The new trend among some men on flights is the dumbest yet

I don’t know if you remember, but long-haul air travel used to be brutal. The seats were uncomfortable, the food was horrendous, there was actual cigarette smoke wafting over you, and the entertainment, if you were lucky enough to have any, was a single projector screen at the front of the cabin playing what might be a movie.

If you wanted to “watch” the big screen, you plugged your terrible headphones in and changed the channel to 1 or 2; if you had to get up to go to the toilet you would just miss 10 minutes or so and hope nothing important happened.

The new social media trend among some passengers is to just stare at the inflight map throughout their flight. Credit: iStock

I say all this just to remind people of how bad flying can be, and how good we have it now.

Most airlines these days provide comfortable seating, to the point where some lucky people can lie down completely flat, close the door to their suite and have a solid night’s sleep. The food in all cabins is good, mostly, and even quite tasty on some airlines.

And the entertainment is nothing short of amazing, with hundreds, if not thousands of on-demand choices that play on a good-sized monitor right in front of your face, everything from action movies to TV drama series to foreign-language films to box sets of Family Guy.

I actually look forward to a long-haul flight now, because it means I have something like 12 hours to just sit there, uninterrupted, zero guilt, and watch TV. (I have two young children, so this essentially never happens.)

So I, like many other people, am completely baffled by the new trend on long-haul flights: “raw-dogging”.

If you hear that term and your mind goes to something that has nothing to do with international travel then, my friend, you’re probably in your 30s, 40s or older and the world has moved on without you.

Raw-dogging a flight means to go without any entertainment, and in some cases without any food or water for the entire journey. No books, no phones, no music, no TV, no food, no water, no toilet breaks. All you’re allowed to do is sit there and watch the flight path.

This trend is taking flying back to the bad old days in more ways than one, because it was technically kicked off on Seinfeld something like 30 years ago. In one episode, the character Elaine takes a long-haul flight with her then-boyfriend David Puddy, who, she discovers, travels with no entertainment. “You’re just going to sit there, staring at the back of the seat?” she asks. He nods. “Yeah.”

It should come as no surprise to discover two things about the modern trend of raw-dogging: one, it began as a challenge on TikTok; and two, it’s mostly being done by men.

The whole thing was started by a man on TikTok: a user called Westy, who posted a clip of himself on a seven-hour journey only watching the maps, calling it a “bareback” flight. It continues to be practised almost solely by men, who engage in a pointless test of mental strength and physical endurance, a bro-tastic way to take something already uncomfortable and make it a try-hard performance of masculinity.

As my partner Jess would say: “Are men OK?”

And look, honestly I don’t know. Going by this evidence you would have to say no. (Though, you know, #notallmen.)

Even celebrities are getting in on the act. Manchester City star Erling Haaland recently posted a video of himself “raw dogging” a seven-hour flight.

This also puts raw-dogging right up there with the dumbest TikTok challenges to have emerged in the past few years. It’s destined to join the likes of cooking chicken with NyQuil, the “blackout challenge”, and the consumption of Tide Pods on the podium for the most pointless internet stupidity.

Though, raw-dogging isn’t just pointless – “Bro, I just raw-dogged a 14-hour flight”; wow, have a medal – it’s also dangerous.

The no-entertainment thing? Sure, whatever. I spend a fair bit of time watching the flight path too, but that’s because I’m a massive map nerd. That’s not going to affect your health in any major way, and it might even be practising some form of mindfulness.

But going without food and water on a long-haul flight, and even without toilet breaks? Are you crazy?

Long-haul air travel already puts passengers at risk of dehydration, so clearly going without water for your whole flight is going to increase that risk even further (and make your jet-lag at the other end far worse). Refusing to go to the toilet for 14 hours is obviously stupid.

And one of the key things air travellers can do to lower the risk of deep vein thrombosis when they’re flying long-haul is to get up and move around. A commitment to just sit there staring at the maps is going to raise that risk considerably.

There’s probably something quite Darwinian about this whole thing that we shouldn’t dig too deeply into. Just know that raw-dogging is a thing, and if the bloke next to you is staring at the maps, refusing drinks – and, crucially, filming himself on his phone while doing so – then you could just be in the presence of a TikTok legend.