Don't Even Scan My Junk!

To Washington Post op-ed columnist Ruth Marcus:

As a liberal Democrat, I generally agree with your practical yet slightly-left-of-center opinions, if I may so characterize them, but your column "Don't touch my junk? Grow up, America" (Nov. 24) is unconvincing to me. I just don't want to have my genitals subjected to a stranger's gaze or touch so that some bureaucrat's or politician's idea of enhanced airline security is served.

I have been patted down in an airport, by the way. It happened years ago, in Kenya, which is a country that may need such intrusive procedures. I'm not yet convinced such procedures are needed here.

Maybe "whether this is real security or security theater is to some extent unknowable," as you admit. Yet I want to be shown some hard evidence, please, before I submit to the depersonalization of a full-body scan or patdown that is not clearly for my own individual — or at least somebody else's — benefit.

Here are actual airport-style scans of a woman and a man, with faces blurred:

Those are "millimeter-wave" scans. The alternative Rapiscan process gives:

The second impresses me as quite graphic, the image of the male notably so. How exactly, I'd like to ask, is it any less depersonalizing if a scanner blurs or obliterates my face while it's outlining my "package" so faithfully?

Many of the things you wrote bother me greatly, Ruth:

" ... where is the harm if some guy in another room, who doesn't have a clue who I am and doesn't see my face (it's obscured on the machine), gets a look at my flabby middle-aged self?" Maybe so, but you're still being depersonalized — rendered anonymous — while your "junk" is put on display. This is acceptable???

The question of one's flabbiness being limned, and one's middle-aged sag being exposed to view, makes your position more tenuous, not less, I'd say. I myself am far enough past middle age to expect to hear loud guffaws emanating from that nearby room of high-tech privacy invasion. But even if I were young and buff, I'd still loudly say, "Keep your eyeballs off my junk." (And, by the way, are those prying eyeballs ensconced in a nearby room female eyeballs or male eyeballs?)

"The images are automatically deleted once the screening is completed"? Not necessarily ... from Gizmodo.com, "One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans" is proof that they don't always get dumped into the bit bucket.

"'Don't touch my junk' may be the cri de coeur - cri de crotch? - of the post-9/11 world, but it's an awfully childish one"? It misses the point for you to say how immature some of the blogging has been about this issue. Immature men and women, like the rest of us, have a right not to be ogled by complete strangers or patted down by begloved officials in Transportation Security Administration uniforms.

"The marginal invasion of privacy is small relative to the potential benefit of averting a terrorist attack," you say? Two thoughts:

• One, the invasion of privacy is not marginal, it is (as I said) depersonalizing. Patdowns are no better just because the patter-downer can see our face and we his or hers. Breast, genital, and posterior prodding, no matter how brief, is depersonalizing. What is depersonalizing is never marginal.

• Two, exactly how much do the odds of a terrorist attack decline if this kind of scanning/body-touching is insisted on? I'd like a rigorous comparison, please, between:

1. The odds of my plane crashing with no survivors, due to causes other than a terrorist bomb
2. The odds of my plane being blown up by a terrorist bomb if we go back to the older, less intrusive screening procedures
3. The odds of my plane being blown up with the new procedures in place

If odds-number-three can't be demonstrated to be palpably greater than odds-numbers-one-and-two, is odds-number-three justified?

"We let people touch our junk all the time in medical settings"? Air travel is a part of many people's day-to-day lives. If I had to have my "junk" put on display on a basis more regular than an annual doctor's exam or mammogram, I'd certainly start to feel I was getting "objectified," after some period of time. In the case of frequent air travel — which I personally don't engage in — I'd like to feel that the benefits-to-depersonalization ratio was as significant as with the oocasional medical procedures I do voluntarily undergo.

"I undergo the pat-down, if I must, for the greater public benefit"? Again, where are the numbers to show how great the public benefit is?

Breast cancer survivors having their prostheses inspected; bladder cancer survivors having their urine bags ruptured ... yet you cover this by saying, "Effective screening does not require a complete suspension of common sense"? Do we really expect common sense to govern what each one of dozens or hundreds of TSA employees do in the performance of their duties?

An obvious problem with scanning/patting procedures that are this intrusive is that the line between what is OK and what is unacceptable is way too slender for unintentional oversteppings of that line to be rendered sufficiently uncommon.

And that doesn't even include the potential for intentional overstepping. Why might one think TSA employees any less immature than the average blogger?

"The stepped-up screening has generated a fascinating fusion of left-right outrage"? Well, duh. Maybe that's because there's no quantifiable, objectively verifiable case to be made for the stepped-up screening!

I could go on and on, Ruth, but I think you get my point. In a nutshell, I just don't see that stepped-up, intrusive screenings and pattings down of my private bodily parts in an attempt to reduce the likelihood of someone secreting non-metallic explosives on board an airplane enhances the public welfare in a quantifiable way.

And even if it truly forestalled what it purports to forestall, what is to stop the bad guys from, as you so delicately put it, "hiding explosives in body cavities" as the next phase of their war on civilization? If it ever comes to that, what would prevent your "reasonable" depersonalization-creep from one day acquiescing in anal and vaginal inspections?