“Anti-rape” pants: Which is sillier, the feminist overreaction or the pants themselves?

Here’s the video (h/t Kathy Shaidle).

Note that they’re getting crowd-funding for the “rape-resistant” knickers that lock at the waist and upper thighs and look about as comfortable as a wet bathing suit constructed from steel cable.

The idea (according to the vid) is: You go clubbing, but with “anti-rape” pants on underneath your minidress. Then you drink yourself silly and pass out–but the guy who tries to take advantage of you can’t get your pants off, so he just gives up and moves on. Right!

The video has predictably stirred up an ideological frenzy among feminists. Here’s Feministing getting hot and bothered because the anti-rape wear may not fit fat ladies and trannies:

1. 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?

2. Are these thin, able-bodied, cis women the only kind of people who deserve not to be raped?

3. When did we forget anti-violence work is a collective, not individualized,

   effort?

Here’s Amanda Hess waxing ireful at Slate:

AR Wear is for you, the woman who’s “ever been out walking alone, wishing you could feel safer.” But it’s also for that other “you—parents and friends,” who have spent nights “worried about a loved one” walking alone. AR wear will give you, “women and girls, additional power to control” your bodies “when things go wrong.” But they’ll also give you, parents and friends, a pointed yet elegant holiday gift for the women in your lives whose bodies need safety locks.

But my favorite reaction is the 5933 comments generated (so far) once the vid got posted on World Star Hip Hop. Many are NSFW–but here are a few samples:

* i will buy this for my girl i set the lock though

* what is rape? is it something to eat?

* A bae let me see how yo ass look in these boy shorts… Gotcha bitch. Insecure nigga cuff trick

* Aint nobody tryin to rape none of these flat pasty booty bitches…them look like the same shorts Miley Cyrus was wearin on the VMAs

And as you might expect, WSHH contains more practical advice to women about avoiding rape than all the feminist sites lumped together:

uhhh as yall can see, it was straight white bitches wearin that shit cuz they the main ones doin dumb shit like gettin drunk or too fucked up to remember some shit and they need that, u aint see no nigga bitch wearin that shit, they got mace, taser, pocket knife, and a fuckin rock in they purse, they aint worried bout shiddd and the cousin dayday just got out so u kno she straight lmaoo

Oh, but we can have women arming themselves for self-defense–that would be violent! And we can’t tell them not to binge-drink because “that would shift the blame for rape from men.” And we certainly can’t tell them that wearing a short skirt and high heels while walking alone late at night isn’t a prudent idea–because that would be “slut-shaming.”