It was time to buckle up and face the void. I wanted to “rawdog” this flight, a new trend in extreme air travel. Rawdoggers, according to the dubious lore of social media virality, overcome the longest long-haul flights (New York to Hong Kong, say, or London to Sydney) through nihilism. They claim to spend the entire trip, possibly up to 18 hours, doing nothing but staring at the flight map on the seatback screen—no movies, no books, and, for the most rawdoggie, no meals even.
My flight lasted an embarrassingly modest 78 minutes, but I didn’t even last 15 of them. A pure-bred rawdogger might call me weak – unable to even manage the length of a Perfect Strangers before relying on the artificial crutch of Spotify downloads, Fast & Furious Movies streamed through the in-flight entertainment system, young adult novels devoured on an e-reader, the lure of working on a laptop, or the foamy head of a Diet Coke poured from the trolley. The sad state of today’s culture, they might lament, is such that there is no way to escape these temptations of the flesh, even temporarily.
Rawdoggers seem to think they’ve invented a new form of meditation, and who am I to prove them wrong? While the Buddhist might accept the confining circumstances of a long flight as an invitation to let go of worldly trappings, the rawdogger seeks to transcend them through rejection and its public performance. He rejects the film. He rejects the delicate crackle of the plastic cup of airplane refreshments. He rejects the tender grief that somehow always amplifies cruising altitude. Having ascended thanks to the ingenuity of humanity, the rawdogger now rises above the very idea of ascension. And then he posts a TikTok as proof, which perhaps millions of people watch.
Thanks to its success as a meme, rawdogging has now been applied to things other than air travel: you can rawdog on subway rides, at movie screenings, at office work, at mental illness (without medication!), at meals (without sauce!), at sports (without betting!). Most of these things are jokes, and that’s the point: rawdogging is a wish, not an act. It’s a fantasy of returning to a supposedly pure previous situation (that probably never really existed anyway), undertaken for symbolic exchange on social media, not as a lived experience, let alone as an enlightenment.
The practice evolved from the general rise of asceticism, particularly among (young, very online-oriented) men. To live on Earth today is to suffer constantly from temptations—sex, drugs, gambling, laziness—that are so widespread and easily accessible that one must constantly fight to resist their seductions. This condition has diluted asceticism from the actual, if difficult, rejection of pleasure to a fetish for that abstinence. Spending a flight shirtless is certainly a fictional act—few would actually spend a transcontinental flight staring at the flight map like a draft horse. But speaking of the idea—there’s surely a subreddit for that.
When brutal fuck When rawdogging first emerged as a popular culture concept, some critics linked it to contemporary sexual slang – raw (in the sense of unprotected) sex, or “No-Nut November,” a forgoing of sexual gratification for people who need to touch weed. But that’s wrong; rawdogging is about purity in a more general sense. It’s about Life Raw, in an ideal, natural state, untainted by cultural decay. And that has always been impossible.
Human culture has always struggled to accept this fact, and “rawness” is at the heart of this struggle. Structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed a “culinary triangle” that describes three phases of food – raw, cooked, and rotten. Raw food is unadulterated, by neither human nor natural processes. Cooked food is prepared by humans to resemble raw food; rotten food is subject to natural decay. Rotten is also relative; a ripe, smelly cheese may appear rotten in one culture than another. Roasting or grilling involves less processing of food than sautéing or souffléing. Enough cultural manipulation – such as through artificially manufactured, prepackaged foods – can make food appear rotten, stripped of its nutritional and social value. This fact has made rawness, once considered primitive, a new ideal for the civilized. This is why some consider raw sugar to be better than refined or artificial sugar. Raw materials such as wood or leather seem to be closer to nature and therefore purer. Cocaine or heroin are considered raw when they are unadulterated, meaning the narcotic is delivered at full strength.
Rawdogging takes this feeling of rawness and combines it with an actor who Dog—a guy, a dude, a hombre—who would stage rawness by becoming its agent. But just as today’s raw food products are highly processed cultural— packaged, sold and ideologized as green or organic, for example — nothing about a rawdogging flight is pure. After all, what is natural about being hurled through the troposphere in a pressurized metal tube burning petroleum distillates extracted from dinosaur remains? And if rawdogging just means the elimination of frills, the airline industry long ago stripped flying of most of its former luxuries — even, in some cases, the seatback screens that might display a flight map that a rawdogger could rawdog onto.
We can’t turn back the clock on social progress, even if that progress feels regressive. Regression can also be a kind of progress. Cinema has been degraded by smartphones, but smartphones have also put mini-cinemas in everyone’s pocket and purse. The impersonal, modernist thrill of watching strangers on the crowded subway is gone, but those odd glances have also been replaced by genuine camaraderie in group text chats. Nothing in life is ever simply better or worse, purer or more polluted. Nothing in life is ever simply one or the other.
But striving for a state of purity – even a fictitious one, even a fabricated, obviously impure one – still feels right. When you try to get closer to nature, or to achieve an imaginary state of purity, you also feel like you’re making the most of it. As a metaphor for competition, it’s fitting that flying became the rawdogs’ top dog. Purity is rising, and the rawdogging flyer is already closer to heaven. Can’t he soar a little higher? Rather than dance through the sky on laughing, silvered wings, you stare at them.
Unfortunately, every time you feel like you’ve overcome something, another, seemingly purer way to overcome it pops up. After I gave up on my humble attempt to survive my flight and pulled out my laptop, I found an even purer version: Rawdog Simulatora Rawdog flight simulation video game. After purchasing a virtual ticket from New York to Singapore, I piloted my Rawdog avatar across the jetway and took my virtual seat for the 18 hour and 40 minute flight to nowhere. The software uses a laptop camera for eye tracking to ensure players are staring down the virtual flight path, otherwise it’s game over.
As I stared from my real seat at the imaginary map on my seat in the imaginary airplane, a familiar, sickening taste rose in my throat: ironic detachment, the unadulterated taste of purity’s momentary success. The joke is on you, you real-life rawdoggers who actually fly to Singapore like idiots. I was rawdogging, rawdogging myself.
