Airport Anxiety

I'll admit, I'm one of the people who went to the airport to fly home for Thanksgiving, ready for a fight.  I knew I had two options:  submitting to a full-body scan or a pair of hands down my pants.  Disliking the airport is nothing new, but as I stood in the security line I noticed I was shaking slightly, my heart was racing, I felt nauseous.  I had read about other people reliving trauma in this way.  I was prepared for anger, but here I was too, re-experiencing my own vulnerability.

Finding myself in the old-fashioned metal detector line, my anxiety quieted.  But as I watched people file through the scanner or the pat-downs, I wondered how they were feeling.

At home, reading the online news reports about the proposed resistance to the new security measures, I realized: it's just me, a bunch of white guys, and a few other white women, freaking out.  This is not the group I'm used to protesting with.  Although it may be a function of whose voices make the news, and not representative of reactions or values, I began to wonder.  Is my righteous indignation just white privilege?  I don't think much about getting pulled over and searched on a day-to-day basis, or about having parts of my body swabbed at the gynecologist because I'm in a "high risk" group (read this fabulous blog by our very own, Vanessa Torres).  Maybe now white folks are getting a taste of the everyday experience of people of color, and no surprise, we don't like it.

But I know there are other components to my discomfort.  In our culture, it is mostly female and ambiguous-sex bodies that are subjected to chronic objectification, scrutiny, and physical forms of violence.  I'm far from alone in my personal understanding of this.  Throughout my life, I've heard innumerable unsolicited comments about women's bodies that left the younger me feeling awful about myself.  At least one screener has received a "warning" for photographing a female co-worker who walked through a scanning machine.  More TSA employees are being investigated for singling out a woman with large breasts for extra screening.  Saved photos of men and women have been leaked online, and even the ACLU has opened a website devoted to documenting such incidents.  Of course, not all screeners are inevitable sleazebags, but sexual violence as an expression of power is alive and well, both overtly and insidiously, and we can expect to see it abused in this setting.

Finally, the fact that something as natural as nudity can create such a stir speaks to our cultural conception of sexuality.  Our hyperbolic fear of all things "sex", coupled with a pornified, simplified, objectified, dumbed-down media version of our sexual lives, creates a tense atmosphere.  Rules governing the supposed danger and strangeness of naked bodies form the backbone of our sexual teachings in school, church, and the legal system.  These forces lead us to fear bodies, and to exploit them.

I'm eager to read what you all think.  What do our reactions, both carefree and volatile, say about sexuality, nakedness, power, and privilege?