I believe that is the traditional pronoun to use for an individual of unknown sex. I didn’t notice anyone referring to the unknown agent as “a man”, while you specifically said “a woman”.
Well, that’s what I get for trying to be helpful in The Pit. You’re the one who asked me about the American usage of the word “girl”, as in “You go, girl!” This expression is, in the US, stereotypically associated with both gay men and African-American women. The link to Urban Dictionary that you posted actually describes “You go, girl!” as “Network Television adaptation of gay/inner city jargon”, so I’m not sure why you’re shocked to hear basically the same thing from me.
Is there some reason you can’t just admit that you don’t have a cite for the agent’s sex? I asked, IMHO quite politely, for a cite that the agent was a woman since “a woman” was how you described this person – a person who as far as I knew had not been publicly identified as either male or female. For all I know the agent in question is a woman, but in the absence of other evidence it’s just as likely that the agent is a man.
After reading about what happened to MS Filipovic and other female law school students at autoadmit, I would think that she would agree that popularity is a very mixed blessing.
After reading about what happened at autoadmit, I think I’ll change my signature to “prude and proud if it”. There are some people around that I don’t want to admit I share an Y chromosome with.
Wow. That’s a sickening read. The negative comments on her blog seem positively menacing now.
I stand by my feelings about Jill’s refreshing lack of prudishness, and I really can’t see her blog entry as anything but a humerous anecdote that’s been blown way out of proportion. But please forgive my nasty advice about posting your negative feelings on her blog; I’m quite sure you don’t belong in that cesspool.
Discreet. For the love of all that’s holy, people, learn the difference between these two damn words if you are going to use them.
Secondly, I know a ton of lawyers in private practice, working for corporations, the government, working in human services and for advocacy groups, pretty much all sorts of legal work, and I know most of them via their blogs, where they talk openly about their private lives and their personal beliefs. I’ve seen pictures of two of them half-naked, sitting in water with human effluvia floating around them. (i.e. pictures of them taken shortly after having water births.) I’m pretty sure your expectation of what constitutes appropriate “discretion” isn’t universal or particularly realistic.
And since Jill doesn’t work for a firm, she’s the only one who gets to decide if she’s revealing too much.
Feministe is rarely a cesspool, until it’s trolled assmonkeys who saw a link on Fox News or, when the AutoAdmit thing blew up, by all the douchebag dudebro sexist pigs who thought the AutoAdmit thing was funny and why did girls always have to harsh their squee.
Well… It’s not “victim blaming” to point out the tension between saying “I don’t want anyone to be fired over this” and at the same time “here’s an example of something that will clearly get someone fired.”
I mean, the TSA employee wrote his own death sentence, so to speak. But it’s seems just a little disingenuous to me to play the “I didn’t mean it to come to this card” when you most clearly knew that it would certainly come to this.
Gotta go with Joel on this one, at least partially.
Because, and I admit that this is me talking out my ass here, I’m sure she wouldn’t have blogged about a TSA agent leaving a note about her Harry Potter book (“Snape kills Dumbledore!”). Yes, according to the letter of the law it would have been just as inappropriate, but this is bad because dildos and sex are private.
Which is why she blogged about it.
We live in a very confused time with regards to sex, where we flaunt, flirt, and discuss sex as if it’s the most public thing, and yet at the same time are both appalled and titillated whenever details of someone’s sexual behavior is made public, or talked about too directly.
. . . which is a tangent, I guess. But it’s worth thinking about, IMHO, because I’d be willing to bet good money that without the allure of SEXDILDOS!!!111, no one would care about this story at all.
SEX is what inspired the agent to write the note, SEX is what inspired the blogger to blog, and SEX is what got the internets interested in her blog.
FWIW, I agree with the TSA’s handling of the situation.
I’m siding with the cunt. This was hugely inappropriate and unprofessional. It’s bad enough that we are subject to these kinds of searches. There is no excuse for creepy commentary. I don’t know whether dismissal was the appropriate response, but I see nothing wrong with what the traveller did in this case.
This story reminds me of flying out of Sangster in Montego Bay back before they got X-ray machines. They opened and rifled through most suitcases on a table at the head of the long check-in line. It took forever. If they found a sex toy, they held it up for everyone to see.
Public Service Announcement: It’s a good idea to remove the batteries before you pack them into the suitcase.
You are not kidding. I think I actually read the argument that this is all her fault because she brought a vibrator. Because women are not supposed to use vibrators, we’re supposed to have a man for that.
Though I don’t think my “manbrator” would quite fit in an overhead bin…
Yes, well, I don’t want them to do that. But if I find the clerks are infringing on my right to decide when and with whom I socialize, I can simply go to another store.
Yeah, if I can’t,in practical terms, not have them go through my luggage, they should be discreet about it.
I’m curious as to why your response to the assertion that she wasn’t using this incident to garner blog hits was to post Twitter stats.
Not like you, who never says “boo” on the internet. You avoid anything anywhere public, like message boards.
Twitter is a blog, its just on their server and limited to short messages. I’m sure the hits on her other blog are proportionately higher on the TSA entry than the other entries there too, but that is obvious so I’m not sure why you’re even making the distinction.
Exactly. A ‘blogger’ and the mini bloggers via Twitter and Facebook are a much more attention whoring crowd in general than those who post anonymously on an internet forum.
If someone wants to tell the world what they think about this or that, whatever it may be, to some little following of groupies on the internet, including things that happened during their vacations or notes left from the TSA in their bags, that’s fine with me. I don’t have to read it. But to do so while saying she really doesn’t want any attention, she never intended for it to be a big story, and she just wishes it would all go away, while continuing to blog and re-blog it, is totally, sickeningly disingenuous and anyone who could look past their own knee-jerk RO over vibrator comments (which didn’t bother her at all) should be able to see that.
Many companies do Google searches on job candidates and these people were actually trying to sabotage the women that would be competing with them for law firm positions.
No, it really is simple. Persons in the medical profession do it routinely. The nurse who checks you in for a yearly exam asks “Are you sexually active?” not “You been getting a lot since your last visit?” During a routine exam, gyno notes some changes in your cervix since last exam rather than saying “Looks like some wear and tear on your junk here, lady, you must be getting pounded.”
Just consider Jill’s audience; I seriously doubt readers of Feministe are scandalized by a vibrator. The unprofessional and crass comment coming from an agency which has been screaming “Trust us with your naked body and personal items! We are here to protect you!” since 9/11 is the ironic blog fodder, not the silly toy.
Besides…she wasn’t sporting it on a chain around her neck, just hoping for some random stranger to comment in order to generate blog buzz. She was chatting it up with an audience of liberal, modern-thinking women. If someone picked up the story and ran to the presses while giggling like a 13 year old boy, it says more about the media’s fascination with scandal than it does about Jill’s motivation in posting the two sentence anecdote.
The TSA luggage inspection job involves looking for specific things. It doesn’t involve checking to see what passengers carry in their luggage. If the items they’re trained to look for aren’t there, nothing else should garner their attention. I realize it’s asking a lot, and probably more than most people could do, but once the piece of luggage has passed without them finding anything dangerous in it, they should ideally not be able to tell you what else it might have contained. It’s not supposed to be about cataloguing the contents of the suitcase.
How anybody could think that a comment, from a total stranger, regarding one’s sexual activities or preferences, especially from a stranger who has had access to one’s personal items, should be interpreted as playful, or encouraging, or anything at all but creepy and inappropriate, is completely beyond me.
People keep talking like this TSA employee is just one person, and it’s just one incident, but we have no way to know that. Who knows if they’re down there waving things around, yelling, “Look what’s in this bag!” “I wonder what she’s doing with thi-i-is.” We also don’t know if this employee made a habit of this, and most people are just too embarrassed to report it, or decide not to interrupt a trip or go back to talk to someone.