A woman interviewed on NPR today explained that if she were flying, she wouldn’t want to walk through the body scan machine because she’s over forty and “there are places no one should see.” She then explained that she’d opt for a pat down.
Um.
I’m not sure how people feeling you up is somehow less invasive than someone seeing a flash of your naked outline.
I think this is a remnant of our conflicted puritan and victorian past, which takes us back to this time of year–Thanksgiving. The puritans came over here for the opportunity to be uptight. No–they didn’t come for religious freedom–they came to establish a theocracy in which they could make everyone follow their interpretation of the Bible (or else), which is the opposite of freedom of religion (their descendants are among us today). Only a third of the people who came were puritans, by the way, the others were fortune seekers and convicts who chose America over English jails (because we were a prison colony, too).
The puritans were famously prudish about sexuality and their bodies. Yet they had a very high out of wedlock pregnancy rate. As long as the couple got married, the community didn’t really say anything about it.
The Victorians who came later were uptight as well. They covered their table legs and referred to chicken parts by color rather than saying breast or thigh. Yet venereal disease ran rampant. Most soldiers in the Civil War were not taken out of duty by death or battle injury, but by some form of sexual pox. 1 in 6 homes in Victorian London was a house of ill-repute.
No wonder all of these people who are so concerned about their privacy are opting instead to have a stranger’s hands caress them. Why settle for a grey outline of my breasts when you can put your hands right on them? (Go ahead–pretend to be outraged–Americans are great at that; I used to know a minister who’s wife would catch him watch Cinemax at 3 in the morning. He would then pontificate about the filth that “they” put on tv.)
(Of course, some people are opting out of flying all together. If they are the people who wanted to start wars for our safety, or accept civilian casualties for our safety, or who believe in preemptive strikes for our safety, or who insisted that if you didn’t agree with Bush then you were siding with the terrorists, then they need to be inconvenienced for my safety. Thousands have died for our “safety”, yet these people won’t go through a scanner? I don’t like waiting in line; I don’t like being inconvenienced; I dislike being blown up even more.)
