When the Rally Ends
There is a kind of hypocrisy that reveals itself not in what people say but in what they type when they think no one is watching. Since 2015, the word "refugee" has been appearing with increasing frequency in German pornography search bars—on Pornhub, xHamster, RedTube. Up to 800,000 searches a month, according to platform data analyzed by journalist Mohamed Amjahid for ZEIT ONLINE. The spikes correlate almost perfectly with moments of peak political debate: talk-show panels about border controls, AfD election campaigns, parliamentary arguments about refugee quotas.
The content is what you’d expect. Degradation fantasies, power dynamics made pornographically explicit. One video—a "Syrian refugee" performing oral sex on a "huge white cock for dinner money"—had 420,000 views by April 2018. The top comment came from a user named ghostwalker, complaining that refugee women these days shave their pubic hair. Another user wrote, in German: refugee cunts welcome. The man had opinions.
Jakob Pastötter, a professor of sexology and cultural anthropology, frames it as dominance and submission—sex as a theater of control. He notes it probably isn’t only neo-Nazis here; the attraction to "exotic bodies that submit" runs across the full spectrum of German society. Which is somehow worse. The mass-market nature of it is the more disturbing part, not the fringe-extremist part.
What the xHamster data makes visible is the feedback loop: the more fiercely the political debate rages about whether refugees belong in Germany, the more German men search for videos of them getting fucked. These aren’t separate phenomena with separate audiences. The same political intensity that fills a rally also fills a search bar. The political and the pornographic are feeding identical appetites.
The specific ugliness is the simultaneity. The person posting racial slurs in a Facebook group and then, beer finished, opening a tab for refugee porn isn’t experiencing a contradiction. It’s the same impulse expressed in two registers—hatred and desire collapsing into each other, with the porn being, if anything, the more honest expression of the two. At least on Pornhub you know what transaction you’re participating in.
I keep thinking about the comments section. Not the slurs—those are just ambient German internet—but ghostwalker’s complaint about pubic hair grooming. The intimacy of the grievance. He had preferences. Standards. He was a connoisseur of something he publicly wanted expelled from the country. That’s the whole thing, right there, in one comment thread.