Objectify This

The case Redding vs. Safford Unified School District #1 was decided by the Supreme Court this week.  The 8-to-1 decision was awarded to Savana Redding, who as 13-year old girl, was strip-searched by school officials when she was suspected of carrying prescription-strength ibuprofen to school, each of which would have had the strength of two advils. No drugs were found.

A recent New York Times article reports, “The case also revealed a gender fault line at the court. In an unusual interview about a pending case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told USA Today in the spring that judging from their comments at the argument, her colleagues, all men, had failed to appreciate what Ms. Redding had endured.

““They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” Justice Ginsburg said. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I don’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”

“In the end, Justice Ginsburg’s view of the constitutionality of the search prevailed.”

It’s interesting to me that there’s such a strange reluctanct to consider the ways that gender issues inform our lives. There’s really no denying that biologically, and thus hormonally and emotionally, men and women have distinct experiences. Shouldn’t justice take those into account?

Yet, in the history of the Supreme Court, according to a recent New Yorker article about Sotomayor, there have been 106 males and 4 females. Without Justice Ginsburg’s argument, would her colleages have known that the difficulties of becoming a woman and stepping into a world of humiliation and objectification could only be compounded by standing in front of strangers and being ordered to display one’s genetalia?

Men do not have to experience the menace of rape to the extent that women do, and are less likely to feel powerless in such situations. Clearly, such an act is a violation of individual dignity that resembles hazing, which should not be part of any school’s curriculum.

Hat tip to Casey for this video: