I guess I should maybe elaborate.
I’m sitting at a gate in the C-wing of McCarran International. Earlier, a male Transportation Security Officer approached a woman behind me in the security line at PDX for no discernible reason other than to compliment her body. The above paraphrases the line he opened with. The woman laughed it off, and the incident concluded. Ostensibly, she enjoyed it. So why am I, on her behalf, infuriated?
(Disclaimer: Being up to my molars in frothy first-world white male privilege, I am utterly unqualified to talk about any of this. But I’m gonna anyway.)
I’m not normally a fan of what the concept of sexual harassment has done to our culture. It’s a big, important idea that’s been diluted by the small idea of the “hostile work environment.” We dial every conversation between mature adults down to a G rating; we shy away from links marked NSFW; we stand down our gestural paratroops lest an innocent touch, launched to land a point, drift across enemy lines. In so doing, we lose sight of the larger goal, which is to prevent sexual slavery. Yes, women shouldn’t have to tolerate a constant barrage of sex talk from the men they work with, but they also shouldn’t have to sleep with their bosses. In other words, it’s not the incidental mention of sex or inadvertent racy HTTP request that’s the real problem: it’s the abuse of a power imbalance.
The woman who may or may not have been a ballerina may or may not have enjoyed the officer’s compliment. There’s no way to tell. But consider her situation. In the next few minutes, she would likely be given the following choice: a) submit to having nude photos of her body taken by individuals in another room; b) submit to having her private parts touched by a stranger; or c) miss her flight, be detained, have a) and b) as well as d) through m) happen anyway, and maybe also get sued for eleven thousand dollars. That is what we call a major fucking power imbalance. In that context, even the slightest hint of a sexual approach on the part of a TSO could be considered not just harassment but assault. You’re saying, basically, “pretend to flirt with me, or my gender-appropriate equivalent over here might have to get rough with your tender bits.” So there’s a nonzero chance that instead of feeling flattered, she felt forced to make bedroom eyes at a creep to avoid being finger-raped.
If you’re part of a government that compares itself favorably to the Taliban, you have no business taking that chance. The only acceptable demeanor for a TSA officer toward a passenger, especially when the TSO is male and the passenger is female, is abject humility. No one made you take a job where you clinically deprive innocent people of their dignity under threat of force. You signed up for that, and I expect to see the apology on your face at all times. I expect to hear it in your voice; I expect to smell it in your goddamned sweat. And I expect you to wear that apology long after your disgusting daily routine is finally found unconstitutional and your hideous organization is disbanded and its leaders imprisoned. I expect you to wear that apology not because it makes up for all the years you helped ruin America — which it doesn’t — but because it’s simply the bare minimum standard of behavior someone in your position must meet in order to call himself a human being.
I wish the woman who may or may not have been a ballerina hadn’t laughed off the encounter, although I don’t blame her if she was simply doing whatever helped her feel safe. I’m not sure there was a response available to her that wouldn’t have made things worse. But what if she’d stopped removing her shoes, stood silently, and stared at him? Like the students who stared in silence at the chancellor of UC Davis last week? Again, you have no reason to listen to me; I’m as privileged as privileged gets. But what if every woman — every person — the TSA abused just stood silently and stared? What would that look like?
People in power never see the abyss on their own, no matter how near to it they push us. It must be shown to them.
Be the abyss.
Gaze back.
