TL;DR:
This text is not a factual report and not a real confession, but the literary reconstruction of what a man would have to say if all the accusations discussed in the public sphere were true in their most serious form and he were willing to openly admit not only concrete guilt but also the patriarchal structure of his actions. At the center are two levels: first, what he would have specifically done to his wife — appropriation of identity, sexualized control by others, social contamination, and the destruction of her sovereignty over her own image — and second, what would become visible in this beyond the individual case: a logic of male possessiveness in which the woman no longer counts as an autonomous subject, but as material for power, fantasy, control, and humiliation. The text therefore asks not only what a perpetrator might have done, but what he would have to understand and articulate if his confession is to be more than crisis PR: namely the recognition that digital sexualized violence is not a sideshow of private conflicts, but a precise expression of contempt for women.
Preliminary remark
What follows is not a documented confession and not a claim about the actual wording of a real person. It is a thought experiment in text form: the reconstruction of what a man would have to say if he were not only to admit individual actions, but also to understand and name the full moral weight of these actions.
That is precisely the point. Public apologies often do not fail because they contain too little emotion, but because they contain too little insight. They speak of mistakes where it is about domination. They speak of crisis where it is about control. They speak of pain where power was previously exercised.
A serious confession would have to go deeper.
The hypothetical confession
I did not only wrong my wife. I used her identity, disregarded her boundaries, and violated her dignity. I did not do something merely embarrassing, immature, or morally diffuse. I acted. I decided. I repeated. And by doing so I interfered in an area over which only she should have had the right to decide.
I took what did not belong to me: her face, her name, her intimacy, her credibility, her sovereignty over how she appears to others. I did not only lie. I used her person against her. I put myself in the place of her will and determined what others could see of her, believe about her, and read into her.
That is the core of my guilt: not just deception, but presumption.
What I did to my wife
When a man uses his wife’s identity to sexualize her, to alienate her, or to force her into intimate contexts, he does not only violate her privacy. He deprives her of control over herself.
He turns a person into an object.
He turns a boundary into a tool.
He turns closeness into a gateway.
The wrong then does not lie solely in the fact that intimate or sexualized content is created or circulates. It lies in the fact that this content would not be an expression of her freedom, but the result of someone else’s control. The woman does not appear in it as the subject of her actions, but as the material of a narrative that a man writes about her.
And that is exactly the point at which digital manipulation becomes a form of sexualized violence.
The destruction of sovereignty
The real horror of such actions lies deeper than in any individual file, message, or montage. It lies in the destruction of sovereignty.
Every person must be able to control who they are, how they appear, to whom they show themselves, what intimacy means, and where consent begins or ends. Whoever takes over this control attacks the innermost realm of personal dignity.
The harm then does not consist merely in something false about a woman circulating. The harm consists in the fact that she has to experience that others were able to work with her appearance, her sexual integrity, and her social image as if these things were detachable from her.
That is more than exposure.
It is dispossession.
The role of the other men
Such an event becomes particularly perfidious where other men are drawn into this cycle. For then it is no longer only about the relationship between perpetrator and affected person, but about the social world into which her person is fed.
Suddenly real men are faced with the possibility of having seen, believed, or desired something about her that never originated from her. Real contacts are contaminated. Real encounters are poisoned. Real glances become uncertain.
The woman then no longer only knows that she has been wronged. She must additionally live with the possibility that others see her through a sexualized fiction.
This is a form of social damage that goes far beyond the original act.
Why this is not only private
This is where the second level begins. For such an action would not only be a crime against a specific woman. It would at the same time be an expression of a larger order.
It would be an expression of that patriarchal logic in which a man believes he can derive a right from closeness. From familiarity, ownership. From relationship, control. From knowledge, power. From female vulnerability, exploitability.
The woman does not appear in it as an autonomous person, but as something that can be shaped, shifted, sexualized, and put into circulation. Her will is not constitutive. It is only an obstacle. And that is precisely where the misogynistic core lies.
Contempt for women does not begin only with open insults. It begins where female self-determination is internally declared dispensable.
The patriarchal deep structure
That is why it is not enough to read such an event as an outburst, jealousy, digital derailment, or private perversion. That would be too small. Too cheap. Too exonerating.
What would become visible here would be the classic structure of male control in modern form:
• the woman as a usable image,
• the female body as a projection surface for others’ fantasies,
• the female identity as a manipulable surface,
• the shame as a burden that in the end lands back on her,
• and the man as someone who can act, rewrite, and destroy without having to bear the first social consequence himself.
That is precisely where the political dimension lies. Not because every individual case would automatically be a social symbol, but because certain individual cases in extreme concentration show what women have long known: that male power has not disappeared, but has been technically refined.
What a serious confession would have to say
A serious confession therefore could not stop at one’s own motives. It could not say: I was hurt. I was confused. I was jealous. I made mistakes. I lost control.
All these sentences still revolve around the man.
A serious confession would instead have to say: I destroyed her control. I used her person. I not only harmed her, but reproduced a structure that has long threatened women. Through my actions I sent the message that a man may digitally rewrite a woman and that even her sexuality, in case of doubt, does not belong to her but to the access of others.
Only there would a confession begin to become true.
The point at which contempt for women becomes clearly nameable
It is important not to become soft at this point. If one assumes that all this were true, then “overstepping boundaries” would be too weak. “Problematic” would be almost cynical. “Boundary-violating” would be precise, but not yet complete.
It would be contemptuous of women because the action is based on an internal hierarchy: the man’s will counts more than the woman’s self-determination. His fantasy counts more than her boundary. His control counts more than her dignity. His crisis dynamic counts more than her integrity.
The scandal would therefore not only lie in the fact that a woman is hurt, but in how she is hurt: as a woman whose image, physicality, and social presence are made subject to others’ control.
The reversal of shame
A particularly cruel mechanism of such acts is the reversal of shame. The perpetrator acts, but the affected person has to explain. He produces the fiction, but she has to restore reality. He crosses the boundary, but she bears the social irritation.
This is not a side issue. It is part of the violence.
For violence does not end with the act itself. It continues in glances, suspicions, doubts, rumors, and the feeling of never being able to know for sure who has seen what and how one is remembered.
That is why the harm is not only technical, not only sexual, and not only reputational. It is existential.
Why digital violence is no less real
For too long digital violence has been treated as if it were a secondary, almost virtual injury. That is wrong. Whoever takes over, sexualizes, falsifies, and feeds a person’s identity into social circuits does not commit a harmless online derailment. He intervenes in this person’s real experiential world.
The affected person continues to live in her body, in her environment, in her relationships. That is exactly where the act lands.
Digital violence is not less real because it is mediated. It is often all the more profound precisely because it combines physical absence with total reach.
The minimal duty of truth
Perhaps this is the crucial point of this thought experiment: a public confession would not be significant because it makes something good again. It makes nothing good again. It erases nothing. It does not put anything back in order. It does not heal.
It would only be the minimal duty to no longer distort reality.
If a man truly understood what he had done, he would have to acknowledge that he had not only destroyed trust, but violated freedom. Not only damaged a relationship, but attacked a woman in her dignity. Not only failed privately, but practically executed a patriarchal logic.
And he would have to say that forgiveness is not his due, but can at best be denied or granted.
Conclusion
That is precisely why the possible confession of Christian U. as a textual figure is interesting. Not because it would give us a real explanation, but because it makes a standard visible. It shows how radically honest a man would have to speak if he no longer tried to save himself, but finally to understand.
That would then no longer be a PR statement. No lawyer’s sentence. No crisis language. No image management.
It would be the belated recognition that the worst thing about such an act is not only its content, but its structure: that a man believes he is allowed to overwrite a woman.
And that it is precisely there that the abyss lies.
