Long Term Effects of Superman

I'm not sure if anyone has ever addressed whether Superman's X-ray vision exposes its subjects to higher than safe levels of radiation.  For that matter, I'm not sure whether anyone has ever addressed whether exposure to Superman involves higher than normal levels of radiation.

Why does this even matter?

I'm not sure it does, yet, but it occurs to me that the hard questions don't always get played out adequately in fiction, and then when we face them in real life, we don't even have a fictional strategy for dealing with it.  We just don't know.  In Watchmen, there's a glimpse of this with Dr. Manhattan, but that ends up getting subverted anyway because it turns out that he's not emitting radiation and would probably know if he was anyway since he's so in control of his shit that he can change all of his particles at once.

And besides, in the comics, it's almost always super awesome to be exposed to radiation anyway.  Get bitten by a radioactive spider?  Gain spider-powers!  Be a turtle and hang around in radioactive gunk?  Gain sentience, ninja powers, and an insatiable craving for pizza!  Exposure to test detonation of a gamma bomb?  Get huge and strong and green when you're angry!

But we know that's not how it is.  Maybe we're protecting ourselves from the fear by making it awesome, I'm not sure yet, and have a lot of research to do before I have a clear hypothesis on that.  The point is that when regular people are exposed to radiation, and are aware of it, there's so much going on that it's hard to have a clear conversation.

Let's take the choice I'm probably going to have to make in May:  Do I walk through a machine that has not been adequately tested for most people's liking and receive a dose of radiation concentrated on my skin (unlike a regular X-ray, the backscatter body scanners only penetrate skin deep), or get felt up by someone who resembles those scary killing guys in Firefly what with the blue gloves and zero sense of humor?  Some people have vowed not to fly because of this crap.  And what's going on is more than a choice between radiation and being groped - it's a choice between an invasive procedure we all know the stakes of (get groped, and deal with whatever social/emotional consequences your particular psychology and the professionalism of the groper end up with) or an invasive procedure where we are unsure of the stakes and fear they may be getting intentionally obscured.

We have no common dialog to cope with this.  Most people will not blink an eye at getting an X-ray on a broken bone, at spending time at a higher altitude, or at numerous other things that increase our exposure to radiation.  But call attention to it, and add that the radiation produces near-nude pictures (albeit deeply unsexy ones), and then the anxiety comes out.

I have no idea about the safety of the backscatter scanners.  I've read a lot of hype and a lot of stories, and I think the bottom line is that even if they are safe, the TSA is acting like goons in the face of people's very real fears.  It's not enough that flight is now a privilege reserved for those who don't mind being treated like potential terrorists, it's not enough that their employees are not always well-trained in handling delicate but non-threatening situations (seriously, dispassionately refusing to let a man tell you to be careful of his colostomy and not apologizing when you knock it loose because you wouldn't let him tell you?), it's not enough that they either touch your junk or take x-ray-vision pictures, they also have to address fear by saying essentially; "We think it's fine so you should think it's fine, it's for your own good, you ungrateful twerps."

The fears that are about the radiation should certainly be explored - but the trust involved should also be explored.  We don't question Superman because we trust him.  He can even be kind of a dick, but we still trust him, because in the world of DC comics, we know that he has the best interests of the planet in the front of his thoughts.  We don't know that of TSA - they state it, but it's not the DC multiverse, and there are shades of gray that exist in the everyday world that they are staunchly refusing to address, while demanding that we treat them with the implicit trust that we'd give Superman.