Fucking for the Fatherland
A startup gets a regional innovation prize for designing a quiet vibrator. Third place, five grand. Pretty normal innovation stuff, the kind of thing that gets announced and forgotten. Except the AfD decided to make it mean something.
Thomas Hartung, vice-chair of the AfD in Saxony, couldn’t let it go. He released a statement—actual political capital spent on this—explaining that while Germany once invented drum-driven washing machines and functioning locomotives, now we’re celebrating sex toys. You can feel the weight he was trying to give it, the sense that something sacred had been violated. Germany’s honor. Germany’s future. All connected to whether women have orgasms.
I kept reading his actual argument, which basically came down to: women with vibrators means fewer babies means Germany dies. It’s clean logic if you don’t think about it. If you ignore how contraception works, or how sexuality actually functions, or that people who enjoy sex are more likely to have it. None of that mattered. He needed a simple story: sex toys are an existential threat.
What interests me is the specific desperation underneath this. When someone gets that worked up about women’s solo sexuality, when the future of the nation comes down to controlling what happens in private bedrooms, there’s a real panic there. Not about policy or economics or anything fixable. It’s about relevance. It’s about a world moving on without you, and knowing you can’t actually stop the things that matter, so you attack a vibrator startup. You make it cosmic. You turn it into proof of decline.
The responses were predictable. Biology was explained. Someone pointed out the absurdity of policing women’s pleasure while worried about birth rates. One response hit just right—dry observation that if any confused right-wingers were reading, they might want to learn how contraception actually works.
The thing that stuck with me wasn’t the stupidity of his position so much as the fact that he thought it was worth saying. That he believed it was good politics. That meant the fear was real. Not the fear about vibrators, obviously. The fear about something else—demographic shifts, cultural change, the sense that the country he imagined was disappearing. And because he couldn’t actually do anything about that, he picked a fight with a toy company instead.