Airport security, body scans, and Annie Sprinkle’s cervix (NSFW)

Full body scanning machines proposed in major airports may involve an image received by screeners of travelers in their “altogether,” but all together, scanning makes sense. So endorses the American Association for Nude Recreation (www.AANR.com), the oldest and largest group representing nudists in the US and Canada.

via Nudists Agree: Airport Scanning that ‘Takes It Off’ is Good for America | American Association for Nude Recreation – The Alltogether.

Image by Oldmaison via Flickr

Well said. Could even be important, except for the fact that most of us are not recreational nudists. For most people the experience of looking-at and being looked-at is a very complicated psychological relationship. But recent discussions about airport safety and body scan technologies have ignored the complexities.

Showing someone else the curves and shapes and folds defined by our skin can bring deep anxiety. So deep in fact that shared anxieties about being seen naked can become powerful enough to trump feelings of shared risk and shared responsibility (remember how it felt in the weeks after 9/11?). Many would rather protect some notion of modesty than increase safety.

Those who advocate for these technologies hurt the cause by adopting a “get over it” attitude, or by talking about some yet to be demonstrated tectonic shift in cultural attitudes about privacy. We need instead to confront the reality and depth of the problem. Namely, that even if nothing of consequence happens from being scanned other than a civil servant gazing at a momentary flickering image–really nothing more than a quickie with a bored stranger–those few seconds really do risk powerful feeling.

Image via Wikipedia

A woman looks at the Currin painting 'Honeymoon Nude'...

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 looking at the naked, usually covered parts of someone else.

We’ve all had those experiences. Think about seeing a pregnant Demi Moore on a Vanity Fair cover, Lucien Freud’s “Big Sue,” a John Currin nude, or porn itself.

But from high art to low porn perhaps no one has explored this 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 the most discussed sequence, the infamous Public Cervix Announcement, Sprinkle was featured onstage with her legs spread, 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, personalized and not as an object of pleasure, but as an area of empowering beauty and mystery.

via ANNIESPRINKLE.ORG.

While this picture from a performance may not capture the actuality of planned airport security procedures, it does illuminate the feared experience. And if this is too tame an illustration you can click here and accept Dr. Sprinkle’s (yes, she has earned a Ph.D. in Human Sexuality) invitation to view her cervix up close.

Having been a porn performer and sex-worker before becoming a post-porn artist with a Ph.D., she has the credibility to show that 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 now controls the relationship, not the viewer, and she moves the experience to “empowering beauty and mystery.”

And why has the relationship changed? Because she said so. The viewed controls the experience, which is why Annie Sprinkle’s cervix is so central for understanding the TSA’s new procedures. Perhaps those made nervous by the thought of being scanned at the airport, an anxiety deserving of respect and helpful attention, can take control over the act of being seen. Make it our relationship, something we do rather than something done to us.  We can follow a path blazed by Sprinkle from T&A to the TSA.

We can stand together and invite the TSA to look at our naked bodies. But with us in control of the meaning of the experience. We will not stand as vulnerable objects threatened by stupid policies and hatred packaged as religion, nor as objects to be displayed somewhere somehow as scan-porn for someone’s sexual arousal. No, we will stand under our own empowerment, with certainty that the only intention that matters is getting safely and comfortably to one’s destination.

We will need to transform being scanned into our show, not theirs, our committment to each other and our collective safety. It is our choice how we will flash our shapes on a 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.