Technology is amoral. It has influenced human sexuality in all sorts of ways, and the result is not always to encourage more and better sex. In this postmodern world such ideas as free consent and gender equality live down the block from the same old predatory/ownership impulses that civilization grew up with. In South Africa, where the battle against predatory sex is raging, one inventor is using a surreal technology to fight back.
Meet RapeX, a modern incarnation of Vagina Dentata. Billed as an anti-rape female condom, this tampon like device has rows of tiny barbs that will snare anyone unlucky enough to attempt penetration.
"Nothing has ever been done to help a woman so that she does not get raped and I thought it was high time," Sonette Ehlers, 57, said her invention. The device, made of latex and held firm by shafts of sharp barbs, can only be removed from the man by surgery, which will alert hospital staff, and ultimately, the police, she said.
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
