What does inappropriate look like?  According to a young woman travelling from New York to Dublin with her vibrator it looks like a TSA inspection ticket with “Get your freak on girl” scribbled on it.  Travelling alone, Jill Filipovic found the ticket in her luggage while she was unpacking and assumed it referred to the “personal item” in her bag.  She admittedly “died laughing” in her hotel room and was not embarrassed, as evidenced by her posting the note on Twitter and her website, Feministe.  Ms. Filipovic then emailed the Daily Mail about the incident and said she found the incident to be incredibly invasive and creepy.  In my experience searches do tend to be invasive and I assume that anything in my luggage will be perused by someone.   According to her, she could not get her freak on and had to dispose of her vibrator because she “had no idea what he did with it while it was in his possession”.  It is disappointing that a self-proclaimed feminist did not entertain the possibility that the TSA agent may have been a woman, in which case I would have thrown it out, too.  Ms. Filipovic also said the incident was “wildly inappropriate”.

It seems that appropriate and its opposite used to be more easily identified.  I grew up very familiar with what my Mother deemed inappropriate and passed on that knowledge along with my own definition to my Daughter.  But, in today’s transparent and shameless culture, inappropriate is defined by the individual who can often just turn the channel or close the browser.  A perfect example is that I do not believe the TSA agent was wildly inappropriate, but then I love a good joke.  I do think it would be appropriate recompense for the airline to give Ms. Filipovic a gift certificate to her shop of choice for the purchase of a new “personal item” so that she can return to getting her freak on, poor girl.