Kavitha Rajagopalan: Elusive definition of privacy

Over the past few weeks, the public debate has featured a lot of talk about private parts. But what the national conversation about airport-security body scans and pat-downs really exposes is the fault lines in ideas about the right to privacy in an age of heightened security.

When word of the coming body-scans and other intensive preflight security policies first broke earlier this year, a few feminist voices cried foul. In the Huffington Post, Kelly Kleiman likened the scans - which generate nude images of travelers for review by airport security staff - to sexual assault, writing, "I've never been stripped or raped. And I don't propose to let a government agent be the one to end my lucky streak."

As body-scan images hit the Internet last month - along with stories of rape survivors suffering crippling flashbacks and travelers filing civil suits - at first it was women who spoke out against the inherent invasiveness of the scans, and against the vast potential for quasi-pornographic exploitation (or at least titillation) these images gave airport security staff. They were soon joined by men reportedly outraged by the physicality of the enhanced pat-downs.

Then the so-called feminist perspective began to fragment. In New York Magazine, Alyssa Giacobbe suggested that the outcry against pat-downs only emerged because they affect well-situated white men.

Women have been subject to airport security "gropings" for years, she said. Others have pointed out that hundreds of innocent black and Latino men have been stopped and frisked on the street under crime-reduction regimes, and Muslim men and women have undergone physically invasive airport pat-downs for years. While some might consider the scans and pat-downs a perverse kind of equal rights, we have to ask ourselves whether a wholesale invasion of privacy - in which we may end up violating everyone's rights - is really progress.

The controversy over these policies has brought together some unlikely bedfellows. Controversial conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who recently argued that racial profiling would be a far more effective security strategy, has suddenly found herself on the same side of this issue as the American Civil Liberties Union, a long-standing opponent of racial profiling, in opposing the body scans as a violation of privacy.

But the right to privacy is a tricky thing to defend, partly because it's so hard to define. What is private? Our religious practices and our personal communications? The safety and sanctity of our homes? Our bodies - or just certain parts of our bodies?

For decades, women's rights advocates have walked a fine line on privacy - demanding greater protection of women's bodies from exploitation and violence, while seeking greater visibility for women in the public sphere and greater freedom to express sexuality or dress with fewer restrictions. Issues from family and reproductive health to domestic violence were once considered private affairs, and not the stuff of public policy.

Now, not only is our evermore diverse society trying to navigate a whole host of cultural, religious and legal ideas about what should be kept private, but the nation is also facing tremendous security challenges. As we decide what parts of our information, behaviors and bodies should be sacrosanct, we also have to figure out the best strategy for protecting these same things.

The news media have focused on the varying outrage and indifference of private citizens and public advocacy groups to these measures. But perhaps it is time to stop tittering and gasping about private parts - and to start getting serious about what privacy trade-offs are acceptable in an enhanced security world.