than ever, we need British values to hold tight onto. Getting onto a two-hour flight, pissed out of your gourd, and shagging a stranger while yelling with futility for a "jelly"? As British as well-dressing, as saluting the Queen, as getting into an argument about the jam-cream order re: scones. In many ways, this anonymous man and this anonymous woman, locked for the ages in a writhing, sweaty, wipe-down seated sexual embrace: they are all of us, they are the entire nation. Are we not, all of us, shagging to bits under the heat of a yellow-hot sun? Are we not, all of us, just one jelly away from getting caught half-hard and shagging a stranger in the sticky-humid heat of a Ryanair flight to Ibiza? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Let he who has never begged for a jelly on a flight to Ibiza be the first to chat shit.

@joelgolby

*1: Apart from election fallout, endless election fallout, but even that has turned quite dull now. That possible sheen-like dream that The Boy might do it has soured and it looks like a good old-fashioned Conservative x The Worst Bits of the Bible collab will maintain power for the next five to ten, amen, so now all there's left to really focus on is the fact that Someone Allegedly Shagged Someone on a Ryanair Flight to Ibiza.