Draft legislation aims to criminalise "sexually suggestive" photographs of fully clothed people in public because AI is scary

The Federal Republic of Germany is becoming a very stupid country.

This unpleasant thin-lipped woman is Stefanie Hubig. She is a Social Democrat and our current Justice Minister, and she has drafted an insane law that will make it illegal – and punishable by up to two years in prison – to create or circulate unauthorised “sexually suggestive” photos depicting the clothed posterior region, the clothed genital region or the clothed female breast area of anyone. The proposed legislation specifies that prosecutions would normally be initiated by criminal complaints from purportedly “victimised” parties, but also provides that authorities can proceed with charges on their own in cases “of particular public interest.”

What counts as “sexually suggestive” is of course in the eye of the beholder, and every photo where the subject’s consent is disputed (or simply undocumented) could conceivably count as unauthorised. The draft law is therefore set to extend a cloud of criminal suspicion over much ordinary photography, over the sharing of images (including potentially even historical pictures) online, and much else that I haven’t even thought of.

These wild prescriptions reflect the desiderata of feminist activists at the notorious internet censorship operation known as HateAid, with whom Justice Minister Hubig enjoys close connections.

To create support for this new law, German establishment media have collaborated with HateAid, a Correctiv journalist and a former Zero Covid advocate to incite public hysteria over “digital sexual violence.”

The campaign began last Saturday, with a bizarre exposé in Der Spiegel on the trials and tribulations of a German media personality named Collien Fernandes. Fernandes claims that for a period of ten years, her (now ex-) husband Christian Ulmen operated various fake online profiles in her name. Ulmen allegedly used these profiles to contact all manner of random men pretending to be his wife. In this role he engaged in phone sex using his wife’s persona and shopped around various pornographic films or pictures depicting women who may have resembled his wife engaging in sexual acts. Separately, Fernandes also complains that she has been plagued for years by a wide array of online pornographic deepfake content in her likeness. Ulmen has issued a blanket denial of all accusations through his lawyers.

Now, as NiUS have reported, there are many odd things about this story. Among them: 1) Fernandes has been teaming up with HateAid to complain about AI-enhanced pornography since at least 2023, well before the present story broke. 2) Nobody can find this allegedly abundant deepfake Fernandes pornography anywhere. 3) Neither Der Spiegel nor Fernandes nor anybody else will clearly characterise what materials Ulmen is alleged to have sent using his fake profiles. I leave it to my readers to imagine what has really happened in this case; I have my own theories, but the truth hardly matters.

The point is that in Fernandes, Justice Minister Hubig, the HateAid harpies and every other last desiccated sexual hysteric occluding the Federal Republic suddenly has a deeply emotional narrative to support their new and quite deranged innovations to the German criminal code. The NGO machinery has kicked into high gear; thousands have taken to the streets to protest against “digital sexual violence,” the press have maintained a closely coordinated drumbeat of sexual hysteria, and feminist influencers are losing their minds on Instagram.

Screengrab from a video in which the unhinged influencer-activist Leonie Löwenherz demands the public castration of Christian Ulmen “and other offenders” and screeches that anyone referencing the “presumption of innocence” should have the words “perpetrator defender” tattooed on his forehead.

Now that everybody is properly freaked out, Hubig can ride to their rescue with wide-ranging enhancements to our criminal code, which as noted above target not only the dreaded deepfakes, but also much ordinary public photography.

This is how legislation works in the the brave new Federal Republic of Germany: Every major progressive initiative is now attended by great pageantries, by much histrionic protesting and shouting, by strange media fables that parade before our imaginations an unceasing line of villains and victims, of heroes and martyrs, of upstanding defenders of our democracy and of evil Hitler antidemocratic fascists who hate our democracy. This will keep happening and it will probably get even more bizarre and crazy until somebody realises that the NGO machine is a huge public menace and sets about defunding all these frightening unbalanced people.