Panty-Sniffing Gets 21st Century

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 4:23 AM on April 24, 2008.

Holy mother of Disco Ball, is this just wrong. It's a semen detection kit that is marketed for catching cheating spouses and teenagers who have unruly amounts of autonomy. Naturally, they are trying to suggest that it's for catching both men and women, but of course, we know that's just some ass-covering and defies all common sense that tells us that since men shoot the semen away from their bodies, clean-up to the point of avoiding detection would be simple enough. Also, as blogger Slut Machine notes, this would be really good at catching male masturbators (i.e., all men), if not cheaters. I'm sure some woman out there will try it, and much sorrow will be had as she discovers that her husband is a man and thus has trace amounts of semen in his underwear all the time, but on the whole, I see this being marketed towards men who are looking for novel ways to control wives and daughters now that the law is less cooperative than it used to be.

My main concern here is that the abstinence-only nuts are going to find out about this. (Probably shouldn't blog about it, since many of them read this blog to get their daily titillation thinking about women who have sex without apologizing for it.) You think the metal detectors at school doors are ridiculous? Or think about all the annual dust-ups with over-zealous, perverted school officials start doing underwear checks on high school students. This could make the situation a thousand times worse, with school officials getting the brilliant idea of having panty drills, like fire drills except everyone has to submit to panty-testing to make sure that they're not having Teh Sex. Sure, various civil liberties organizations would sue them into the ground, but don't think the idea isn't attractive. Though I suppose it would encourage young women to use condoms.

Anyway, it's a rip-off. If you want to find out that there's biological material in people's underwear, you can just assume that there is. And if you're skeptical, I recommend the black light as a cost effective alternative to satisfy your doubts.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.