The Ugly American: 3 Reasons the Mile-High Club is Disgusting and Kris Jenner is an Idiot

Kris Jenner is now bragging about balling her husband in the bathroom of a jetliner, which should be reason enough to keep you in adult diapers on long flights in order to avoid having to use the facilities. But in case that doesn’t discourage you from membership in the mile-high club, here are three more reasons:

It’s against the law. I’m not against breaking laws, just breaking them for stupid reasons. Sex in a toilet is a stupid reason. Unsurprisingly, flight attendants are not cool with passengers humping each other like loud bunnies behind the bathroom door. For one, the jump seats are usually right next to the lavatories, which are far from sound proofed. It really disrupts a flight attendant’s focus on ignoring the passengers if she has to hear you wailing like warthogs in there. And that little “occupied” latch can be easily unlatched from the outside, and I know it as a personal fact that flight attendants take immense pleasure in “mistaking” those wails as cries for help. They love to throw open the door, discover you mid-coitus, and then have the plane met by security so you can be arrested for indecent exposure, or worse, interfering with a flight crew, which can get you thrown into the real can. From there you’re just a Google search away from never getting hired anywhere ever again.

It’s disgusting. Those toilet cubbies are a complete Rorschach splatter-scape of strange DNA. You should not even touch anything in there, let alone press your ass up against it. If you think those lavatories are thoroughly cleaned between each flight—think again. Sometimes the cabin crew has just 10 minutes to tidy the entire aircraft before it takes off again. Notice how I said “tidy” and not “sanitize.” The airplane is not an operating room, it doesn’t get scrubbed and hosed down after each use. You would not believe what’s been discovered in airplane lavs over the past few years: bombs, fires, rats, heroin, black widows, snakes, abandoned babies and dead bodies. Again, these toilet closets are not sanitized, they are not even cleaned with the same attention you’d get from a maid at Motel 6. The cabin crew does not consist of maids. The cabin crew empties the trash and restocks the toilet paper and that’s about it.

Nobody cares. You think that after your uncomfortable, unhygienic, unromantic, furtive, illegal and odious romp in the airplane toilet that you’ll have bragging rights at the water cooler or office cocktail party or any number of other symbols of stifling real life? Wrong. No one has a single shit to give over the fact that your DNA is now added to the random festering mess of the petri-dish that is a sky toilet, except that they might want to keep double arm distance from you so they don’t catch that new strain of bionic flesh-eating gonorrhea for which you will probably be the future case study.

Hollis Gillespie is Paste Travel’s The Ugly American columnist. She is a writing instructor, travel expert and author of We Will be Crashing Shortly, which is on bookstore shelves now. Follow her on Twitter.