Those brazen Brazilians have done it again.

First, they gave us the thong bikini, then the ultimate bikini wax to go with it, and now, underwear designer Lucia Lorio presents "Find Me If You Can" lingerie -- an intimates set including a lace bodice, bikini bottom and faux pearl collar ..... with a GPS tracking device.

That's right, the country responsible for the reinvention of plastic surgery (butt implants) is now responsible for the reinvention of the chastity belt. The designer insists that she was targeting "a modern, techno-savvy woman," but feminists understandably have got their knickers in a knot.

So I decided to ask Ann Savage, who teaches gender, race, class and sexuality at Butler University, what she thought.

"It's frightening and insulting and problematic," Savage said. "It's very much like a leash."

This was typical of the worldwide backlash against "Find Me If You Can." Even Brazilian feminists have loudly decried the product, labeling Lorio a "modern day slaver." And Savage, who has been a professor at Butler for more than a decade, points out that sexism is sexism, no matter where it occurs.

But what of the pervasiveness of "machismo" within Brazilian society as a determining factor? Again, Savage notes, we don't have to look too far to find our own local brand of chauvinism. Historically, American women have been regarded as property for centuries, from wedding bands to fathers giving away daughters to the changing of women's surnames in marriage.

But back to the underwear itself. Should it make a difference that it was invented by a woman?

"In some eyes that legitimizes this, but progressive politics are more about the mind than about identity," Savage said. "Look at Sarah Palin and the women's groups against her. We all have the potential -- regardless of our skin color and gender -- to be racist and sexist."

The way the maker explains it, though, it's all a game -- the device acts as "a wink to women and a challenge to men."

"I don't even know what that means," Savage intoned. "However you look at it, this is about women being controlled and pursued -- trapped, caught and owned." The device is a way to satiate the male desire for an object, as if a woman was nothing more than a flashy car.

"It's not a coincidence that for many men, their boats or their cars have women's names," Savage noted. "It's something they ride, something they control. It would get too homoerotic if something they rode or drove had a male name."

As Savage said earlier, the device is a lot like a dog collar. And as long as we're talking about animals, I can continue the metaphor by saying only a chauvinist pig would buy something like this. If she's such a beautiful bird, why not set her free?

My advice to the suspicious: Don't worry about keeping her close. Work a little harder on keeping her close to you.

A short history of GPS undies

The makers of "Find Me If You Can" lingerie were not the first to think of GPS underwear. "Forget-Me-Not-Panties" came along a few years ago boasting the tagline, "Protect Her Privates." The product not only bragged about GPS capability, but that the all-knowing knickers could also monitor heart rate and temperature.

The Web site explicitly asked buyers "Ever worry about your wife cheating? Want to know where your daughter is late at night?" There were even testimonials from worried-but-satisfied fathers and suspicious-yet-vindicated husbands.

If it seems too ridiculous to be true, that's because it was. The panties were an Internet hoax, one that fooled more than 1.million people into visiting www.forgetmenotpanties.com in one month.

Machiavellian or mythical?

The chastity belt might be more of a fantasy than a reality. Dr. Albrecht Classen, author of "The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process," said the first known drawing (pictured above) of one dates to 1405, but it was satirical.

The idea was picked up again in the next two centuries, but in a similar or erotic context. Classen contends that historians and anthropologists have projected fallacies onto the past out of a desire to "find something juicy and sordid in Victorian history."

Feminists, he added, also adopted the chastity belt as a convenient icon of horror, with no real evidence of their existence en masse, apart from their relatively modern use in the world of S&M.