Bianca, before disrobing. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty)


February 4, 2025   6 mins

Is Bianca Censori okay? On Sunday, the Australian consort of erratic music genius Kanye West arrived at the Grammys accompanied by West and wrapped in a full-length fur coat. Then, seemingly at a command from West, she dropped the coat — revealing a completely sheer dress and no underwear. Her gossamer-covered, full-frontal nudity is now all over the internet, tastefully censori’d for the gutter press.

Censori’s outfits have been growing increasingly in need of censorship for some time. In 2023 she was photographed in Florence, trailing after West, clad only in a sheer bodystocking and clutching a purple pillow like a child’s teddy. Then there was the claustrophobic Maison Margiela shroud, all sheer full-face covering and a tyre-like collar.

West, meanwhile, stalked next to her in shoulder pads and tights, like a Judge Dredd terrorist with a hooded hostage ready for necklacing. He seems to relish displaying Censori’s beauty, vulnerability, and pliancy, as a foil to his own vaguely paramilitary-tinged and always fully clothed aesthetic — often in dark glasses, and often masked, too, like a bodyguard or executioner. We’re to treat it as high fashion; but her huge eyes, blank face and awkward, near-naked discomfort cry out that something is off.

Creative passion or abuse? Opinion is divided. Early in their romance, West wrote a febrile song called “Censori Overload”, lamenting “no more sex till marriage, and no more drip till Paris”. She has been described by some as West’s “muse”: an inspiration and living artwork. Others find the outfits degrading, and worry that the relationship is abusive.

“He seems to enjoy displaying Censori’s beauty, vulnerability, and pliancy, as a foil to his own vaguely paramilitary-tinged, no-flesh aesthetic.”

Perhaps the most liberal interpretation is that it’s just kinky, with West as the “dom” and Censori in the “sub” role and the whole dynamic subject to an unusual degree of public exposure. Certainly West has form for enjoying power and control in relationships: often dictating the wardrobe choices of women he dates, even clearing out ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s wardrobe on camera. He reportedly employs a whole “secret team” to create Censori’s outlandish outfits, as though she’s a living doll, and announced early last year that she would wear “no pants this year”. He gropes her publicly — and, it appears, sometimes demands still more intimate public sexual favours: a 2023 incident in a water taxi in Venice saw West photographed seemingly with his trousers at half-mast and Censori’s head in his lap — prompting local police investigations. At the Grammys over the weekend, West reportedly ordered her to drop the coat with the three words “Make a scene”.

This is all still, more or less, at least arguably within the scope of “lifestyle BDSM”, which is to say a form of long-term couple relationship that never breaks out of “dominant” and “submissive” roles. But advocates of BDSM emphasise that while participants in a “kinky” partnership may agree to a “power exchange” even 24/7, the dynamic itself should be consensual, pre-negotiated and based on mutual trust and communication — with “safe words” giving the submissive party an escape route if it all gets too much. That doesn’t sound like it’s happening here: West reportedly screens her social media, controls what she eats, and even tells her when to go to bed.

So are West and Censori just kinky, or kinky and playing without safe words? And if so, what’s the difference between that and coercive control? But when  we set BDSM itself into context, it becomes clearer that its safe, sensible rules for rational perversion can’t be made to apply in this case. Rather, they serve to distract from what’s actually off about this scenario.

As a cultural phenomenon, BDSM only only emerged alongside liberalism itself. As the writer Andrew Klavan has noted, one of the great early innovators in the relativist philosophies that underpin modern liberalism was the Marquis de Sade: also a notorious sexual degenerate and origin of the “S” in BDSM. Downstream of (among other liberal thinkers) his trailblazing, amoral, often sadistic (they named it for him!) advocacy of radical sexual libertinism, a liberal worldview has steadily emerged in which sexual and social norms may be discarded in favour of individual freedom and will.

Especially since the Sixties, we have leaned into that Sadean social picture: one that decries moral absolutes and rejects baked-in asymmetries and social givens, asserting, instead, the freedom of every individual to do what he or she wishes. Among less amoral liberals than de Sade, this tends to come with a side-order of egalitarianism and strictures on harming others. In other words: we should be able to do what we want, provided everyone consents, and we’re all working meanwhile to abolish real-world asymmetries of power.

This is the context in which BDSM makes sense. For it’s a good rule of thumb that whatever is most forbidden will seem especially enticing. It’s thus those most committed to egalitarianism — broadly, liberals — who are also most likely to fantasise about domination and submission. The practice of “BDSM” within its usual “safe, sane, and consensual” boundaries, complete with safe-words, creates a space to enjoy the frisson of power asymmetry for liberals otherwise committed to the flattening and disavowal of all such differences.

And what’s so icky about West’s decision to sculpt his personal life into a de Sadean tableau is that he’s taking full advantage of the now-widespread culture of liberal sexual permissiveness that views BDSM as so perfectly fine it has a UK Ministry of Justice advocacy group. In this culture, Bianca Censori’s treatment can be read as merely “kinky” — and yet West’s treatment of her exploits the fact that social hierarchies never really flattened. Or, rather, that flattening has gone into reverse. Kanye West stands among an emergent post-liberal phenomenon of lords and princes: billionaire titans of a new Gilded Age, who live out, very literally, the internet assertion that you really can “just do things”.

In this context, what’s off about West and Censori isn’t the sexually explicit outfits, or even waterborne BJs. It’s not even West’s evident relish for exposing and exhibiting his obedient consort. It’s the fact that he has selected someone to serve as his counterpart who is unable to play at his power level.

The bestselling soft-porn fantasy Fifty Shades of Grey thrilled countless normie housewives with its romantic-yet-kinky account of the love-affair between dominant billionaire Christian Grey, and loving, submissive, middle-class Ana. In that book it all ends happily, and Christian Grey falls deeply in love with Ana and doesn’t make her wear a see-through bodystocking in public. But the reality of real wealth disparity in the postmodern age is that, like the aristocrats of the pre-liberal age, the super-rich are “equals” only with others of their own kind. Relative to normies, the idea of “equality”, or even “consent”, is largely an abstraction. They really can just do things, and we can’t. In terms of what this looks like in practice, for socially asymmetric romance, a better mythic model than Christian Grey is the (from a modern perspective, rather rapey) Greek mythology of Olympian gods seducing mortal women: a grab ‘em by the pussy world of simply taking what you want, all horny swans and abduction by bull.

West appears to have come upon Censori somewhat like an Olympian seducing a nymph. Not long after they met, he “married” her, in a private, possibly-not-legally-binding ceremony — a scant few months after finalising his divorce from fellow-Olympian Kim Kardashian. And the contrast between the two women says it all. Conservatives may curl a lip at the flashy, new-money excess of the celebrity super-rich class, preferring the understated grandeur of old European money; but in the weird world of “high net worth individuals”, Kardashian — who is also a billionaire — is indisputably in the same league of aristocracy as West: postmodern influencer royalty.

By contrast, Censori has neither obviously abundant family money, nor particularly extensive business interests of her own beyond serving as architect-turned-model-turned-living-doll. She is, figuratively as well as literally, all fur coat and no knickers. Combined with the ambivalently binding “marriage”, this relative poverty makes her acutely vulnerable: a situation in which domination and submission is less a fun game to play at weekends, than an all-enveloping reality. In theory, she could surely walk away any time; but as the journalist Tina Brown observed recently, there is nothing more corrupting than private jets. So unlike for Queen Kim, it’s easy to see how the costs to Censori of walking away from her controlling prince and his creepy fashion thing could lead her to tolerate more, or indeed wear less, than she would really prefer.

In this new age of yawning wealth disparities, West’s remodelling of Censori from employee to chattel-wife takes objectification to new levels — all while presenting Censori as wife, controlling her as if she were still an employee, and smuggling the whole queasy cocktail under the cover of possibly-“kinky” sexual liberalism.

In old-money aristocratic terms, then, we might compare West’s choice of Bianca Censori as his project to a duke seducing a maid, then parading her half-naked in public — simply because he can. The new-money volume of objectification and media spectacle makes it something still worse. If we lack the language today to express our disgust at the obvious misuse of power this all entails, it’s because the liberal world has forgotten how to think about real, substantive class hierarchy. With a post-liberal one now fully upon us, in the Second Trumpian Epoch, it might be time to remember.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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