Victim Feminism Has a Catchy Chorus
You’re doing badly at school, at work, at every party you show up to. Your jokes don’t land. People drift away from you mid-conversation. It could be that you’re a bit lazy and not particularly compelling and both of those things are worth addressing—but that requires looking at yourself honestly, which is exhausting and uncomfortable. So why not blame your reproductive anatomy instead?
That is the thesis, delivered with sincere backing vocals, in Giulia Becker’s 2016 video "Verdammte Scheide"—roughly "Damn Vagina"—which circulated widely enough to deliver the fifteen minutes she was presumably after. Becker is a German TV comedy writer; her show is the kind of production that middle-aged critics describe as "fresh" and "edgy," which is usually a reliable indicator that it isn’t. In the song, she explains that she used to think her problems came from her body image, but then clarity struck: I have a vagina. It’s the fault of my vagina. No matter how much I suffer, my vagina is to blame.
Repeat chorus. Backup singers. Earnest piano.
The message being transmitted to any young woman who takes this seriously is: don’t bother developing yourself, because your biology has already decided your outcome. Which would be a bleakly honest account of structural sexism if that were the actual argument. It isn’t. The argument is that individual failure—not getting into the club, not being taken seriously in a meeting—is your vagina’s fault specifically. That’s not critique. That’s self-pity wearing a feminist costume.
A century of actual feminism—the kind that cost people jobs and relationships and sometimes their physical safety—told women the opposite: that the circumstances you’re born into are unjust, and you fight to change them, and you don’t let anyone use those circumstances as a permanent ceiling. Becker’s version says the ceiling is load-bearing, don’t touch it, write a song about it instead. I can think of quite a few women throughout history who would have had very little patience for that particular message.
The video got her the attention. That’s the mechanism working as designed. Outrage and agreement feed the same algorithm, and neither one particularly cares whether the underlying idea is any good.