By Alexandra Brodsky • @azbrodsky • 11 years ago

Twelve questions about AR Wear’s anti-rape underwear

AR Wear is fundraising to manufacture anti-rape (as in AR) underwear. Here are a few questions we have about the apparel.

  1. AR Wear, if the whole point of your magic anti-rape underwear is that an evil rapist can’t take them off, is it going to take me a really long time to undo all the secret locks if I have pee?
  2. How about if I want to have sex?
  3. How does this protect people who have an intimate relationship with their assailant?
  4. What about all the forms of sexual violence that don’t require removal of underwear?
  5. Do the inventors of this know what sexual violence actually looks like outside of Law and Order?
  6. What is the “thing” mentioned in your motto “offering protection for when things go wrong?”
  7. Where are the rapists in this calculation?
  8. If a predator realizes you’re wearing magic anti-rape underwear, won’t s/he just go find someone who isn’t?
  9. Won’t those people be more likely to be unable to afford magic anti-rape underwear, or have bodies, invisible or mocked in popular imagination, that don’t fit into clothes designed for thin, able-bodied, cis women like your models?
  10. Are these thin, able-bodied, cis women the only kind of people who deserve not to be raped?
  11. When did we forget anti-violence work is a collective, not individualized, effort?
  12. Haven’t we been over this before?
Alexandra

Alexandra Brodsky is a Feministing editor, law student, and activist who talks about rape a lot.

Washington, DC

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com. During her four years at the site, she wrote about gender violence, reproductive justice, and education equity and ran the site's book review column. She is now a Skadden Fellow at the National Women's Law Center and also serves as the Board Chair of Know Your IX, a national student-led movement to end gender violence, which she co-founded and previously co-directed. Alexandra has written for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Nation, and she is the co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future. She has spoken about violence against women and reproductive justice at campuses across the country and on MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, ESPN, and NPR.

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com.

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