Air sex
Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 3:47 am
Remi Gaillard is a French prankster and comedian. He’s enormously popular in Europe thanks to a series of YouTube clips of him doing things to unsuspecting members of the public and then posting them to YouTube.
Most of the time these are pretty benign, like dressing up as Mario and driving a Go Kart around Paris, which is actually pretty funny.
But he’s got a new schtick and it’s taking the world by… what’s the less impressive equivalent of storm? Scattered showers? Drizzle? Light to moderate wind on the southern coasts and ranges? Something like that.
That schtick is this: pretending to have sex with unsuspecting women.
He calls it “air sex”: he goes up to women in public places, positions himself relative to the camera so it looks like he’s penetrating a woman while she reads a book in a park or ties her shoelace in the street, until they realise what’s going on and get outraged, at which point he scampers off grinning at his own hilarity.
The joke is that they don’t realise for a while – they just keep on doing what they’re doing while Remi pantomimes pounding away.
It’s seemingly struck a chord with the planet: the video went up on March 28 and by 2 April had already passed four million views. Needless to say, outrage was not long in coming. The video was swiftly picked up by feminist blogs and websites and Gaillard was the recipient of much criticism on Twitter from all over the world.
Naturally, being a male comedian accused of perpetrating rape culture, he immediately apologised for his insensitivity, addressed the criticisms thoughtfully and entered into an enlightening dialogue about the damaging effects of sexism on socie…
Nah, just joking. He said his critics were humourless scolds and that those who were supporting his right to pretend to screw strangers were “voting en masse… for freedom of expression”. Freedom! Oh, Remi, you’re like the Rosa Parks of pretending to rape people.