Love is a pair of panties that can track you down

Monica Potts
Columbia News Service

NEW YORK -- The model is tanned and slim, and the underwear she displays on a Web site called forgetmenotpanties.com looks like any other pair of regular bikini briefs.

A closer look, however, reveals a little flower on the right hip emitting radio-like beams in concentric yellow circles. The ad copy underneath tells you that inside the flower is a microscopic Global Positioning System transmitter that beams its location to network satellites, enabling jealous boyfriends, husbands and worried fathers to track the location and monitor the vital signs of whoever is wearing the panties from their computers or cell phones.

The ad copy also says that "satisfied customers" testify to how good the new panties are. One man named David claims that he can quickly find and retrieve his teenage daughter when her heart rate indicates she might be having more of an amorous experience than is good for her. Another, Tim, says he escaped a bad marriage after discovering that his wife was cheating on him; he tracked her for several weeks as she went to a hotel near her office with a coworker.

Supposedly invented by a Japanese company called the Panchira Corp., the new panty technology was trumpeted by at least 430 bloggers on their sites. Newspaper and magazines, including Rolling Stone, ran articles about it. And throughout the summer, the Panchira company received upward of 1,000 orders, more than a hundred offers from distributors to handle the product, even feelers from "The Tyra Banks Show" and "American Idol."

The whole thing was a hoax.

Panchira, a Japanese slang term for "panty peeker," is fictitious. And the track-her-down panty technology exists only in the minds of two artist/pranksters in New York calling themselves the Panty Raiders -- Leba Haber Rubinoff, 28, a filmmaker, and Katie Marsh, 28, a graphic designer.

"We just wanted to trick people, to get them thinking, or make them laugh," said Rubinoff, a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. "But people really, really want these panties!"

Rubinoff and Marsh, who has a master's degree in graphic design and owns her own design company, believed that a Web site devoted to a modern version of medieval chastity belts would be a funny feminist experiment.

They submitted the site to a contest called Contagious Media, sponsored by a nonprofit organization and art studio in New York called Eyebeam.

Contagious media is any kind of media that spreads quickly, almost epidemically, a phenomenon described and studied by some members of Eyebeam. The sites had to be interesting, weird or provocative enough to catch the attention of those who troll the Internet and then spread by word of mouth, a kind of electronic version of office water cooler talk.

"When you hear about it, you have to tell everyone you know about it," said Jonah Peretti, of Eyebeam.

The panty site attracted more than 600,000 hits and won the $2,000 grand prize.

Other winners included a site called Crying While Eating, which consisted of videos of people overcome with sadness while eating. The site tells us "Aaron" is crying while eating Pringles and a 22-ounce Presidente beer because his "girlfriend is making him go to therapy." "Helen" tears up over her New Zealand "Hokey Pokey" ice cream because she feels "alienated by modern women's fashion."

The Ringtone Dancer, a series of grainy videos of a man in a superhero costume dancing to ring tones on a cell phone in a supermarket, received an honorable mention.

Rubinoff and Marsh were unable to determine whether some of the people who responded to their site realized it was a joke. Among their e-mail messages were 15 angry ones, one of which said they should "DIE PAINFULLY." Another threatened to report them to the Tokyo authorities. They expected feminists to be upset, but many women wrote to say they should offer to wire up men's boxers, too.

As for whether GPS panties are really possible, the technology appears to be not quite there yet. The transmitters come in the form of thin silicone wafers and can be found in bracelets, wristwatches and on children's backpacks, but they have yet to be woven into fabric for everyday clothing.

The way the Panty Raiders see it, it doesn't matter if people figure it out or not. "It's really funny if you believe it," Rubinoff said, "and it's really funny if you don't."