Two 18-year-olds call the police because the passengers in the back seat are having sex. The case clearly shows how all genders suffer from sexist double standards – and how quickly a male victim is portrayed as a joke.
“An unmistakable sexual offer triggered a police operation on the A6 in the Ansbach district,” says a news medium. This initiates a case in which – once again – it becomes very clear where we stand in 2022 when it comes to toxic gender roles. It shows the double standard of sexually abusive behavior, exhibitionism and dealing with victims. On the surface, it was actually just a ride.
What happened on the A6 in the district of Ansbach
The course of events was as follows: On Sunday evening, June 19, 2022, around 10 a.m., two 18-year-old men spoke to a police patrol from the Ansbach traffic police at the “Frankenhöhe-Nord” service station on the A6. The two had taken two women aged 28 and 26 with them via a carpooling agency.
While driving on the freeway, the two women in the back seat got drunk and started having sex with each other. When they invited the two young men to “take part in the sex games,” the driver stopped at the said facility and the two men turned to the police for help. They described the situation in such a way that the clear sexual offer described by some media “apparently overwhelmed the male duo”.
What this case says about us as a society
If you look at the coverage of the case, you can really only shake your head. Let’s start with the introductory sentence at the beginning of this article: In such a case, can we please speak of a sexually assaultive act and not of an “unmistakable sexual offer”? The unspeakable double standard behind this becomes very clear when we take the liberty of exchanging the genders in this case.
If two young but still significantly older men were having sex in the back seat and “inviting” the two 18-year-old women in the front seats to “take part in the sex games”, how many media outlets would still be talking about “winning the lottery”? write? If the (rightly) disturbed women then turned to the police, would the report then read of an “overwhelmed women’s duo”? Would the story jokingly go down as a “valuable entry” in the “cabinet of oddities on ride-sharing” as some media describe it? One may doubt it.
Legally follows from the whole – nothing
The icing on the cake is the end of the story: Yes, legal action is being taken against one of the two women. But not because she wanted to force two de facto children who had just come of age to have sex, but because the police found 1 gram of hashish in the possession of one of the women when they searched the car. Not a word is said about the fact that this was a clear sexual transgression that must be legally prosecuted – simply because not much can be done legally, if you take a closer look at the paragraphs on the subject.
This case is clearly sexual harassment, isn’t it? According to Section 184i of the Criminal Code (StGB), one only speaks of sexual harassment when someone “physically touches another person in a sexually specific way and thereby harasses”. You couldn’t even sue the two for “exhibitionist acts” – because according to the Criminal Code, the corresponding §183 is aimed exclusively (!) at men. It says here: “A man who molests another person by an exhibitionist act shall be liable to imprisonment for not more than one year or a fine.” Exciting, aren’t we – if not socially, then please before the law – actually all equal?
The Basic Law does not seem to apply here, after all that would attack gender ideas – after all, the man is a sex-mad monster just waiting to mate with the woman (and only the woman, please stay heteronormative right away) or to be and himself Meant to present at least as a kind of “invitation”.
The woman with the “incomparably greater female sense of shame”
And the woman? She is perhaps the passive object in these cases, but certainly not an active and illegally acting subject, who is not to be punished according to the paragraph, since “male sexuality appears incomparably more strongly than female sexuality in public, what essentially due to the greater female sense of shame and the greater reticence of women in questions of sex”.
This is how a judge summed it up in a 1957 case on a very different subject. But this statement seemed to fit so well that it was transferred to the exhibitionism paragraph in 1999 after several complaints were made about the unequal treatment of men and women.
Can we please talk differently about such topics?
It is doubtful that the two young men would be patted on the back by their friends for this experience, which has undoubtedly already spread in their social environment. Hardly anyone will say: “It’s great that you drew a clear line!” or “That was incredibly intrusive from the two women.” It is more likely that they will be described as “wimps” or something similarly low – many media do not suggest a different picture, and the police report does not read anything to the contrary. What “real man” refuses to invite a woman to have sex?
We have to do better, we are in the year 2022, equality is being demanded from all sides. But it rarely takes more than one situation like this to challenge gender clichés, even break with them – and then men who were nothing more than victims in this situation become a joke figure.
Sources used: rtl.de, sueddeutsche.de, infranken.de, allgaeuer-zeitung.de, jura-online.de