„#Grab ‘em by the pussy“ 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.
#Grab ‘em by the pussy, found footage documentary, 110 minutes, 2026
Producer: Nicolas C. Geissler
Dramaturgy: Janina Herhoffer
Music: Sascha Blank
Graphics: Janina Albrecht
Director & Courtesy: Patrick Alan Banfield
It begins with a simple proposition: rape is the most extreme act, but it does not begin there. It begins much earlier, in the subtle and often normalised forms of sexual boundary violation embedded 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 rehearses them, softens them, aestheticises them and, at times, makes them appear flirtatious, desirable or even charming.
A kiss awakens an unconscious princess. A woman resists a man until romantic music tells us that persistence is desire. Men joke about women in locker rooms and online. Influencers teach boys how to dominate. Victims describe experiences that seem to belong to another world. Side by side, these images begin to contaminate one another.
Composed entirely of existing material – films, series, games, TikToks, pornography, manosphere monologues, memes, testimonies and fragments of online self-performance – #Grab ’em by the pussy traces a visual culture in which boundaries are acknowledged and eroded at the same time. Through repetition, collision and accumulation, seemingly unrelated images begin to reveal a common structure.
The film does not argue that pop culture turns innocent men into perpetrators, nor does it accept ignorance as an adequate explanation. Men know that boundaries exist. The more unsettling question is how they also learn that, under certain circumstances, those boundaries may not apply to them.
This is why the film is 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 trivialised until it starts to feel ordinary. A sexist joke goes unchallenged. A humiliating comment earns laughter. A boundary is crossed without consequence. Each incident may appear minor; together, they form a social logic of permission.
The film makes an uncomfortable proposition: 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 an atmosphere that allows such violations to persist. Men cannot simply place themselves outside rape culture because they are not rapists. They are formed within it, rewarded by it and, all too often, protected by it.
But what is learned can also be unlearned. The film searches for moments in which those patterns can be questioned, interrupted and replaced by other ways of relating to one another.
#Grab ’em by the pussy emerged from the experimental documentary SOYBOY. What began as a chapter on sexual violence gradually expanded into a feature-length found-footage film about the images, gestures and narratives through which sexual entitlement becomes normalized.
SOYBOY follows the cultural battle for interpretative sovereignty over gender roles that is being played out on the internet, using memes: silly, fast, political and overt miniatures of pop culture. On a journey through the western USA, we develop a documentary project in which we meet people who deal with masculinity: Porn stars, soldiers, supporters of conspiracy theories, men’s rights activists, freefight organisers or transsexual bodybuilders.