Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

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.

I touched down at SeaTac with a terrible case of jetlag yesterday evening.  This was only somewhat mitigated by the fact that I had managed to get a little bit of sleep on the flight from Beijing despite the man behind me who insisted on tugging on my seat every time he got up to use the bathroom (and, given that every time the flight attendants passed by he asked for beer, this was rather often).

My first flight had landed at SFO, and I was immediately shocked by the blue sky (minus the pollution that often makes it safe to look at the sun with your naked eyes in China) and the warm air (it didn’t get above freezing the whole time I was in Beijing).  During my layover, I found that I had to remind myself that I didn’t need to crowd up right behind the person in front of me in line and that I did need to throw toilet paper into the bowl rather than into the trash beside it.  When I passed through the security checkpoint for the domestic terminal, I also found once again that US airport security seemed far more absurd and repressive than Chinese airport security.  In China, you don’t have to take off your shoes; domestic flights allow liquids of any size in your carry-on.  If you set off the metal detector, they quickly and unobtrusively wand you.  In San Francisco, I heard security guards demanding that baseball caps and sunglasses be sent through the X-ray machine.

Once I feel a bit more awake and manage to edit my photographs, I’ll provide more details about my experiences in Beijing and the most frightening taxi ride I have ever experienced.  In the meantime, you can read these three poems in the current issue of Philament.

In reading various commentaries on the death of a woman in a holding cell at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, I’ve seen many people express the opinion that a woman in her condition should have been accompanied given how stressful air travel has become.  While there may be some validity to that opinion, it misses what should be an issue in the public sphere.  It fails to ask the essential question of why airports should be such hostile environments.

Today, everyone planning to get on a plane is treated as a suspect, which is of course ridiculous.  The vast majority of people planning to get on a plane are tired and/or excited travelers headed off for vacation, business, or even just to see their families.  In no other area of our lives would we stand for this sort of treatment or consider it reasonable: fear has clouded our better judgment.  Are we really going to say that as long as the treatment wouldn’t cause a “normal person” to snap, it’s acceptable?  I’d always thought that the main reason for treating people decently was respect for human dignity, not the desire to avoid a scene.

But that’s the insidious nature of the “War on Terror”.  Along with its claims to protect life and freedom comes the assumption that anyone harmed by it must have done something wrong.  Either they were a threat or they behaved in an inappropriate way (such as failing to heed soldier’s orders to stop).  We need to stop questioning the victims and start questioning the war.