Men "Rawdogging" Flights

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About

Men "Rawdogging" Flights or Men "Raw Dogging" Flights refers to a discourse and a series of jokes about some men simply sitting through long-distance flights without entertainment such as books or movies. Spawned by an X / Twitter post from 2022, the discourse went viral in June 2024 after GQ published an article about the phenomenon.

Origin

While the original meaning of the slang word "rawdogging" is "having intercourse without protection," in slang, the word has been used to refer to experiencing something in its raw, original form without adding anything extra to it.

On June 22nd, 2022, X^[1] / Twitter user @blackprints wrote about a male passenger who "rawdogged" a 10-hour flight to Europe without headphones, a book or a pillow. The post (shown below, left) garnered over 17,000 reposts and 303,000 likes in two years. In the same thread, X^[2] user @PaulinaBryant wrote about a similar experience, with their post (shown below, right) gaining over 760 reposts and 33,000 likes in two years.

Spread

Prior to June 2024, several similar posts were made on X^[3]^[4] / Twitter by other users. On May 26th, 2024, TikTok^[5] user @westwashere posted a video captioned: "pov: you successfully completed another 7h flight only watching the maps," commenting, "Anyone else bareback flights?" The post (shown below, left) received over 2 million views and 278,000 likes in one month. On May 30th, @westwashere made a similar post^[6] that received over 1.9 million views and 179,000 likes in the same period (shown below, right).

On June 24th, the lifestyle magazine GQ^[7] published an article about the phenomenon of "flying raw" titled "Why Men Are 'Rawdogging' Flights." On that day, article author Kate Lindsay made a post about it on X / Twitter, where it received over 1,000 reposts and 6,200 likes in one day (shown below).

The article triggered a discourse about the phenomenon and whether using the word "rawdogging" is appropriate to describe it. On June 24th, 2024, X^[8] user @allgarbled quoted the post with an older post about men "pondering." The post (shown below, left) garnered over 430 reposts and 8,000 likes in one day (shown below, left). Later on June 24th, X^[9] user @AutismCapital made a post critical of the discourse that received over 280 reposts and 3,500 likes in one day (shown below, right).