"Feeling the Love"

In response to the controversy over enhanced airport security measures, The New Yorker magazine's cover for December 6 shows a curvaceous, pony-tailed, female Transportation Security Administration agent frisking a male passenger who's about her age. He's wearing a tan suit, a striped shirt with a red tie, and horn rimmed glasses. He's passed through a metal-detecting electronic gate, and he's deposited items such as his shoes, cell phone, keys, and coins, into one of those gray plastic tubs - we see his shoes in one of them. He should also have been asked to deposit his hat, which still sits on his head.

He's standing with his legs spread far apart, and he's holding up his arms parallel to the floor and at right angles to his body. The agent is leaning over him as he bends backwards. With one hand, she's feeling his chest and with the other she's feeling his lower left arm, each hand flat against him, and she's kissing him. Another TSA agent, a male (who should have been the one to frisk him), looks on with a smile.

Mentioning the cover at dinner, I told my wife that it represented wishful thinking on the young man's part. "What are you talking about?" she said indignantly. "She's fending him off!" Incredulous, I protested. "It's perfectly clear that she's succumbed to passion. She's molesting him." My wife was adamant. "Don't you see?" she said, "She's pushing him back!" I turned to the magazine's table of contents to find the cover's title, hoping that it would justify my position. But the title, "Feeling the Love," was no help. "If she's fending him off," said I, still pursuing my point, "why is she kissing him? Why hasn't she pulled her face away?" But it was clear I was beating my gums in vain.

Our interchange made me think of the different ways in which we must be viewing the world, she from her perspective, I from mine. I always knew some differences in perception must exist. After all, our educations and backgrounds are similar, but the differences in our ages (six years), heights (seven inches), and genders, if nothing else, would create different experiences and expectations. Long ago I learned that if there are two ways of doing something, hers and mine, my way is not necessarily better. Long ago she learned that my assertions, even when delivered in my most definite, professorial, and authoritative tone, are not necessarily true.

Even so, our tastes, political positions, and values are very similar. So I was startled that we could disagree about what seemed to each of us so obvious. Are there other radical differences in perception that we haven't uncovered? Our disagreement provides a useful reminder that each of us is an individual; neither is a clone nor an appendage of the other. And it's just as well. I would find marriage to someone just like me intolerable. As it is, our compulsions nicely complement one another's, neither reinforcing nor conflicting with them, so our relations with one another are harmonious. Whether the agent is kissing the young man or he's kissing her, someone is "feeling the love." In the case of my wife and me, the love is felt by us both.