Sex Sells

I keep coming back to something that happened in Berlin in 2012. Refugee camp at the Brandenburg Gate. Ashkan Khorasani was there—Iranian, had walked from Würzburg with dozens of others. They set up tents and asked for something basic. Police came hard the first night, twenty vehicles, dogs, beatings. Then cold. Then nothing from the media for a month.

Then four women showed up with a stunt. Tits for Human Rights, they called it. Anne Helm, Anke Domscheit-Berg, Julia Schramm, Laura Dornheim. Invited reporters with the promise of seeing breasts. Reporters came. Breasts didn’t. Story went everywhere.

Laura Dornheim said something I can’t shake: People starving themselves isn’t enough. It takes tits. Sex sells. And she was right. The coverage flooded in the moment the nudity angle appeared. Suddenly opinions, suddenly photo ops, suddenly it was news.

Ashkan had something sharp about the language. Flüchtling—the German word for refugee. The -ling suffix diminishes it, makes it sound like weakness. He pushed back: We’re not small. We’re strong. We eat nothing, we sleep outside in winter, and we’re strong. There was exhaustion in it but also anger, the kind of clarity that comes from having nothing left to lose.

I don’t know how it ended. Whether they stayed and forced change or drifted away. Whether anything real shifted. But that moment—people fighting for basic rights needing to engineer a media stunt around nudity to be seen at all—that reveals everything about the machine, doesn’t it. About what moves us and what we have to be tricked into seeing.