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In reading Joe Sharkey’s April 13th column, Looking You Over, With a Shameless Gaze, I couldn’t help but think that the reaction of the woman who had been directed to go through a whole-body imaging machine was remarkably similar to the way many women respond after experiencing sexual assault (emphasis mine):

“I was stressed out and in a hurry,” she said, when a female screener directed her to one of the boothlike machines. Ms. Jost said she assumed it was another kind of machine, one of those so-called puffer devices that check for explosives traces.

“When I figured it out, I really felt violated and mad at myself,” she said. “I’d been trying to avoid these machines, and I literally walked into one without knowing it. I really did not connect the dots until later when I was sitting on the plane, and I said, oh my God, that was one of those strip search machines.”

Indeed, the first paragraph of that quote is reminiscent of institutional rape in which an individual with power, possibly a trusted figure, directs someone to engage in or tolerate acts that they may not understand until later (if at all). Now, obviously, I am not saying that the security guards in question were acting out of a desire to violate this woman (though especially if whole-body imaging should expand, it seems unlikely that the TSA would be able to screen out people who would find such things titillating, even if they tried). What I am saying is that such security systems feel like an assault. Being forced to display your nudity when you do not wish to, even if only one other person sees it, is an assault.

That said, the column in which this woman’s experience appears is highly problematic. Sharkey feels the need to note that “[l]ike Ms. Jost, many people who object to the invasive nature of the machines insist they are not puritanical”. Why is it that people, especially women, who do not want to be forced to reveal their bodies need to defend themselves against charges of being puritanical?

Even worse is that when it comes to the possibility of someone figuring out how to save images from these machines, especially images of celebrities, Sharkey turns the violation into a weak attempt at a joke. Ending his column on that note, undercuts the seriousness of violating a woman’s right to control her body and who sees it.

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