I’m enjoying your response. What you describe as prudery is what I would describe as a basic survival skill. I’ve known guys who discussed their natural biological inclinations at work and ended up getting canned. Most people recognize boundaries in what types of private behavior they talk about.
We have a winner.
Not this TSA agent, apparently. I see that you said you agreed with the firing, but I don’t understand why you’re so shocked that Ms. Filipovic dared speak up about the incident and (seemingly) less surprised that the agent left the note in the first place.
This has got to be the most peculiar case of blaming the victim I’ve ever encountered.
Okay, so don’t tell your co-workers about your marital aids. Jill, however, is a writer, and a lawyer, and is apparently mature enough to decide what she should and shouldn’t blog about.
For contrast and comparison, please note that the TSA agent does not have the same on the job freedom as Jill to wax poetic about vibrators, hence the trouble.
So you’re suggesting what? That Jill tweeted in order to get the attention, specifically, of big traffic driver blogs so that she’d be “forced” to write a full follow up which would then be picked up by the mainstream media because she needs traffic on a blog that has ads solely to pay for server costs. (Feministe is not her personal blog.) That would belie a lack of understanding, to say the least, of how Twitter works, just as a start.
The words you want are “discreet” and “disingenuous” to begin with. Secondly, and more importantly, why are you presuming a requirement that any complaint about the TSA go only to the TSA and not be made via Twitter (especially when the complaint is, in the main, mild) or by one’s blog if they so choose?
Say, I just got a stash of saucy Ethel Merman nudes; you wanna get together?
I’m suggesting that if she carries a silver bullet shaped vibrator in a checked bag on an airline it is guaranteed to draw attention. Furthermore that blogging about it is guaranteed to draw further attention. All over something that is outrageous because it is a violation of her privacy. I go on to stay that she could maintain her privacy and achieve exactly the same result, or better, by simply following the normal process of filing her complaint, discreetly via the normal channels and getting the situation remedied. By immediately taking it public it would seem her hope was to gain publicity, yes, and/or evoke swift punishment for the agent which she says was not her goal.
I’m not presuming it is a requirement, only that it is advised if discretion and protection of one’s privacy were the goal. Thanks for the spelling tips but I didn’t type them that way - something is going on with all my posts today, making auto spelling corrections and adding font and size tags that I didn’t select prior to posting.
Good god. Do you understand that the TSA has a zero tolerance policy on harassment? That the agent would have been in trouble whether she phoned in the complaint, faxed a copy of the unwanted note, wrote a formal letter, or blogged? The fact of the blog is not relevant to the TSA rule that was broken.
One note found by a private person doesn’t appear to be what is happening out there. I think it is something a lot of TSA agents are doing, the sooner this is stopped the happier I will be. Fire any TSA agent found doing this even once. Look for bombs not my stuff, asshats.
So let’s say he would be insta-fired either way, and they would do nothing to change their own policy, training, hiring requirements, etc., either way. Even so the only difference between the two approaches is publicity. I never implied that it wasn’t a violation of TSA rules nor that he shouldn’t have been fired. (or is it She? some refer to the note writer as female). The screener may have been fired for it either way, but it is still disingenuous or stupid to claim that she didn’t want that to happen despite blogging it instead of just contacting the TSA about it.
Now her name is associated with the vibrator story all over the place - jokes, speculation and general chatter about her personal sex toys are fair game to the entire public instead of one rule-breaking TSA screener and their managers. She’s clearly internet savvy enough to know that would be the case, and that the agent would be fired, from the very first tweet.
I’m sorry, is it your contention that as she posted the note, she a) foresaw that the story would go viral and b) expecting this, was all smugface “That’ll show him” as she typed ?
Sweet Lord, it is.
You’ve never even been in the general vicinity of a person running a blog, have you ?
a) yes. b) there is no way to know. But after the fact saying that her wish wasn’t to get anyone in trouble indicates insincerity. Or she is the one who has no clue about how blogs and social networking work.
Not if I see them first. But on occasion I have, even working in the same office as a fairly well known one. And we are all in the vicinity of bloggers works by being on the internet. Is it your contention that bloggers, and blogging by it’s very nature, are not often directly based on attention whoring, traffic driving, and ad revenue?
Okay this thread is beyond retarded. Some jackass creeper riffles through someone’s personal things, and then leaves commentary.
Whatever the reasons the woman posted about it are irrelevant. She shouldn’t have been given this to post about in the first place. I’m glad she did.
Makes you think about what other creepy things they could be doing. When I take a plane I’m planing on having a suit case with:
[ul]
[li]A picture of a woman who vaguely (but not definitively) looks pregnant[/li][li]a pregnancy test[/li][li]a single coat hanger[/li][/ul]
Might as well give them something to talk about.
Only because we’re a nation of people with ridiculous sexual hangups. How dare a woman carry a sex toy with her when she travels, oh no! :rolleyes:
Which happened after the tweet blew up and people demanded more of the story. (The ability to foresee that a tweet will go viral to that level is 1 in 17 gazibillion.)
No, all over something that is outrageous because it was a violation of the understood professional social contract between the public and the TSA. That it’s shorthanded as being about “privacy” is not really indicative of the whole story.
We know they’re invading our privacy, even if we’re not carrying sex toys or anything else that’s especially revelatory. And that’s something that *we accept *-- begrudgingly in some cases, but still we do accept – as the unfortunate required condition of flying in this country.
But we require, in exchange for trusting the TSA with this level of personal information about and interaction with us that they maintain firm professional boundaries with us and the information. There are strongly delineated lines of propriety that we demand for our peace of mind, and that the agency requires as a modicum of professionalism.
The problem wasn’t that the agent invaded her privacy, it was that the agent abused her power by making an inappropriate and invasive comment that could only be made because of the ability to rifle through Jill’s belongings. And Jill said as much, within six hours of the initial tweet that began it all, Jill said, in an email with a web magazine about the issue
It’s not about “discretion” about her ownership of a vibrator. She’s never been secretive about the fact that she has vibrators, she’s talked openly on the blog in the past about problems she had with a super who got too nosey in her drawers when he came into her apartment to do work. She’s talked openly in the past on the blog about supporting feminist sex toy stores like Babeland – whose management tweeted to offer her a fresh new vibe within a couple of hours of the initial tweet, so the “personal item” in question was never really a secret, it was clear from the get go.
You also seem to think that she was embarrassed by owning a vibrator, or ought to be, like the TSA agent, trying to capitalize on a shame that just doesn’t exist. Without it, your argument falls apart.
Yes, because it’s entirely possible to predict what the TSA, a huge and largely unaccountable federal agency whose “highly trained and skilled” staffers have ripped medical devices out of people’s bodies without so much as an apology, will choose to do with an allegation made via Twitter.
Clearly with her magic psychic powers she knew that they’d talk about this on Fox News and The View and the TSA would be forced to act.
Not because it is a vibrator, Einstein, it is guaranteed to draw attention because it is a silver, metallic, bullet shaped vibrator. (which unsurprisingly is linked from one of the links in the OP where it is available for sale). Having an ammunition-shaped object in your bag is like sending a homemade cake into a prison and finding a note that says “No hacksaw found here, bake on Baker!” Totally inappropriate for the note to be written at all, as are the others that have been cited in this thread but for all we know the note writer might have been a female fan, just echoing something she wrote on her own blog at some time not making a comment on the sexual nature per se.
It is inappropriate to make any comment at all during what should be a sterile, mechanical search for specific contraband and nothing more. I haven’t disagreed with that by pointing out all she needed to do in order to right the wrong was report the incident. I think she saw this as an opportunity. That doesn’t have to mean it wasn’t also a legitimate complaint, nor that the screener didn’t deserve to be fired.
There you have it folks. She had a terrorist dildo.
A weapon of mass stress reduction.
What is your problem, then? Are you really just worked up that a blogger dared to blog about something? As long as Ms. Filipovic was telling the truth – and I’ve seen no indication that she wasn’t – then she had every right to speak/tweet/blog about this incident.
Bravo!
Try to keep up. My problem such as it were is that she says she never intended for it to become a big story or get anyone at the TSA in trouble and I say she did intend for it to become a big story and didn’t care if it got anyone at the TSA in trouble. I never said she was outside of her rights so I agree. Otherwise, no problem. What’s yours?