Rainer Brüderle Looking at Girls

Politics is basically reality TV if anyone actually had power. They don’t, not really. Just enough authority to make headlines before everyone moves on. Front pages, news cycles, Twitter. The standard loop.

Rainer Brüderle ran the FDP caucus in the German parliament, which was already kind of a joke. He became briefly notorious when journalist Laura Himmelreich published in Stern that he’d hit on her during an interview. Whether that’s actually what happened is anyone’s guess. Either way, something cracked open. Women started posting their stories everywhere. #Aufschrei. An outcry.

For days the posts kept coming: the same catalog of things that happen when you’re a woman in public. Hands grabbing asses, hands on breasts, men exposing themselves on trains. Things everybody knew about but nobody talked about, until suddenly they did.

Someone made a Tumblr called Rainer Brüderle Looking at Girls, riffing on those Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things memes. Except the women he supposedly looked at—Angela Merkel, older women, beauty queens—weren’t girls at all. The joke was just how off his taste apparently was.

What stayed with me was how the parody became part of the actual moment. The meme and the movement got tangled up together. The joke and the rage became one thing. Maybe that’s how change works now. Maybe it’s just performance. Hard to tell the difference anymore.