Well Animal I suggest you try an experiment by sticking one of these devious up inside of you.... wherever.
Hmm... big knitting needle pushed inside of my vagina.... not on my list of Christmas presents. The insides are not concrete .. ya know...
Either hoax/joke or waiting patiently to be sued.
Scroll back to my posts in this thread. The technical workings of the device and consequences were explored in 2 previous threads.
The motivations of the authors of the site to use this device to "jump start" discussions of "male violence" was exposed by the authors themselves here: http://femdefence.info/bakgr2.html To me, that puts the device and its' website in the category of "anti-male urban legends," similar to the Superbowl DV Myth that makes seasonal appearances. This "Urban Legend" should probably be stickied in the FAQ, so we'll recognize it faster when we see it... It's been around since 2003, so it is very lame to keep bringing it up.
OK, because the nature of the device and the development time-line/story line were so close to that of the FemDefence device, I assumed they were the same. Now that I actually went and read the South African article, I'm still not convinced this isn't a spin-off. Yes, I see different names, countries, slightly different design of the "product." It will be interesting to see what kind of a spin comes out when the actual marketing hits the web. Keep me posted.
Odd that the company/device aren't actually named in the article. Especially since it is supposedly so close to "market."
Back to Devia's question about effectiveness... Years ago, I had opportunity to attend a feminist sponsored seminar on women's self-defense with some friends. Risks and effectiveness of several strategies were discussed: doing nothing (submitting) hoping the perpetrator didn't intend to kill you anyway; trying to convince the perpetrator that something about your physical condition should make you less desirable (ie. infection); or aggressive self-defense strategies. Women were told that the entire point of an aggressive self-defense strategy was to gain an element of surprise and an opportunity to get away and get help by inflicting as much physical damage as possible on the perp. The danger in a strategy not being disabling enough would be that the perp would then be angrier and more likely to do real harm. Like the FemDefence device, I don't see this spin-off being disabling enough to provide an escape option. But let me know when the marketing materials come out...
Very telling was when I ran a Google search of Sonette Ehlers just now hoping to find the device name, is that a number of the results were women's boards discussing why such devices should be banned...
http://www.google.com/search?lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Sonette%20Ehlers
