You're arguing past my point and not really addressing anything I actually said?

Are you really comparing sitting next to a woman would be akin to sexual assault, in a society where men and women are treated as equals?

No? I'm comparing it to something like hugs, which are acceptable cross-gender greetings in some places but limited to the same gender in others. That doesn't make places where the latter holds anti-democratic. I thought I was clear enough on that, but I'm not justifying what the man in the OP did; I'm just saying jumping from that to "disrespect for democratic values" is reading more into the story than there is to it. Plain entitlement is sufficient to explain everything we see here, and there'd have been no problem had the man been more respectful about what he was trying to do (for example by looking for someone to switch seats with). This is ultimately a problem of how he went about it, not of what he was trying to do.