laura.fo

I read this in The Columbia Journalism Review and became oddly disturbed. "Oddly," because it's not the horror of the WTC disaster itself that shakes me (I've processed that, I think), but the writer's fixation with the ocean of documents that fell out of the sky that morning. A fixation I share. I was disturbed by it even as it was happening, when I watched the fall on September 11, but it seemed too sickly trivial to even merit comment. But there it is: real horror at the thought of a mass of private papers blasting out of the cubicles where they originated and sailing onto this nightmarish mass of rubble and bodies for everyone to see. I carried home with me three things that I'd snatched at random from the site, the writer says: a memo from Matthew to Jeff about Karen's secretary, the front page of a report on Telecom Strategies for the New Decade, a photograph of a mustachioed man in a tuxedo at a podium. I hate him for this raid. It's not the act of keeping a memento; that doesn't bother me at all. It's the fact that he's seeing what he wasn't meant to see, however trivial. And the owners of those documents have no recourse.

I'm bothered, too, by him knowing that the dead woman he saw fall from the tower was female "because she was wearing a skirt (sea-green) and I could see her legs." He steals in to get a glimpse of her face, and I picture myself in her position, unable to arrange myself, to hitch my skirt down over my slip before being stared at by a stranger. Her humanity ended precisely that instant.

It reminds me of this, which horrified me in the exact same way. I passed that link around for a while and most of my friends responded half-sympathetically with "yeah, men are pigs" or some other casual statement meant to pacify me just enough so that I would shut up about it already. They identified with the hassle of being stalked. "What a hassle." But they – and I admit it, even I – were seeing this woman as "a former nude model." It's hard to get up in arms about someone being launched into the spotlight if we never knew them backstage, when they were still whole and multi-faceted.

But lots of my friends are "former nude models," yet I don't think of them that way because they've never been forced to make it paramount. And they accept that as their entitlement, which I believe it is. But I don't think they understand how tenuous their claim on their own narrative is. Being misrepresented is rarely about someone saying you're this when you're really that. It's a matter of degree: someone takes some small part of you, hacks away the rest, and makes that part all-encompassing, turns it into everything you are. What can you say in your own defense? That you aren't that, when in fact you are? "Yes, but I'm other things, too!" or "I'm that, but, uh, not the way you said it!" are childish retorts. So you're left with silence. Like the woman in the sea-green skirt, legs helplessly exposed for the benefit of some cub reporter, breathing just ten seconds ago, dignity intact.