Everything He Thought He Could Get Away With

German politics has a way of being simultaneously boring and grotesque—a reality show where the contestants happen to control tax policy, which makes it worse. Rainer Brüderle was the parliamentary floor leader of the FDP, Germany’s perennially self-satisfied liberal party, and he tumbled into national notoriety not through any legislative achievement but through a hotel bar. Journalist Laura Himmelreich wrote in Der Stern that he’d hit on her during an interview. Whether he actually did, only the two of them and whatever bartender was pretending not to listen can say for certain, but the story landed like a match in dry grass.

What followed was #Aufschrei—"outcry"—a hashtag that detonated across German Twitter as women posted their encounters with everyday sexism. Men grabbing asses on the subway. Colleagues grabbing breasts in office hallways. Some guy pulling his dick out on the U-Bahn at ten in the morning. The ordinary inventory of indignity that roughly half the population navigates as routine while the other half remains largely convinced it’s being exaggerated. It ran for days and showed no signs of stopping.

Naturally, the internet responded with a Tumblr. Modeled after the great Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things—one of the finest political absurdist projects the early web ever produced—someone built Rainer Brüderle Looking At Girls. The name promised more than it delivered: what the creator labeled "girls" turned out to be mostly Angela Merkel, various women of a certain age, and some bewildered wine queens from regional festivals. Which is either incidental commentary or just mislabeling. Either way, it fit the chaos of that particular week perfectly.