First there was anti-rape underwear. Now this:
One push of a secret button on this necklace gives women an instant escape from awkward situations: The jewelry automatically triggers a call to a woman’s cell phone, so she has a convenient excuse to walk away from unwanted attention at the bar or a bus stop. If things change from annoying to dangerous, holding down the button sends an emergency message to a friend with the victim’s exact GPS coordinates.
The Guardian Angel technology was designed by ad agency JWT Singapore, who were originally asked to create an educational campaign about date rape, but decided to go further than the usual series of ads and try to solve the problem more directly.
Adi Robertson believes the pendant “symbolizes some of our worst ideas about women and sexual assault”:
I understand the reasoning. If you want people to use something, you should make it look like it will seamlessly integrate into, then improve, the rest of their life. I want a smartwatch to feel like a more useful version of what’s on my wrist now. I want checking a fitness tracker to feel like a natural part of my routine. But this reasoning is fundamentally, grossly, offensively unsuited to rape prevention. You are asking civilian women to wear body armor or an emergency alert system in order to go to a bar, restaurant, or party. If this is the place we are at – and we are, it seems, still at that place — then that is not something to be streamlined and minimized. It is something to be deeply concerned about.
And that’s what’s wrong with the Guardian Angel’s gauzy, stereotypical femininity: it ends up normalizing rape as an unremarkable, if unfortunate, part of the female experience. The soothing language – making women “feel less vulnerable” so they can “live their lives to the fullest” – smacks of the vagaries in tampon commercials. It’s something everyone knows about but nobody wants to hear about, and certainly nothing that we want to acknowledge is a shamefully common plague in our schools, our prisons, our armed forces, and almost every other social institution.
Update from a reader:
Guardian Angel seems like a failure on all fronts. It’s not actually pretty or subtle. It’s casually offensive. It doesn’t call 911 or some other protective service. How dense do the creators have to have been to think that rapes are happening because women don’t have a polite excuse to leave? Stranger rapists will likely be undeterred by a phone call. Maybe it’s a closer call with date rape, but it seems unlikely to be useful in a situation where any party is drunk beyond reason or where physical force is being used.
At best, it seems like Guardian Angel usefully transmits your GPS location to use as evidence when your abduction is reported to the police. Which raises the question: Is this something advertisers actually don’t expect women to buy for themselves but want parents to buy for their teenage daughters? Presumably the device can be set up to call any phone and not just your own cell phone. The message is certainly much more consistent with a parent’s fear than women’s empowerment. Because really, what woman is looking is to buy ugly -jewelry-Life Alert but without the emergency services?
Another has a different view:
I think Adi Robertson is a) over reacting and b) not aware of other products on the market that perform a similar function. This thing is mostly going to be used exactly as it says in the blurb: to ring your phone giving you a convenient way to get out of an uncomfortable situation. Haven’t most of us pretended to be on a call just to avoid talking to someone we didn’t care for? Haven’t we even pretended our phones vibrated, signalling an incoming call?
This simply creates an actual ring the other person can hear. It makes a commonly used (by men and women) dodge a bit more believable. As to being able to use it to call for help, well, that’s one reason we carry phones in the first place, isn’t it? To be able to notify someone in case of an emergency. Why is moving that from your phone to around your neck a huge step in ” normalizing rape”.
Finally, there is at least one product on the market right now, the 5Star Responder, which offers a similar level of protection. While large numbers of their customers are elderly, they promote their product as “peace of mind” for everyone from children coming home to an empty house to women walking to their cars in an empty parking lot. I can’t find it now, but in the original marketing material they specifically suggested women call and talk to a representative while walking to their cars after dark.
How women or anyone taking actions to make themselves feel safer can be viewed as a negative is beyond me.
The Dish 