Day Log

Athena's Mirror Pt 1

Cover-Ups: Exchanging Hides by stephanie pope

C’est un dur métier d’être belle femme… It’s hard work being a bombshell
                                                                        -Baudelaire

I have begun this next series of essays around the archetype of Athena, Sex, and The City, in part because I am preparing to fly next week and as I am, several stories around the clothing, i.e. the hiding of the female body have made the news. Two of the three images that surface have to do with flying and airport security. The third image has to do with father-daughter psyche that tissues in notions regarding sexual purity, chastity and the scapegoat complex.

Airports are funny places these days. You want to fly. You book your flight. You have your ticket and your ID in your hand.

Kyla Ebbert/ You Tube: Fox News
Thrown off plane; attire deemed, “too sexy”   
  (as seen on Today show with Matt Lauer)

You stand in line. Security nods you on to the metal detector. You stand in line again. You are told to take off certain kinds of clothing and to put that and your toiletries and your laptop, cell phones, and jewelry in several bins. Your things go through one side and you go through another. A ringer goes off. You are waved into another line. This one scans you with x-ray vision. (Don’t laugh.) This really happened to me. It turned out to be my underwire bra, one of three articles of clothing I felt fortunate to still wear. In case you haven’t noticed, going through airport security is going through a strip search.

Kyla Ebbert is more fully attired than I was at the time. I’m sure she felt herself fortunate in a similar way as she tried to board her plane. Kyla, as pictured, actually wears five pieces of clothing, excluding shoes. Having passed such screening, the editorial “you” will collect your things, finish dressing and proceed to your gate like Kyla did. What becomes important to me that I note is how the earlier experience of going through airport security frames the next encounter Kyla has with airport personnel.

Along with Kyla, you and I have lived this. It is part of our brain’s psyche now. That psyche is emplotting new psyche just now framed by the sexualized value-based insistency that declares it had a right to do what it just did to all of us.  It did not have this right. It simply had this power. The incidence is an example of an abuse of power. And that is what you and I witness and why the airline issues an apology to Kyla, lowers its fares and launches a miniskirt campaign in apology to us all. The airline does not say it is wrong. I think they are.

You see, this incidence is unlike the strip search through airport security that we all go through no matter who we are.  In the next encounter Kyla is made an example of; she is sexualized and humiliated. The next emplot-me(a)nt is ‘value’ based behavior and that value is an elephant in the room. This elephant is what a hidden prejudice looks like. This particular sin against our American freedom to live our own life, with our own liberty to pursue it toward our own personal happiness is what we call American freedom. Our physical appearance is “ours”.  It should not be exploited to promote a religious idea.

It is only just now, as you are walking away, if you are a female you, you begin to imagine that moment when you board the plane and the airport clothing Nazi…er…flight attendant scrutinizes ‘you’  regarding your terrifyingly (or is that petrifying?) female-looking ‘look.’ These days, on certain days, being ‘a bombshell’ seems harder and harder to endure. (Okay, now you can laugh!) That is because these days you cannot be too sure of what is talking when this is talking. But, you can be sure as a ‘female’, you are being framed to it.

This may be precisely the point everybody seems to instantly understand in what makes the whole thing so very wrong. I suppose you and I, who can still laugh over such faux pas, are fortunate. Comedy is the best way to invite resolution of our current polemic, allergic and erotic affliction. But what gives? How is airport security in its scrutiny for bomb-making materials getting disoriented in its focus and misguided in its mission? What makes-up this zealous 'reflux'—for reflux or abject body is what this incidence is and is what shows in the national psyche when it comes to securing our airspace. What invites unaccountable suspicion when in its projections regarding issues of national security people in power attempt covering over or hiding something else hiding in that significant space assigned the sex and sexiness female body behaves socially?  

One may guess it is that this mini skirt is too mini. But, when asked what part of her attire was inappropriate for travel, Kyla was told it was her entire outfit. This answer suggests it is not the skirt that accents what is not seen in the photo between the woman’s legs but, heaven forbid, might be flashed  or as many suggest is flashed when she sits down, nor is it the green sweater that can’t help acknowledge the lucky young woman’s ample breasts. It is the sexiness of the entire image which appears under attack.  Or is it her sex?  Or is it the having sex the sexiness suggests? Is it the ease with which all this seems so easily assailable to the eye? Is there a certain mythos filling in the air of plaint’s first claim?