Judith Levine, Writing of The American Prospect explores largely overlooked gender issues the recent TSA look-vs-touch dilemma and, by implication, the recent initiative to insist on the intrusive groping option over the intrusive voyeurism option TSA prefers.  She says that...

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."

Source: The American Prospect

And of course now that she mentions it of course it makes sense.  You don't have to appreciate the way gender is constructed to appreciate that it's constructed that way.  Levine brings that particular point home just a bit further down in her post.

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.

(CoughTwo Rules of Desire #2cough)

Men might occasionally lament that it's inconceivable that they might be physically desired, but that in no way diminishes the intolerability of such a prospect. As Levine says, if, like most men, you have no conception of such corporeal scrutiny it won't occur to you that others might notice and possibly deeply envy the luxury of that oblivion.

One last point Levine makes is that very often, especially with men, the outrage expressed isn't about what happens to them. Instead it's projected outrage that such treatment might befall those who are deemed "weaker." Often it's the weakness of women and children that fuel the outrage even though a) on average women and children are just as tough and resilient as men and b) on average men are no tougher nor more resilient than women or children. (It's not that others might not in fact need support, it's that when we're privileged we sometimes project our insecurity on others. Which is a nifty way to preserve our sense of self-esteem without confronting the fact that we actually tend to want, need, and/or possibly deserve the same treatment we demand for others.)

It's a good post.  I stand by my earlier posts on the subject of TSA screening but since I began my own first post on the kerfuffle by deprecating my own discomfort it would have helped me if I'd read this first.

Via Kaili Joy Gray

Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle says that whereas we’ve been extraordinarily docile about having both our personal data appropriated by enterprises both private (Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg) and public (NSA wiretaps, strong-arming ISPs and phone companies for call data) we’ve finally started to collectively call bullshit when eyes and hands start reaching into our pants.

Nothing, apparently, sets us off more than some unhappy TSA worker — an increasingly unenviable job, you gotta admit — yanking you out of line and giving you the delightful option of getting your entire body X-rayed from ass to nipple, or being groped all over in case you might be carrying something explosive in your pants.

Is that not amazing, by the way? That a solitary “Christmas underwear bomber” has now changed the complexion of the entire country and inconvenienced tens of millions with a single failed attempt? Yes, all this groping is because of one guy, and he’s not even Justin Bieber. How incredible is that? Who says an individual can’t make a difference? Who says the terrorists haven’t already won?

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

I’m still feeling even more gloomy about this — despite long, long standing privacy concerns among progressives, and the fact that “nude” x-ray backscatter and 152 millimeter-wave machines have been around since at least last summer (my family and I went through one in Boston last August) the issue’s sudden “discovery” by conservative bellwether Matt Drudge and its subsequent liftoff in the media has felt a little too coordinated. (Evidently there’s a clause in the authorization bill that begins allowing both privatization and unionization of TSA beginning… oh… sometime this month.)

Still, as apologists say about venal, corrupt, and cynically hypocritical televangelists, “light will shine through any window.” The coordination of criticism really might have risen out of an initiative to privatize TSA* the issues themselves have been both well-known and bitterly criticized for years. If it takes a marketing ploy to finally get the conversation moving then… hey, maybe so. (I don’t think the privatization thing is going to get a lot of traction. Certainly not from the groping story.)

* Remember, it’s not a crime if you’re imprisoned in a shipping container by a private security firm after its employees have drugged and sexually attacked you so how could it possibly be a privacy invasion if a private security firm merely squeezes your genitals till you flinch?

Cartoon “Anxiety” by Randall Munroe of XKCD. Used under a Creative Commons license.

In comments to my previous post about TSA’s spanky new groping policy for those who refuse to pose for their backscattered nude photos Holly of The Pervocracy, who’s so brilliant she should have her own blog (oh wait!), said

The part that really scares me is that it’s fairly clear the pat-down has been made more invasive not so it’s more effective, but so it’ll serve as a deterrent to keep people from opting out. It’s a creepily sexualized retaliation for being disobedient, not an actual security measure in itself.

And in comments Sungold of Kittywampus (who’s been all over this story) added

Yes, Holly is exactly right. If the “enhanced” pat-downs are so essential, why weren’t they implemented in January, right after the Underpants Bomber incident, instead of waiting until now, when many airports have the strip-search scanners? They’re being used to bludgeon people.

This should not be a left-right issue, but so far it’s gotten the most coverage among libertarian and right-wing media. The left is only beginning to stir. In the feminist blogosphere, I don’t know of anyone besides Melissa McEwan and me who have called much attention to it – which is why I’ve been blogging up a storm about it.

...

Those of us who care about bodily autonomy and social justice face a lot of intractable issues. We are not, for instance, going to stop sexual violence. But we can stand up and protest a brand-new government policy that mandates searches that feel to many of their recipients like sexual assault. A policy that is centrally decreed can also be withdrawn in a single stroke. If people refuse to be sheeple, we might have a chance to win here.

Another commenter, Ms. Inconspicuous (who I wish still had a blog) recounts her own recent experience where the prospect of groping was expressly raised as a reason for complying with radiation-based porn.

I just went through the new body scanners a few days ago.

It was absolutely and fundamentally clear that TSA agents were using full pat-downs as an intimidation tactic to dissuade you from trying to opt out of going through the scanners.

“If you refuse to go through the scanners, be aware that you will be subjected to a more thorough full-body search and potentially lenghty delays.”

Ms.I adds, relevantly, that

HOWEVER—were I a survivor of sexual assault and I knew that my body image were being projected to a stranger I would feel absolutely violated and vulnerable. And a thorough pat-down is a good answer? No. It’s not.

But it’s by an agent of the same gender! (Baffling how even TSA security measures assume that all sexual assault and abuse takes place between people of opposite genders… and that no one could possibly feel threatened or assaulted by a person of the same gender. Gimme a freakin’ break.)

And I’ll just close with what I said over at BoingBoing after finding the relevant image for my previous post. It’s also why, incidentally, I chose the… intrusive XKCD comic to illustrate this post.

What’s sickening, of course, is it’s not about perversion — they’re probably as humiliated to do it as we are to receive it. What’s sickening is that they do it anyway. Same thing and maybe worse when they do it to little kids.

I’m pretty confident that pretty much every last floor member of the TSA would really rather not be fondling passenger penises and vulvas, with or without rubber gloves, and with or without consent. In fact I’m pretty confident that for all the snarking and invective we’re leveling at them the very, very last thing any of them wants if for passengers to get the idea that either TSA or the passengers should find the procedures either sexually abusive or erotic. Which is why the XKCD notion of a culture hacker calculatedly selling Viagra to prospective passengers is excellent resistance.

Do I think people really should take Viagra and present their clothed erections to TSA staffers? No, absolutely not. (Because just as one can’t assume passengers are free of triggerable sexual trauma you can’t make those assumptions about all TSA staff either.) Instead what’s effective is the accusation of sexualized conduct.

Nor am I suggesting all this because a) I’m a sex blogger or b) because I’d prefer less security theater (shoes, underpants) and more actual, less-intrusive security. Instead I’m suggesting it because…

Y’know? Just because TSA doesn’t want adults or children to associate blue-gloved hands in their groins as sexual… And just as TSA doesn’t want adults or children to associate backscatter imaging as voyeurism or as adult and child pornography… and just as TSA agents themselves would probably rather think of anything else on earth besides sex when they’re manipulating the folds of a small child’s testicles or vulva or hefting a pregnant woman’s full breasts, the fact of the matter is they have no fucking say over how the recipient is going to interpret that. M’Kay?

Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors expresses uncharacteristic suprise at findings about women in a recent report on sexual abuse in the criminal justice system.

The statistics are staggering.  Kaiser and Sannow explain the importance and implication of the studies, as well as their deficiencies and strengths.  In describing one of the findings of the Bureau of Justice Statistics report (available here) the authors note:

Nearly 62 percent of all reported incidents of staff sexual misconduct involved female staff and male inmates. Female staff were involved in 48 percent of staff-on-inmate abuse in which the inmates were unwilling participants. The rates at which female staff seem to abuse male inmates, in jails and in juvenile detention, clearly warrant further study. Of the women in jail, 3.7 percent reported inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse; 1.3 percent of men did. Does this mean that women are more likely to abuse each other behind bars than men, or that they’re more willing to admit abuse? We don’t know—but if they’re simply more willing to admit abuse, then the BJS findings on men may have to be multiplied dramatically.

I was astounded at the rate of reported sexual abuse of male inmates by female staff members.  It illustrates that in some circumstances, women use sexual violence as a form of domination and power over men in a way that is not so different from what men do to women.  The authors point out that it is difficult to know why female inmates are more likely than their male counterparts to be sexually abused by another inmate of the same sex.  It may be that women are more abusive of each other than men are. 

She said it here.

I’m not at all sure why anyone should be surprised. Here are three reasons that skip off the top of my head:

1) Sexual abuse and sexual assault are excitations of power, not of sex… or gender. Yes, historically we see far, far more sexual abuse and assault by men but I believe historically power has been also see far, far more likely to accrue to men. As we make progress towards parity of power it’s inevitable that we’re going to see more parity in its abuse.

2) The standard gender assumptions about women as vaguely and passively “sugar and spice and everything nice” make the standard gendered scripts for behavior for women in dominant, potentially sexual situations, let alone scripts for men in sexually dominated-by-women ones, are inadequate. Both narrative and scripting need to adjust to the reality of women as autonomous human beings who’s moral compasses are neither more nor less flawed than anyone else’s. (I ought to add that because we do have a lot of scripting about men and abuse of sexual power there may also be better developed policies for managing or deterring it.)

3) Both of the bogus Two Rules of Desire make it more difficult to confront or transcend our (mis)understanding of sexual (mis)use of power. When society believes to its core that it’s not only intolerable and inconceivable for women to manifest sexual desire, and equally intolerable and inconceivable for men to be sexually desired, you’re just going to find women poorly prepared to forgo opportunities to exploit sexual vulnerability, you’re going to find men, and women, poorly prepared to resist such exploitation, and you’re going to find social and prison policies ill equipped to police it.

So. You wanna know just how entrenched our gender narratives about sexual abuse really are? All this seems to be seriously old news, at least among rape-crisis community professionals. I’ve mentioned several times in this blog an interview I had back in the very early 1980s with the director of a rape-relief and domestic violence shelter. I mentioned my ignorant impression that men can’t be raped, not by women, and she said no, that it was actually relatively common. The common denominator, she told me nearly 30 years ago, was that perpetrators were very likely to have custodial power over their smaller (i.e. children), or weaker (i.e. elderly, disabled) victims. Given that prisoners, and particularly juvenile ones, are in custodial power and there should be no surprise nor shock at all that they would be just as subject to sexual abuse by women as by men.

That it wouldn’t have soaked in to general awareness even 30 years after I first heard about it is the only really shocking thing about the whole story.