Suspicious Hair

~ Clarissa

“I need to go through your hair, ma’am,” the TSA officer said.
I don’t blame her because this hair is so thick and abundant that I could easily be smuggling a skinny terrorist inside it.

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Published by Clarissa

14 thoughts on “Suspicious Hair”

  1. Isn’t it ridiculous? Too much?

    May be, as a college prof, you’ll be interested:

    At Rutgers, a student urged professors to use trigger warnings as a sort of Solomonic baby-splitting between two apparently equally bad choices: banning certain texts or introducing works that may cause psychological distress. Works he mentioned as particularly triggering include F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The warnings would be passage-by-passage, and effectively reach “a compromise between protecting students and defending their civil liberties”.

    The Feministe poster is against the idea:
    http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2014/03/05/against-trigger-warnings/

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    1. This could be a great comment for the lonely Open Thread post.

      Yes, I’ve heard of college trigger warnings. Oberlin is doing them, if I’m not mistaken. The notion is completely ridiculous and Jill’s response is very good.

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  3. In response to el, not to Clarissa: I do not quite get this fetish of not causing anyone psychological distress. If one takes this idea to its logical end (and this would be fair, otherwise one would be choosing what should and what should not cause distress, based on one’s ideological preferences) then we are left with some lowest common denominator. Which may be ueber-PC, but completely devoid of any life or substance. In other words – banning books and introducing books that may cause distress are NOT equally bad choices. By far.
    And why should educational institutions indulge the delusion that one is somehow entitled to distress-free life?

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    1. This is a problem that exists and it is impacting teaching. Students like readings and films with saccharine, happy endings. If they are given material that makes them feel sad, they tend to complain in the evals.

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      2. Maybe in some case trigger warnings are OK. But definitely not passage-by-passage ones. Then the only books being taught will be those commented editions…

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      4. Indulging people will only make things so much worse. you get the superficial people winning out and eventually their ideology does as well. So if they read something that evokes negative or sad emotions, instead of saying, “Well that was a sad story, but true to life,” they maintain that the character (or author) had a psychological disorder. That’s just how reality itself looks to a very immature mind, as if others who experience things you haven’t are automatically crazy and intend to do you harm by expressing what they know to be true.

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  4. I think that in some contexts, warning students that there may be distressing content could be very useful. I could have used that last year, actually. One week after I was raped, I returned to my film class, and we watched a film which had a graphic rape scene. I had to leave the room and ended up hiding out in the hall crying my eyes out until the professor came and asked me what had happened.
    If I’d known that there was going to be a rape scene in the film, I would have either prepared to step out into the hall while that happened, or have excused myself in class that day so I could have watched the film in the library or at home by myself, so that me bursting into tears and leaving the room wouldn’t disrupt the class.

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    1. I’m very sorry you had this horrible experience. I think the prof shouldn’t have put on a movie with a rape scene no matter who was in the class. I think this is harassment. But that’s me.

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