The Weird, Wearisome World of Rape-based Tech Startups
From “anti-rape” nail polish to apps for recording consent.
(CW for the obvious)
The first one I heard about was the anti-rape underwear. AR Wear was a 2013 indiegogo campaign that enjoyed immediate success, meeting its fundraising target in just over a month and gaining widespread media coverage.
At the beginning of AR Wear’s unintentionally haunting campaign video, a woman appears on screen and says softly: “ Hi. Have you ever been out at night, walking alone, wishing you could feel safer?” then proceeds to list a number of contexts where women should fear being raped (“ a first date or a night of clubbing, taking an evening run, travelling in another country, or in other potentially risky situations”). The company’s “anti-rape” clothing, text beneath proclaims, “creates an effective barrier layer” that affords women and girls the ability to “passively resist an attacker.”
Earlier, and significantly more horrifying, was the eye-wateringly described “Rapexe” female condom prototype from 2005— a device which, “ concealed inside a woman’s body, hooks onto a rapist during penetration and must be surgically removed.” Rejoice, passive women! We were saved!
Perhaps because of how unsurprisingly difficult it has proven to build rape-proof underwear prototypes, or to make vagina dentata available for all, other budding business leaders quickly shifted to a more achievable goal: letting people know when their drinks have been spiked. The startups blossomed. There’s Undercover Colors, which pivoted from drug-detecting nail polish to a drug-detecting keyring (The SipChip™) when the former proved difficult to get through FDA approval. There’s DrinkSavvy’s “smart straws and stirrers” which will change colour when they detect ketamine, GHB or benzodiazepines, and Drink Safe’s coasters (one of the few products that has made the leap from campaign bluster to actually being available for purchase), which do the same.
As I’m sure you’ve gathered, none of these products have proven effective at stopping rape. The underwear garments, which still haven’t made it past prototype, look like and indeed are chastity belts. Most drug-detecting devices have had difficulty getting FDA approval, and of course are useless against any non-“roofie”-related sexual assault. The glaring flaw (among many, many flaws) in the Rapexe condoms was that in their anti-rape bloodlust they overlooked actually preventing the rape itself — the woman must be penetrated for their device to chow down, as it were. And of course, there’s the fact that the onus remains in each case on the woman to take every expensive, cumbersome precaution to protect herself from all possible rape eventualities.
Nonetheless, anti-rape technology is big business in the startup world. It’s proven a repeatedly good model on which young entrepreneurs can cut their teeth — gimmicky enough to score points for technology know-how, and (sadly) consistently current enough that news media will always take the bait and publicize the creator’s hitherto low profile. For anyone shameless enough to heighten fears about sexual assault and then fail to provide an effective solution, the sky is the limit. But the model has been shifting rapidly since the sexual assault scandals of 2017, closely following the changes in popular thinking about who in today’s climate should now be afraid.
This week in Ireland, an email was sent to the entire UCD School of Computer Science outlining a new anti-rape invention, with a markedly different view of who these technologies should be protecting. Consent, the author claimed, will be an app designed to “fights the ever growing fear for men to be sued post intercourse [sic].”
In case you were wondering whether such an idea needed to be devised, or ethically should be created — don’t. It already exists.
More than one already exists actually. As is generally the case when the business world moves as fast as it currently does, the market has been swamped before we even knew to look for the product.
Against the already established consent app industry, the thin idea from Dublin has little chance of competing. The Consent Amour consent-recording app is already available to download, notable for directing women on their site to a mugshot of Brock Turner, while directing men an image from Fox News and the headline “Today’s single guy needs proof.” A similar app, LegalFling, allows you to note which specific sexual acts you are consenting to. LoveSync — which received a fair amount of mockery on social media in the last month but nonetheless tripled its kickstarter goal — is a gadget rather than an app, designed for established couples to “anonymously” log their interest in having sex by tapping a button beside their bed — should their partner similarly tap their button, it will light up in green, giving you the all-clear to engage in, as their equally plain-English-averse campaign video puts it: “the mattress mambo.”
It’s always a bit strange watching a campaign video for a product that shouldn’t exist — like watching the beginning of a poorly-acted apocalypse movie, as slick voiceovers describe to you a future you don’t want, and ™s fly in all directions. The issues with such an app are instantly identifiable (though helpfully listed by the UCDSU President here). It’s hard to even summon the energy for anger about the paltry attempt from Dublin— replete with all its misspellings, poor pitching, failure to research an already saturated market and attempts to acquire a mobile app developer by spamming an university’s entire computer science department.
It’s more interesting to think about what this change, both in approach and in the primary gender being targeted, signifies about all that has been accomplished since 2017 (All products and campaigns I have seen so far have been targeted towards heterosexual couples, and generally towards just one gender — which one depends on the product). After all, women aren’t the only ones who live in terror now. Should we be cheering the fact that the fear now being capitalized upon has shifted from women’s fear of rapists to men’s fear of being accused of rape? Is that what counts for progress?
It’s rather ingenious to see how startups have continued to make rape the woman’s problem. When women are worried about attacks from strangers, it is their job to carry all adequate protection; when men are worried about accusations from partners, the job again belongs to the woman to provide his defense, in legally-decipherable documentation (It’s also interesting to note how much more portable the male, app-based solution is, but expectations on women to have no pockets yet everything to hand is an injustice for another time). Of course the traditional anti-rape inventions have by no means gone away, with KnoNap™ drug-detecting cocktail napkins getting a surprising amount of press even in 2018.
There is something a little yawn-inducing about the heterosexual, gender-role-conforming image these companies have of modern sexual relationships. There is something wearying about the futility of telling them to stop viewing women as the issue (and curtailing them the solution). There is something so utterly exhausting about the insistence of their “current” “savvy” business attempts on the absolute impossibility of men asking women “is this okay?” before they act.
The Weird, Wearisome World of Rape-based Tech Startups
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