A woman has been branded as 'fat phobic' for moving plane seats after being "sandwiched" between two plus-sized passengers. The 19-year-old explained how she was assigned the middle seat on her flight from Las Vegas to New York, a five hour journey.
But after an hour, she asked a flight attendant if she could move as her seat neighbours' shoulders and thighs were 'on top of hers' on either side. Taking to Reddit, she said: "Both people next to me were plus sized. I wouldn't have any problem with this in any other situation, but plane seats are terribly small and neither of my neighbours were able to fit comfortably into their seats.
"I walked up to the flight attendant and explained the situation as privately and gently as I could, and I asked if there were any other seats available. She managed to find a seat a few rows behind mine that I could sit in."
The young woman "awkwardly" collected her bag from under her seat without saying a word - and moved to the empty seat further back in the plane.
"The rest of the flight went fine," she added. "After I got off, though, the woman I was previously sitting next to was waiting for me.
"She essentially told me that I had embarrassed her and the other man and that traveling while plus-sized is hard enough without 'people treating fatness like a contagious disease'.
"She also said that I made it a public demonstration to everyone that plus-sized passengers are an 'inconvenience' and opened the door to fat-phobia on flights."
While she tried to handle the situation as gently as possible, she has been left wondering whether she should have "just stuck it out".
She asked Reddit users: "I really didn't mean for it to come across that way, but I can understand how it did and everyone on the flight saw me move, so now I'm wondering whether I should have just stuck it out, it wasn't like I was being suffocated or anything."
In response, one user said: "You did not make a 'public demonstration' nor contribute to fat-phobia in any way. You weren't comfortable and you discretely asked for another seat. She's an a***hole for saying that drivel.
"The biggest a***hole is airlines for making seats smaller for the past 20+ years. It sucks now compared to when I flew in the 90s."
Another user added: "Her anger is misdirected. She can go ahead and be mad at the airlines for not accommodating people of her size, but it's a perfectly normal human response not to want to be touching someone you don't know and to take steps to make that not happen."
A third user said: "You're not the a***hole and I'm fat. The best answer would have been to say 'these seats/airlines are really fat phobic and designed to make us uncomfortable, so I figured if there was a way to give you more space it was the kinder thing to do'."
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