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Sure, nothing wrong per se with 184(1)6 criminalizing that.

I'd argue though that this only comes about unintentionally because 184i (sexual harassment) only covers physical sexual harassment.

Meanwhile non-physical sexual harassment is completely legal in Germany unless it is an insult in itself (185).

IMHO the proper way is to mostly yeet 184 (because there is no particular reason for the state to morally regulate porn using the criminal code apart from stuff like CSAM) and criminalize sexual harassment in general (physical or not). That's of course going to be a hard sell for German conservatives (I can already see CDU and AfD go "the leftist greens dictatorship is making DATING illegal!")



Honestly, I think the proper way with most laws would be to just yeet them entirely and go for a round of refactoring; but alas, politicians aren't programmers and neither do they have the same mindset of cleaning up after themselves or even after others, so we're stuck with sub-optimal legislation like this and that probably won't ever change.


It has happened a couple of times in the past (e.g. with the law on transgender people or homosexual marriage) that the courts stepped in and demanded improvement or yeeted laws outright as they became untenable.

It's not unthinkable, particularly as the generation "18th birthday gift? Onlyfans account" enters political life, that the same will happen again. Additionally, the youth protection commission NRW is on a holy crusade against Pornhub and other sites - should they eventually be successful, younger people who don't care about the news and only react when they see their favourite porn site going dark in Germany may rise up and demand reforms as well.

And on top of that, boomers are thankfully slowly dying out and retiring, so the gerontocrats in parliament will go away as well.




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