I haven't flown since the initiation of the new Transportation Security Administration scanner/pat-down regime, but I will have to soon. Protection from the 1-in-9.3 million chance of dying in a terrorist attack requires that I allow a TSA agent to inspect my body. Lucky me, I get to choose: a shower of radiation from the screening machine or fondling by a human hand.
Reflecting on these options, I conclude: I'd rather be gazed at than groped.
While perusal of the gazillion punditries, blog posts, and reader comments on the subject doesn't make it easy to tell who is opting for which indignity (and who is trying to refuse both), I'd bet other women share my preference.
As a woman, I'm used to being looked at; I'm socialized to it, even turned on by it. In fact, now that I'm over 50, I admit to a certain nostalgia for the sucking noises that accompanied my every stroll down the sidewalks of New York, lo these many years ago. The advances of feminism and queer liberation notwithstanding, the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey is still right: The gaze is masculine, the object of the gaze, feminine.
The body-scanning machine makes me slightly squeamish, but the thought of a stranger's hand exploring my nonconsenting vagina evokes downright revulsion, drawing up associations of creepy uncles, subway perverts, and worse. The perpetrator of sexual violence is almost always a man, and his victim is almost always a woman -- or a man perceived to be "womanly."
Watch the now-famous "Don't touch my junk" video, and you will witness a man outraged at the violation not just of his privacy but, more passionately, of his masculinity. After all, masculinity implies sexual privacy -- the privilege of moving through life unmolested. Or unnoticed. The most powerful, and to men, mostly invisible, sexual privilege of masculinity is the ability to remain unaware of oneself as a body. When the body is simply a vehicle in which to be a person, having that body seen or touched can be a neutral experience. It's far more likely that men can submit to the screenings, whether by machine or by hand, with ease.
Women, on the other hand, are never allowed to forget they are bodies: large- or small-breasted, fat or skinny, in or past their prime. A few female commentators have proclaimed that the objectors should get over it. "I have nothing to hide," one said. I wonder what she looks like. Women can "disregard" their bodies only when they are judged unequivocally beautiful.
The loudest voices in the controversy are male (so what else is new?). But aside from the "Don't touch my junk" man, these critics often are speaking up on others' behalf. The most condemned, and most aired, examples of TSA excess involve the "weaker" members of the flying public: old people, children, and women. In the United Kingdom, the scanning of minors was legally challenged as a violation of child-pornography laws.
So thanks for your concerns, guys, but no thanks. As Susan Faludi argues in The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America, it's paternalist "protection" like this that got us into the "war on terror" in the first place. Remember George W. Bush, that great champion of women's rights, citing the Taliban's mistreatment of women as a reason to invade Afghanistan?
Women ask for protection no more than men, according to Faludi. In a stunning rebuttal to the "security mom" narrative so often invoked in the 2004 elections, Faludi concludes that this was a mythical demographic -- "a convincing, if fictional, dramatization of our national protection fantasy."
Women have been thrown under the bus in the war on terror, which has sucked funding from social programs for the poor, children, and the elderly (all "women's issues") at home and intensified the oppression of women where the U.S. is waging wars.
The TSA security check may look like an equal-opportunity oppressor. But it's not. Like many other things, this particular abuse has gender. For women, a humiliating experience is exacerbated by sexual humiliation. And another measure undertaken in the name of safety only reminds us of our enduring unfreedom.
