I am amazed at the audacious stupidity of our muy macho airline security procedures, which have now gotten totally out of control. Everyone knows we need to be vigilant and diligent, doing what we can within reason to keep people from carrying weapons onto planes. But, as Maureen Dowd sensibly explains, what we’re now doing is not within reason — it is humiliating, extreme, and mainly pointless.

I’ve been searched more than Martha Stewart. I watched a Transportation Security Administration screener brusquely insist that my friend take off her blazer even though she had on only lingerie underneath – a see-through camisole – and the man behind her was leering.

Airport screening procedures are more reactive than imaginative. There’s an attempted shoe bombing, so all passengers must shed their shoes. Two female Chechens may or may not have sneaked explosives onto Russian planes, so now some T.S.A. genius decides all women are subject to strips and body searches.

I get flagged for extra security every time I buy a one-way ticket, which seems particularly lame. Doesn’t the T.S.A. realize that a careful terrorist plotter like Mohammed Atta could figure this out and use his Saudi charity money to pop for round trips even if the return portion gets wasted?

In two articles in The Times, Joe Sharkey has chronicled the plaints of women angry about new procedures in airport security that have increased both the number and intensity of the airport pat-down, or “breast exam,” as one woman put it.

He described the experience of Patti LuPone, the singer and actress, at the Fort Lauderdale airport, who resisted taking off her shirt and got barred from her flight, and of 71-year-old Jenepher Field, who walks with the aid of a cane, being subjected to a breast pat-down at the airport outside Kansas City, Mo. (Do we have intelligence telling us that grandmothers are part of Al Qaeda now?)

Even a stripper complained in an e-mail message to Mr. Sharkey that she found her experiences degrading: “On one occasion a screener flat out asked if they were fake.”

Somebody tell me what quantity of explosive material they have found through these strip searches, because I’ve got a hunch it’s zero. How many billions are they wasting on this?

After the first three highjacked jets succeeded in their evil objectives on September 11th, passengers on the fourth airliner heard from relatives on their cell phones what had happened, and since they had absolutely nothing to lose, they stormed the highjackers and the jet crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

If any passenger today were to try to highjack a plane, they would be similarly stormed. No one would just sit back and continue eating their peanuts knowing what these highjackers are capable of. Box cutters, knives, nail clippers — none of these things would stop us from fighting for our lives. We need to do all we can to stop them from getting on board to avoid being put to the test — but there also have to be limits. It’s gotten to the point of plain insanity and irrationality, and I hope the world’s travellers make it clear this is a stupid and unacceptable tactic in the fight against terror.