Surveillance for Her: Women Don’t Want to Buy Meta Glasses

Kylie Jenner’s ad for Meta’s new line of, uh, stylish smart glasses played out like a joke in Succession. The clip offered a supposed first-person glimpse into the life of a multi-millionaire, complete with gawking over her wealth and her interactions with the help. The idea was to entice potential customers with the grand allure of money, as though wearing a camera on your face was all that stood between you and financial solvency. All the cool people are wearing Meta Glasses, so why aren’t you? But the use of Jenner, a highly visible and popular female celebrity, to sell the product also drove home the target demographic for this season of frames: women. Meta knows we aren’t keen on the pervert glasses and they want to change that. I’d argue that they’re failing.

Right now, the majority of Meta Glasses buyers are male, accounting for about 65 to 74% of purchases. Overall, sales numbers are skyrocketing, particularly with Ray-Ban’s Meta line, as the social stigma of filming everything in public fades. They used to look stupid and now you can put them on and have most people not even know about it. Therein lies the problem. While we have grown wearily used to being filmed all the time in the forever-online world where everyone is a wannabe influencer, there’s a stark difference between someone putting a phone in your face and them using smart glasses to record your interaction. Meta claims that the blinking light on the frames will alert people to the filming, but given how easily that can be disabled, and the fact that many people remain unaware of how prevalent these products are, it’s of little comfort. There is a reason these devices have become known as pervert glasses, and it’s women bearing the brunt of the humiliation.

Reports of women being harassed and hectored by men in Meta glasses, recorded without their permission and turned into social media content, have exploded in number over the past year or so. it seems to be a familiar routine: a guy marketing himself as a “pick-up artist” or expert on approaching women bothers some random woman in public, usually without letting them know his agenda, and then the women discover that they’ve been turned into #content. In one instance, as reported by the BBC, one woman messaged the man who had recorded her and asked for the video to be removed. He told her that was a “service” people usually pay for. So, these are our options, ladies: put up with the endless threat of harassment and filming or be extorted.

It’s hard to overlook how much these tech companies’ target demographic seems to be gross dudes. They can herald the glasses’ incredible ability to aid people with disabilities, but they know that’s not what will make them money. They’re aiming for the perennially online Gen-Z crowd, the ones who have been told that being a content creator is practically a life requirement and that recording everything is the way of things. But for what purpose? Right now, the brand is irrevocably intwined with reports of wannabe lotharios non-consensually turning women into props for their videos. What better way to change that than to make it seem like a cool tool for the ladies?

It’s not just Kylie Jenner. Teyana Taylor’s shilling the glasses now. A number of prominent models and influencers have formed partnerships with Meta. They’re all making the same two claims: that these glasses are stylish to wear in public, and that the ability to record everything we see is a feminine necessity. But the promises are flimsy. All Jenner could offer was a manicured version of her elite life we’ve already seen on reality TV and social media a thousand times over. Taylor is an actress and dancer, and we get none of that allure from a first-person POV. Every influencer using them does the same “get ready with me” routines, populated with the same products and colour palates that have homogenised the space into one of rich lady minimalist slop. The gender divide is stark: men do extreme sports, women be shopping.

Statistically speaking, women are less likely to jump onto tech bro trends than men, whether it’s crypto, AI, or smart glasses. It’s not a clean binary divide, obviously, but it is notable how much women have distanced themselves from these fads that they instinctively know are bad for them. It’s not men who are more likely to be the victims of AI-generated revenge porn or stalker creeps. So, the push to sell it to us is usually more calculating and, frequently, more flop-sweaty. Consider Reese Witherspoon and Mel Robbins pulling their “we’re such girlbosses” shtick to try and sell AI as an inevitability that women needed to embrace, or when Reese Witherspoon sold NFTs as the future for women that they had to invest in (really, if Reese is selling it, stay clear.) Multi-level marketing preys on women with grand promises of financial independence and personal improvement. Predatory tech follows a similar path but feels more ephemeral by comparison. What do Meta glasses offer that is in any way tangible to most women?

But even if this problem wasn’t a distinctly gendered one, the idea of ceaseless surveillance from your fellow citizens, willingly handing over tons of valuable data to Mark f*cking Zuckerberg, should be abhorrent to the average person. There has to come a point where you’re wearing these things and you realize that your boring life isn’t worth a first-person Truman Show documentation, and all you’re ultimately doing is making everyone else feel uncomfortable. And eventually, you have to decide if that’s a thing you want to contribute to. Plenty of people, alas, have already declared that they’re a-okay with it. Indeed, that’s the point. Privacy should not be optional, and women get that.