#Grab ‘em by the pussy
Experimental Documentary, Work in Progress 110 min
#GrabEmByThePussy is an essay film composed entirely of found footage, assembled from the unstable surface of contemporary image culture. TikTok videos, Instagram stories, YouTube clips, Disney scenes, manosphere monologues, victim testimonies, deepfakes, memes, and fragments of online self performance are brought together until they disclose a larger visual order. Rather than approaching rape culture as a slogan, the film understands it as a structure of repetition, permission, seduction, minimisation, and violence.
It begins with a simple proposition: Rape is the ultimate act, but it does not begin there. It begins much earlier, in subtle and often normalised forms of sexual boundary violation: in jokes, romantic myths, coercive scripts of desire, pornographic fragmentation, locker room speech, image based abuse, catcalling, entitlement, and the routine dismissal of women’s fear. Pop culture does not merely reflect these behaviours. It helps rehearse them, soften them, aestheticise them, and make them appear trivial, flirtatious, or even charming.
The film is therefore interested not only in perpetrators, but in the culture that produces “normal” men. It asks how men become complicit in structures they may outwardly reject, and how sexual aggression is so often trivialised until it starts to feel ordinary. It insists on an uncomfortable point: no man should be too certain that he has never crossed a boundary, benefited from one being crossed, remained silent when he should have intervened, or participated in the atmosphere that allows such violations to persist. In that sense, men do not stand outside rape culture simply because they are not rapists. They are formed within it, rewarded by it, and too often protected by it.
The film does not argue in a conventional way. It juxtaposes, accumulates, and sharpens. It takes existing material and allows it to betray itself. Meaning is produced through montage, pressure, and the way one image contaminates the next. In this sense, the work shifts attention away from isolated cases and towards recurring structures. It also refuses the comfort of symbolic response. A solitary Instagram post of solidarity is not transformation. It is often only symbolism, a moral gesture that leaves everyday language, habits, fantasies, and male sociality intact. The question is not how men can appear aligned, but how they can begin to change what they permit, repeat, laugh at, ignore, and desire.
As a cisgender heterosexual man, I approach this material from within the field I am trying to examine. My artistic training at the Städelschule, in dialogue with artists such as Isaac Julien, Omer Fast, and Willem de Rooij, has shaped my understanding of images as agents that produce reality rather than merely reflecting it. I envisage the film as a rigorous and unsettling essay that rearranges an image field until a different structure emerges. It is a film about rape culture, but also about the visual regime that renders such a culture legible, acceptable, deniable, and endlessly reproducible.