The XX Factor: What women really think.

Savana Redding's School Was Wrong to Strip Search Her

The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional this morning the strip search of Savana Redding, the 13-year-old student who was supposed to have somehow been hiding prescription ibuprofen in her underwear, only wasn't. That's a relief. At oral argument, some of the male justices got all jokey about their own school experiences of people sticking things in their underwear in middle school while they were changing for gym. That particular reminiscence came from Justice Stephen Breyer: Here's Dahlia's great write-up of the argument. And today, Justice David Souter specifically notes, in his majority opinion, that "changing for gym is getting ready for play." A strip search in response to an accusation, by contrast, is "fairly understood as so degrading that a number of communities have decided that strip searches in schools are never reasonable and have banned them no matter what the facts may be." I want to live in one of those places ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.) 

Ginsburg on Why the Supreme Court Needs Another Woman

Dahlia, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would surely agree with you that it's long past time to rub out the equation that a woman justice equals a second-rate one. To make the case for why she needs a female colleague (or colleagues), she took the unusual step of talking about a case that's just been argued and not yet decided—the one involving the strip search of 13-year-old Savanna Redding. You wrote vividly about Ginsburg's apparent distress at the clueless reactions of some of the men on the court at oral argument. This week Ginsburg said as much to Joan Biskupic of USA Today. "They have never been a 13-year-old girl," the justice said. "It's a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn't think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood."

Ginsburg also remembered being ignored by male lawyers at meetings in the 1960s and 1970s, only to have a man present repeat her point, and get a response. And incredibly, she feels the same way even now: "It can happen even in the conferences in the court. When I will say something—and I don't think I'm a confused speaker—and it isn't until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point." Biskupic writes: "It was a revealing observation from a justice who generally praises her male colleagues, some of whom are close friends." No kidding.

Ginsburg also directly addressed the question of what women bring to the bench, as women:

"You know the line that Sandra [Day O'Connor] and I keep repeating … that 'at the end of the day, a wise old man and a wise old woman reach the same judgment'? But there are perceptions that we have because we are women. It's a subtle influence. We can be sensitive to things that are said in draft opinions that (male justices) are not aware can be offensive."

The differences between male and female justices, she said, are "seldom in the outcome." But then, she added, "it is sometimes in the outcome."

PS: Ann Althouse (U. Wisconsin law prof, blogger extraordinaire) discuss diversity on the court.

Zero Tolerance or Zero Confidence?

Liza, thanks for the great insight on strip searches and female jurists. I am more and more persuaded that we need more women judges, not because their brains are somehow wired differently, but because they have lived and experienced life as a woman, and that still means something when they decide certain cases. I wrote about a study showing that male judges will look at gender disputes quite differently if there is a female judge hearing the case alongside them. Hopefully, Liza, by the time your daughter takes her seat at the high court, we’ll have moved past the need to patiently explain why being asked to show your breasts to a school official is nothing like suiting up for volleyball.

Emily Y, to your point about “zero tolerance,” I got a great note yesterday from Joshua Lanning, an attorney who has litigated several strip search cases who suggested, along with many readers, that schools have zero tolerance policies because they don’t trust the faculty to use their judgment anymore. Or as Lanning put it, “It's as if the Court believes all government officials are so perilously close to being ineffective at their jobs that any burden from the Constitution would render them unable to perform their public functions.” Zero tolerance implies that our teachers aren’t smart enough to differentiate between the dangerousness of ibuprofen and crack. And so to defend against that we institute a strip search policy that keeps them from having to differentiate between searching through students' backpacks and peeking into their bras.

Adjudication Without Representation

I was riveted by Dahlia's vivid description of Tuesday's Supreme Court hearing of the Savana Redding case, which has been followed with interest in my household. Like Redding when she was summarily hustled into a school nurse's office and ordered to disrobe under the scrutiny of school administrators, my daughter is 13 and in public middle school. She immediately got what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also got: To be asked to strip to your underwear, and then shake out your bra and panties, exposing your private parts so that bureaucrats may look to see if you have extra-strength ibuprofen in your underwear, all because some ex-BFF wrongly ratted you out as a drug dealer, is, as Ginsburg put it, "humiliating."

Facebook pages and sexting notwithstanding, I think it's fair to say that there is still no more modest creature on earth than the average adolescent girl. This is the age when the bedroom door is closed almost all the time, and girls in locker rooms develop elaborate, chrysalis-like methods of wriggling out of their clothes and into bathing suits or gym suits without exposing anything. That the male justices on the highest court in the land did not seem to get how Redding felt (an honors student, she left the school permanently after this episode) is dismaying enough; that they took the opportunity to reminisce about their own towel-thwacking locker room youth is hard to believe. Maybe they were so unnerved by frequent repetition of the word "underwear" that they started saying anything that came to mind. One wonders what Redding, now 19, thought as she listened; having hoped to have her situation taken seriously, she instead was obliged to listen to Justice Clarence Thomas guffawing as Justice Stephen Breyer recalled boys in the locker room sticking things into his underwear, or theirs, or whatever, exactly, happened. (But wouldn't even they, as boys, have been embarrassed if whatever was going on had gone on while school officials were intently watching?)

Thinking about this, I realized that the Redding exchange, and E.J.'s post yesterday deploring the tiny representation of women in the Mirror awards for media coverage, are really about the same thing: They are about the need for a proportional representation of women in important places, and the frequent, puzzling absence of same. That there is only one woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, in this day and time, is also hard to believe; if there were a lone male justice among eight females, it seems safe to say that many people would regard this as an unacceptable suborning of the natural order, but the reverse situation never seems to inspire much in the way of widespread objection. I think there have been discussions on this blog in the past about the question of whether female jurists rule differently than male jurists do. I am no expert, but it seems likely to me that in most cases they do not, but that sometimes, crucially, they may. That Ginsburg was the only judge who seemed to understand what Redding went through is a stark reminder that judging also involves reacting as a human being, and that this is why we need women human beings as judges. I don't mean to suggest that no man could have seen the situation as she did; I was chatting with a former criminal defense attorney—and father—who said that even given the special mission of school officials to protect students from drugs and other dangers, he would have ruled this an invasion of privacy. The only bright spot about the Redding case is that it has offered more evidence to my own children, boy and girl, about why women need to be in the workplace and, by analogy, why mom works. My daughter talks now about wanting to be a judge. I think we could use her. 

Zero Tolerence Intolerance

Strip Searches Can Still Humiliate, Decades After the Fact

A guest post from Slate V intern, Lindsey Hough:

Dahlia's account of the oral argument yesterday in Savana Redding's case forced me to recall a memory of my own strip search. During my rebel stage of 13, I too had to take off my shirt for a school counselor so she could examine the little cat scratches I had etched into my bicep out of my devotion for a then-crush…let’s call him James. Out of adolescent defiance, I had somehow launched this fad of "cutting" in the 8th grade, and a small posse of girlfriends decided to grab their own bobby-pins to tattoo themselves. The school caught wind, and started interrogating.

One day, I was in PE class and watched as our counselor interrupted the game of kickball to drag a friend into her office. I knew what was up, and after class went into the girls' locker room to apply cover-up to the few scabs that measured the width of a strand of hair. I put on a long sleeve shirt and thought to myself, "There, no way they’ll find that." I tested my sleeve, pulling it all the way up to my shoulder with no success. My tracks were covered.

They made me take the shirt off, and obliterated any sense of autonomy I thought I had. I got the sense the counselor knew she was doing something fishy but covered by "bringing in the nurse who has to check it out." Forced to sit shirtless in front of these two women, I felt exposed and humiliated, embarrassed and angry. I felt they weren't just judging my actions but my body. We talk a lot on the XX Factor about young women and their changing ideas about privacy. But no matter who you are, being forced to take your clothes off against your will is an act of humiliation, embarrassment, and violation. It stings to know that 8 years after my own strip search, those feelings still don't matter.