Miniseries “Sexually Available”: With the strap-on dildo to emancipation

Dress less revealingly, don’t walk through the dark park and don’t take strange men home with you. These are sentences that are probably familiar to every person who reads female. If you turn the tables, you’ll find yourself in the middle of the “Sexually Available” miniseries. The author duo Caroline Rosales and Timon Karl Kaleyta turn conventional images of women and men on their head with reverse #MeToo accusations. The series also addresses the balancing act that women have to do in order to be heard and recognized. Anyone who is too quiet will be lost, anyone who is too loud will not be heard.

In an approximately one-minute intro you see videos of girls and women from different decades in invasive situations, interspersed with images of naked women in sex magazines or relevant films. “Why aren’t you a little nicer?” asks actress Laura Tonke’s voice. The pictures are not new. A girl is touched so that her top fits better. She looks directly into the camera, images of other women superimpose on hers, then Tonke (in the role of Miki) sticks her tongue out at the camera. »Because we are so perfect, we should always remain so. Anytime.” She lies on a police car with her arms behind her back and repeats the mantra. “Again and again” (we should remain perfect).

Miki rebels against conventional ways of thinking and so she was arrested for a rather unusual reason: she is accused of penetrating the father of the family, August von Modersohn (Hanno Koffler), with a strap-on dildo against his will. She calls her childhood friend Ben (Florian Stetter), who now runs a renowned law firm with his sister (Svenja Jung). The good-natured Ben is the perfect counterpart to the energetic Miki, who wants to be an independent woman at all costs. That’s why her lover Heini (Merlin Sandmeyer) runs the entire household and lovingly looks after her children. And Ben? He is thrown into the whole situation and faces his curiosity.

It is to be expected that there will be a spark between the two. But since Miki doesn’t believe in love, “Sexually Available” is not a cheap romantic comedy, but a powerhouse about female self-empowerment and the art of saying “no” and sometimes “yes” at the right moment. The series asks clever questions and doesn’t spare Miki either. She also makes compromises in her life and has a “day job” that contradicts her ideals. A nice twist: Ghosts of Lilo Wanders, Lady Bitch Ray, Ines Anioli and Ben’s sister appear to Miki, who help her to be her wife, but also tell her off.

You learn in flashbacks what Miki was like before. She led a middle-class life as a good wife and mother, perhaps embodying the ideal woman who also had a career (as a best-selling author). The series repeatedly shows clips from Miki’s childhood, in which it wasn’t just her mother who told her how she should be. One understands how Miki’s childhood memories are burned into her body image and her own behavior. Miki is the heroine who fights her complexes with anger, so she does everything differently.

Of course, you can also ask yourself whether the series has to be so brightly colored, some scenes are very exaggerated, but the basic questions about equality remain. The finale in the courtroom with Hanno Koffler as a rigid clean man and two opponents (Laura Tonke, Florian Stetter) who calmly fight against all prejudices is particularly fantastic.

Available in the ARD media library