Thanksgiving is almost here. And you know what that means.
Air travel.
But this year getting on a plane will feel very different. On Nov. 1 the TSA implemented new, more intensive security procedures that include the routine use of body scan technologies. And of course, this being post Tea Party 2010 America, a self-defeating revolt is afoot. John Pistole, head of the TSA, is now pleading with people not to go along with the so-called "National Opt-Out Day." I mean really, we need the security and such a revolt will only create delays.
While reason rarely soothes a revolt, what current discussions also miss is that for most people the experience of being looked at quasi-naked involves a very complicated psychological relationship.
Showing someone else the curves, shapes, and folds defined by our skin often brings deep anxiety. Even when done anonymously—like with current procedures—the anxieties about being seen naked can become so powerful they trump whatever feelings of shared risk and shared responsibility remain (remember how it felt in the weeks after 9/11?). Many would rather protect their modesty—whatever that is—than increase safety (assuming of course that these procedures actually increase safety which is itself apparently an open question).
One thing that is clear is that those who advocate for using body scan technologies hurt their cause by adopting a "get over it" attitude. Instead, they need to confront the reality and depth of the psychology involved. Even if nothing of consequence happens from being scanned beyond a somewhat bored civil servant gazing at a momentary flickering image, those few seconds can elicit powerful feelings. In addition, having a stranger see you naked, or you another, is not just a visual experience. Power, desire, purpose, status, and unconscious fantasy bounce back and forth in the act of exposing your naked usually covered parts to someone else.
We've all had those experiences as viewers. Think about seeing a pregnant Demi Moore on a Vanity Fair cover, a Lucien
Freud painting, a John Currin scene, or just routine porn.
But from high art to low porn perhaps no one has explored the complex relationship between viewer and viewed more graphically, and more joyously, than Annie Sprinkle, the post-porn performance artist/
sex educator. Consider her second performance piece "Post Porn Modernist,"
In it's most notorious sequence, her
Public Cervix Announcement, Sprinkle was featured onstage with her legs spread and vagina open inviting the audience to view her cervix with the aid of a speculum and a flashlight. She shamelessly presented her vagina in all its glory, and not as an object of pleasure but as an area of empowering
beauty and mystery.
While such performance art does far exceeds the actuality of planned airport security procedures, it does illuminate the feared experience. And if this is too limited a description you can click here for Dr. Sprinkle's (yes, she has earned a Ph.D. in Human Sexuality) web-site and bio. You'll learn she was a porn performer and sex-worker before becoming a post-porn artist with a Ph.D. In other words, she has more than enough street-cred and academic credibility to exemplify how the viewed can control the meaning of the viewing relationship. Her display of her body as "an area of empowering beauty and mystery" works in part because we know she has displayed herself otherwise, as an object, an often denigrated object. But in her PCA she takes control of the relationship, not of the viewer but of her relationship to the viewer, and she moves the experience to "empowering beauty and mystery."
How did she do it? What did she do to change the relationship? Well, she said so. She took control of being viewed like we can control being viewed.
The viewed can control the experience of being viewed which is why Annie Sprinkle's cervix is so central for understanding the TSA's new procedures. Whether it's a post-porn artist in a 1990s performance piece or someone's Aunt Minnie or Uncle Lou trying to get to the family dinner before the turkey is cold, we can make the act of being viewed into a relationship over which we have control. We can make it an active experience of something we do rather than something done to us.
My plan when I next fly the week after Thanksgiving is to stand together with my neighbors and invite the TSA to look at my techno-revealed body. I will not stand there as a vulnerable object threatened by stupid policies and hatred packaged as religion, nor as a vulnerable object to be used as scan-porn for someone's sexual arousal. No! I will proudly stand on my own two feet next to my neighbors—no matter where they live—and proudly invite scrutiny knowing the only intention that matters is everyone getting safely where they want to go.
So, instead of revolting, let's transform being scanned into our show. Lets make it be a sign of our committment to each other and our collective safety. It is our choice how we will flash our shapes on the screen, and I hope we will do so from a place of shared safety and community; we can even make it into a moment of realizing that even with scary technology we are all just fleshy neighbors somehow in this together where our only hope is shared sacrifice.
© 2010 Todd S. Essig, All Rights Reserved
[version history: a slightly different version of this post was published on True/Slant, a news network start-up subsequently bought by Forbes, last January when these technologies were first being widely tested].
