But is the solution to sexual violence against women to increase the rate of sexual violence against men? Young men often do stupid, horrible or unconscionable acts because of a lack of guidance, positive authority figures, or consequences. There must always be punishment for crimes, but at the same time we should build up and make examples of strong, caring, thinking men (while acknowleding everyone makes mistakes), and use their example to teach young men how to be intimate with women without requiring violence and intimidation. And we must break any cycles of parents punishing children for acts done to them as a children.

Hopefully one day we’ll have the time and energy for such an important, powerful, almost sisyphean task

This was always billed as a non-censorship option for porn that would make filtering software function easier. The problem is that it would also make the kind of China-style internet blocks for sexual content, such as Australia has been considering, more easy to implement as well.

There’s also the matter of where do you put sites that are sexual, maybe even pretty explicit, but aren’t porn sites per se. A lot of sex blogging and sex-positive activism falls into that category. Does that get kicked off the regular internet too? Would domains like Blogspot and WordPress, which are .com and .net sites, no longer be able to host sex blogs?

Those are the kind of issues that come up when demands are made that explicit content be neatly segregated to one corner of the internet. Particularly when old-school “decency” groups are the ones making the judgment.

I’ve seen too in other articles about this where the creator claims that there’s no danger of fluid exchange, since the Rape-Axe doesn’t break the skin of the penis. If that’s the case, I strongly doubt that it will disable an attacker to the point where he can’t pee or walk with it on (as is claimed). And if the attacker isn’t crippled, I’d fear things could get much, much worse.

I’m sorry, this strikes me as one of those solutions that appeals to our animal nature for revenge, or inflicting pain on bad people, but does nothing to address the root cause of a problem. If a man is predisposed to rape, as so many in South Africa are, then even if this product “makes men rethink before they assault a woman,” it won’t stop them from raping her; it’ll simply mean they’ll use a finger (or worse… I’ve read some accounts of rapes in Africa that have literally caused me to vomit) to “check” for such a contraption before proceeding. Along those lines, I’ve read that gang-rapes are very common among incidents there; how will this product improve a woman’s chances of survival in such a situation? I’m not concerned about women going all Lorena Bobbitt with these things;; I’m concerned it’s going to turn a bad situation into a much worse one for women who use them.

With that said… I have no better ideas. I’m going to have to second your notion of letting women carry whatever weapons they want: bear mace, spiked mace, .45 caliber pistol… whatever. Lady’s choice.