In Things That Make Me Hate the World

[Trigger warning.]

Why does this (sent to me by Shaker RachelB) even exist? (Unfortunately, that's a rhetorical question. I know exactly why it exists.)

One of the first things I came across was this, a hidden camera in a shower radio.

Check it out. See the woman's face in the little mirror? See that there's a rental price? You know, just in case you'll only be needing it for a limited period of time.

Call me a humorless feminist, but this product, like few others I've seen, screams SEXUAL ASSAULT.

Especially given that it's difficult to imagine any other purpose for this product.

Often, when some new gadget or technology is introduced—usually something to do with communication, e.g. the iPhone or CNN's election night hologram weirdness—someone will comment on its resemblance to some long-ago imagined tech on Star Trek, and it's not difficult to find an abundance of articles discussing the influence of the franchise's many iterations on modern tech development.

I've noticed there's a sort of "Revenge of the Weird Science" phenomenon in tech development, too, in which the myriad ways of assaulting, enslaving, and/or exploiting women via technology in films, becomes a reality. The 1980's was the apex of the Nerd Boy Makes Good Gets Laid genre, e.g. Revenge of the Nerds and Weird Science, in which the main characters respectively install cameras in the girls' dorm showers and build their own woman (She-3PO, anyone?). Sometimes it was just a subplot, as a character known only as The Geek flubbing the photographic evidence for his friends of his "sexual conquest" (see: rape) in Sixteen Candles, a problem helpfully solved in the modern age care of digital cameras.

It was creepy enough that films in which young men were rewarded for their despicable antics by getting the hot girl even existed, but to see their means of exploitation turned into mass-produced consumables makes me ill.

[As an aside: The worst ever of this sexual assault-by-science genre was a 1982 film called Zapped!, starring Scott Baio, in which he acquires telekinetic powers during an experiment and uses them to, I shit you not, blow girls' clothes off. Ugh.]