#kanye west president

[banjo15]

EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY

ELON MUSK

VS

THE IRS

Hola fellas! I’m the irs- hold on this is bullshit you got IBS? I do taxes and shit, cause I’m the best. Nothing is safe no matter how you invest cause I investigated you life a little, the way you treat your children should make you a criminal. Taking a human shield whenever you walk through a minefield, what’s the deal? And how come you steal billions of dollars, yet can’t end world hunger? 13 women become single mothers cause of your weird pro-natalism fetish, to be honest man I don’t fucking get it. You’re a horrible dad, shits bad so sad! Your children hate you, the dad they never had. Seriously, just leave at that point you needa call a cab, the way you and Donald trump interact? I think you’re a…. Facist.

Hold on what’s this talk about me stealing shit? Every cent of my wealth was do to what I did. I make rockets, cars, and I profit off it. Multi-billion dollar businesses make my profits skyrocket. Richer than Mansa musa or John Rockefeller, you think you can beat me? You’re worse than Hellen Keller. Cause I like free speech, except for those damn liberals. They’re criminals, they hate America, it’s probably something subliminal. They probably hate me cause they can’t be civil. So what about my kids? I fucking hate my son, she ain’t my daughter that’s no fun. You think just because she takes hormones and takes a surgery and goes home? She’s a lady now? What the heck, she still got an Adam’s apple in her neck. So what if I’m a facist? I have liberals to deck. Cause I was on top of the world untill someone mentioned pronouns, I think it’s profound how this shit sounds. And me and Donald trump? Historians say we were gay, but so what? We slay,

Alright first of all no you fucking don’t slay, not today not any day if that matters cause I’m like dr Seuss, I’ll give you cancer then I’ll leave you to die knowing… no one loves you. Cause everyone who comes out of your balls hates you, not even your own dad celebrates you. Your teachers called you a retard, YOU WERE FUCKING HOMESCHOOLED! Not cool, how the fuck does that happen? Your dad talking shit about you while you’re napping. At this point stop repopulating the earth and think about why you want childbirth. Cause you abandoned every 12 kids you impregnate, most of your children never see you anyways! No matter how much money you spend on Twitter

It’s X!

FUCK YOU FIRST OF ALL! I’m gonna tax you so hard you can only crawl! Cause you? You’re rich enough to escape the paparazzi. Doesn’t make sense how you became a fucking Nazi.

Hold on there, I’m not a Nazi. And all these swastikas? I’m not the one holocausing it! Not even a little bit!

Horrible pun first of all I’m gonna make you pay extra, dude. If you were penniless no one would send you a single nude!

I still hit though-

Well your shit sucks! You couldn’t even make a woman cum for 10 bucks!

And also- first of I’m not a Nazi, my best friend is black!

HEYO GUYS IM KANYE WEST IM A FUCKING NAZI, I hate the Jews AND THE PAPPARAZI. Asking about my day? Fuck off it’s 3 am anyways.

He doesn’t mean that-

The Jews-

*Elon musk physically restrained Kanye west*

He didn’t mean that shit on X!

Both irs and Kanye: ITS TWITTER DIPSHIT

*They both kick Kanye west out the room*

Even then, how the fuck you lose Half your money twice? I give you some advice, maybe shut up and be nice? You can’t even play video games right, how the hell do you think you’re gonna put up a fight when some deranged lunatic on 4chan tumblr or Reddit says forget it! I’m gonna make sure you’re affected by the actions, first of all everyone on tumblrs a nerd, everyone on Reddit is a virgin, but everyone on 4chan is both versions. I know you’re neurodivergent but that doesn’t mean scream “HEIL HITLER” whenever a Volkswagen comes on screen.

Who won? Who’s next?

[vanessa-rafesgirl]

literally.

[droppedyourhnd]

If you come across this post there’s only two things you need to know about Argentina and those are:

1. The president fucks his sister

2. The same president just scammed a big part of his following

[trumpdump]

[k-lua]

[volcanogal12]

I don't think enough people remember the fact that Kanye west ran for president in the 2020 election and then proceeded to lose horrifically.

Like did we collectively just forget about it or was it because that was just one of many batshit crazy things that happened???

[astarless-fights]

[stupittmoran]

Top 10 headlines the media didn't tell you this week, Repost & FoIIow for more

Idaho House passes bill to give pedophiIes the death penalty.

Tucker Putin Interview breaks 200 Million views in just one week on 𝕏.

Epstein victims sue U.S. government, accusing the FBI of allowing and enabling his s*x traffıcking for two decades.

Impeachment clause to be used against Trump found hidden in Ukraine Funding Bill.

Kanye West's latest #1 album removed from Apple music store.

New report finds Obama CIA had foreign allies spy on Trump Team, triggering Russia Collusion Hoax.

France passes law that could punish anti-vaxxers with 3 years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros.

Biden Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas impeached for border failure.

FBI whistleblower who exposed Biden Ukraine corruption now being charged by Hunter Biden 'investigator.'

Biden refuses cognitive test, first president in history to do so. Is Biden's incompetence a national security threat?

If you appreciate this Top 10 recap, remember to Repost and FoIIow me for another week in a clown world 🤡🌎

[angelkiyo]

modern au high school hcs for my fav haikyuu boys based on my high school experiences + romance hcs <3

[miya osamu, sakusa kiyoomi, oikawa torū, iwaizumi haijime]

a/n- part one + my asks are open bc i do not know what to write but im down for mostly anything tbh so ASK AWAY PLS

miya osamu

he has a similar gpa to his brother [gpa at a 2.5 😔]

is in culinary club and the president

since atsumu is a drake glazer, osamu makes sure to bring up kendrick everytime he hears a drake song

he had a field day when “not like us” mv dropped

even though his brother and him are opposites in a way, that hasn’t stopped osamu from being submitted on ‘inarizaki.bops’

he was most likely talking to a teacher

private insta with 300 followers

doesn’t give a fuck abt p.e and would be enjoying basketball if they weren’t able to play volleyball

osamu would probably also have a very casual way of dressing — stussy and abrocrombie fiend

steals from his brother’s nike collection while owning several pairs adidas gazelles and new balances himself

as for with his s/o, he would be more of a soft launch guy and would post stories of you two holding hands or the two of you in a mirror pic

he would def be holding your hand in the halls and having his arm around you

imagine peter k lara jean moment

your friends would find him to be a green flag

the two of you would use study hall to not study at all but use his little crock pot thing he got from tiktok shop and make food

would try to be nara smith one day and fail miserably

very much would wear ‘aqua de gio’ bc i said so (n would find atsumu’s cologne to be too strong)

dates would include: cooking at his place and eating your masterpieces while watching movies (esp spider-man bc he seems the type)

artists he would listen to: kendrick lamar, joey bada$$, childish gambino, doja cat

sakusa kiyoomi

annoyingly smart (3.6 gpa) and would probably get a 4/5 avg on his ap tests

if he wasn’t on volleyball, he seems the type to be in academic decathlon or science olympiad

would be keeping to himself but if he were to play a sport, it would be smt like lacrosse or tennis

he’s rich. like RICH RICH. (he goes to itachiyama with three siblings or smt)

so he’d wear like club monaco, j. crew, or like ralph lauren

would have a specific rotation of shoes that would be asics or new balance in white

insta would be like 700 followers and 32 following

for him and his s/o, he’d be like osamu and would be very much soft launch you

even though he hates crowds, he would very much like to go out with you shopping (in a shopping center that has nobody/barely anyone)

kiyoomi may be presenting himself as a cold and calculating and he can be, but he’s a soft to ppl he’s close with

him and komori would use brain rot language ironically (I just see that lemme elaborate) after komori would use brain rot language unironically

he would use it with you once “by accident”

he kept hearing komori say it and said it subconsciously

and then never again after the second hand embarrassment he got

“on skibidi…?”

you still bring it up to this day (he blames komori)

dates would include movie nights and making pillow forts

artists he would listen to: sza, 21 savage, kanye west, playboi carti

oikawa torū

would be a note taking fiend and be an honors/ap student with a 3.4

he would be on a ‘bop’ page for volleyball in general

great king? nah great bop

instead of being a wyll warrior, he’d be one of the mfks on insta that would slide up with a 😍 then ghost you after dm-ing

another dior sauvage user and on some days, versace eros…

caught up in the central cee madz drama

also obsessed with watching nara smith (me too)

he’s team ice spice

would be very persistent in taking 0.5s

though because of this, he purposely fluffs up his bangs and hair for him to not fall victim to 0.5s

if he didn’t play volleyball, he would play badminton/tennis

would be a SLUTTTT for pinterest clean boy fits

very clean boy core with his lululemon mens shit and would be shopping at alo + urban outfitters

also ralph lauren teddy bear sweaters n golden gooses

his insta user would be smt like “theyenvy_.toruuu” or basic like his full name and he would have more than 3k followers

THOUGH HE WOULD BE MAKING THOSE SHARED POSTS W YOU.

his finsta would be very full of you and spams of volleyball

nle choppa slut me out 2 glazer

dates would include: self care day at either one of your places while watching baddies or real housewives +shopping

artists he would listen to: laufey, cigarettes after sex, olivia rodrigo, megan thee stallion, nle choppa

iwaizumi hajime

he went to uci so he has his shit tgt (nhs and 3.9 type shit w aps)

though, he would definitely be apart of debate club and a lacrosse person if he didn’t do volleyball

shops at psycho bunny or hollister. the occasional lululemon shirt bc oikawa put him on

would wear yeezys and supreme, i fear

i can see him being into watching the “who tf did I marry” series

massive gym bro

would have his finsta tracking his gains

his fyp would also probably be workouts and those “baby don’t hurt me” meme tiktoks (idk how to explain)

would be the winner of senior assassin

he would def shoot oikawa first

type of person to wear ‘obession’ by calvin klein mixed with axe body spray

as for insta, he would def have a good 1k

would post you to the cutest songs ever and collab on posts

HARD LAUNCH TYPA GUY

yall would have like a specific song that would make him be like “this is our songgg”

in his head

most likely a tyler song

aka ‘sweet/i thought you wanted to dance’

he’d be the okokok to your lalalala

dates would include: him just spoiling you and dinner dates

artists he would listen to: tyler the creator, metro boomin, 21 savage, kendrick lamar, j. cole

[senatortedcruz]

5 Presidents in a row (Bush Obama Trump Biden Trump again) have had to react to Kanye West's behavior

[slarpg]

This might be me reading too much into things, but was Greenridge voting in a baby to lead the Paladins meant to be a dig at Trump?

It was a joke about how every election with a slot for write-in candidates gets joke votes where people write in Homer Simpson or Kanye West or Batman or something. In 2020 someone in Florida really wrote in "Baby Yoda," and another person in Kansas voted for Hard Drive's satirical "gamer president" candidate Ace Watkins.

It was also kind of a joke about tiny towns where things like an animal being elected honorary mayor happen - see Stubbs the cat from Talkeetna, Alaska, for example. These are usually spread as examples of joke write-in campaigns succeeding, but in reality those sorts of things usually happen with tiny, unincorporated communities where there was never a real mayoral election to begin with. But the idea of a campaign like that really succeeding is funny to me.

(SLARPG was in development since 2015, so it's very possible that specific joke was written before Trump was even elected.)

[fanhackers]

Fandom/Activism

I interrupt my dive into Abigail DeKosnik’s work to note that as the United States moves deeper into its (apparently endless) election season, we’re seeing a lot of fandom-as-activism starting to emerge, as well as activism-as-fandom. De Kosnik herself was one of the early writers on fandom/activism, writing “Participatory democracy and Hillary Clinton's marginalized fandom” for the very first issue of Transformative Works and Cultures in 2008; more recently, Aja Romano wrote about how Donald Trump’s followers can be seen to be acting like a fandom for Vox: “If you want to understand modern politics, you have to understand modern fandom.” 

TWC hosted an entire guest issue on Transformative Works and Fan Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova; Jenkins and Shresthova also collaborated on By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (NYU, 2016) which collects essays on fan activism. Other essays on fandom/activism have been published by TWC with Alex Xanthoudakis’s Mobilizing minions: Fan activism efficacy of Misha Collins fans in "Supernatural" fandom (2020) and  Hannah Carilyn Gunderman’s Fan geographies and engagement between geopolitics of Brexit, Donald Trump, and Doctor Who on social media (2020) being recent examples. Meanwhile, Tanya Cook and Kayle Joseph are the authors of Fandom Acts of Kindness: A Heroic Guide to Activism, Advocacy, and Doing Chaotic Good (Penguin Randomhouse 2023), a guide on how to use fandom and fannish strategies to make a difference. 

Some examples of fandom/activism emerging this U.S. election season include Heroes 4 Harris: Kamala-Con  which is scheduled to happen online today, Sunday September 8, 2024, 1pm PT / 4pm ET: this is billed as “a Comic-Con for Kamala” and “the largest fandom led gathering in support of a presidential candidate in American history.” It will feature: “actors, writers, directors, and super fans of Hollywood's most inspiring heroic fandoms” and promises not just inspiration from some of our favorite stars (Mark Ruffalo, Sean Astin, Rosario Dawson and others - not to mention Henry Jenkins himself) but also breakout groups and training in “fan mobilization.”  

Meanwhile, Lynda Carter (always a Wonder Woman!) is also trying to get out the fan vote for Harris with her group Geeks & Nerds for Harris Walz (@GeekOutTheVote); this is also billed as “a fan activist campaign” and they are planning special online events, the first of which will be an online call on September 24, 2024.  As they describe on their website: “Fandom has never just been about media consumption. Fans are artists, creators, and digital ambassadors. When we share what we love, it radiates around the world. And to paraphrase the Vice President, it’s how we show them who we are. By connecting battle-tested campaign canvassing strategies to the heritage and practices of fan communities, we can encourage fans to get out the vote in key battleground states.”

Donald Trump, aside from being his own fandom with himself as fan in chief, also seems to have had some self-identified fandoms collectively organizing for him over the years - these include Fans of Kanye West, Fans of Race Car Driving, and, strange but true, Fans of the 1980s, who apparently believe that Donald Trump would also be a fan of 80s horror movies, Scritti Politti, and  the soundtrack to Pretty in Pink. (I’m not making that up; it’s on their Twitter.) That said, Mel Stanfill’s newest book Fandom is Ugly (2024) argues that, despite its popular reputation, media fandom is not essentially progressive; that in fact, “reactionary politics and media fandoms go hand in hand.” Stanfill’s book looks at the ways in which fans have organized in conservative, reactionary, or even hateful ways, from Gamergate to the collective abuse and harassment of actors in the latest Star Wars franchise. 

The discipline of fandom studies is now being used to study all different kinds of affiliations and advocacy movements, not just those based around film, tv, sports, or music. Fan studies is now applied to political and social movements. Jenkins is still a powerful voice on the relationship between fan studies and participatory democracy (whether progressive or reactionary): read this 2024 interview with him published in Communication and the Public: “The path from participatory culture to participatory politics: A critical investigation—An interview with Henry Jenkins.”  As Jenkins notes:

Part of the ethos of fandom is to ask questions—from nitpicking to imagining other outcomes, different trajectories for character arcs, and other worlds where the story might occur, all of which is expressed through fan works. I would say that fans are often more critical than the general audience in asking these questions, which makes them somewhat different from many partisans and activists I might know who rarely question their beliefs and ideological commitments. And fans are more tolerant—as an aggregate—of different interpretations than partisans are of different ideological stances. So, you could do worse in grounding a democracy than engaging with fans.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ilyse Hogue for The Bulwark:

MY FIRST CLUE THAT SOMETHING WAS AFOOT was at a dinner party in early February when my left-leaning, normie girlfriend proclaimed—seemingly out of nowhere—that Justin Baldoni had been framed.

At a time when most Americans had not yet heard the word DOGE, tens of millions were tuning in daily to debate the minutiae of a high-profile sexual harassment case filed by megastar Blake Lively against Baldoni, her director and costar on It Ends With Us. Not so long ago, the default would have been to empathize with, if not straight up support Lively, who appeared to be the latest in a long line of actresses blowing the whistle on troubling on-set behavior. Instead, my friend whipped out her phone to play reel after reel of TikTok videos of women defending Baldoni and railing against Lively and her über-famous husband, Ryan Reynolds. Three reels in, a familiar name flashed across the screen. “What’s Candace Owens doing narrating this case?” I asked. “You know Candace Owens?” my friend replied, with the bewilderment of someone who just discovered their mom knows what an NFT is.

I did indeed. Owens’s career path reads like a right-wing Mad Lib. The one consistency is her continuing commandeering of the spotlight through spectacle and controversy. She first became prominent as a college dropout who won a racial harassment settlement against her high school, then launched a blog where writers opined about Donald Trump’s penis size and founded an organization to confront��cyberbullying. After being doxxed—allegedly by progressives—she did a political 180, founding #RedPillBlack and the Blexit Foundation to encourage African Americans to abandon the Democratic Party. “Discovered” by alt-right luminaries Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich during the first Trump administration, Owens skyrocketed through roles at Turning Point USA and the Daily Wire between appearances on InfoWars. She attended Paris Fashion Week, palled around with Kanye West, and even received accolades from President Trump, who called her a “very smart thinker” for her defense of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. But even the right has limits, and Owens found them. She was fired from the Daily Wire in March 2024 for peddling the blood libel and Holocaust denial, among other antisemitic conspiracy theories. She leapt into the crossfire between Jordan Peterson and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, with the latter praising her for waging a “full-fledged war against the Jews.” Banished to the right-wing wilderness, Owens relaunched her solo YouTube show three months later. Early numbers were solid but not impressive; she hit a low point in views and subscribers after the 2024 election as she was casting about for new scandals. Then came the Baldoni case.

[...] HOW COULD IT COME TO BE that someone too toxic for the Daily Wire had not only reinvented herself as an influential culture commentator in such a short time, but had risen to preeminence in her new role? Owens’s appeal rests in her young, hip, and glamorous aesthetic. She bridged what many assumed to be an impassable divide—merging the trad-wife trend with the girl-boss ethos. Viewers saw something both authoritative and aspirational: a successful career, a hot husband, and three adorable kids with a fourth on the way. Removed from politics, she was more acceptable—and, arguably, more influential: She is shaping the viewpoints of millions of people who may just now be engaging in the MeToo debates for the first time.

Defenders of what Owens would deride as “modern feminism” noticed that she and others were doing real damage as public opinion shifted against Lively, which coincided with the start of a new administration hellbent on extinguishing the #MeToo movement. But Owens’s narrative has proven durable in spite of pushback. A recent Glamour story offered a look at the “mommy sleuths” behind the campaign against Lively. The piece only made people angrier. Content creators lashed back, accusing the reporter of using “mom” as a derogatory term and delegitimizing their experiences in the world of journalism and the entertainment industry. Popular sports podcaster Dave Neal did a segment repudiating the article’s attempt to paint all Lively skeptics as right-wing plants. (One of his commenters wrote, “Omg I’m a Democrat a mom of boys, and I don’t appreciate lies to destroy a man’s life Blake.”) Reddit threads proliferated criticizing the perceived condescension from white feminists in their coverage of the case.

For Owens, this has undoubtedly been a triumph: Not only has this campaign given oxygen to her career but it has also served to advance a larger ideological project she’s been working on since before Justin Baldoni became a household name. Owens was an outspoken early critic of the #MeToo movement. She launched her 2019 PragerU show with an interview about #MeToo with Roseanne Barr during which she claimed that the closest thing to white supremacy she had seen in her lifetime was the ��radical feminist movement.” She and Barr agreed that women, and mothers, would have to be the ones to take down #MeToo. Despite her noxious views, Owens is tuning in to a real shift in public opinion on these matters. Voters—many of them women and moms—have started to worry about a failure to define due process in sexual harassment cases. Democrats failed to address the skepticism head on. Instead, they appeared to retreat from the movement it once championed. That left a wide-open lane for political opportunists like Candace Owens and her more mainstream counterpart, Megyn Kelly, to roll in, get a handle on the debate, and pull it squarely toward the anti-feminism side.

Far-right antifeminist and antisemitic blowhard Candace Owens is seeing a career resurgence post-Daily Wire, thanks to her branching out of conservative political commentary and diving into the true crime and celebrity gossip fields.

[vague-humanoid]

One assumption embedded in Obama’s remarks is that a significant share of Black men is skeptical of a Harris presidency simply because she is a woman. This is undoubtedly true — Black men are men, after all, and not immune to the prejudices that afflict their gender. I have argued in the past that the GOP’s quickest path to racial parity may be composing a de facto men’s party, given Trump’s recent successes with that cohort across racial lines and the endorsements he has received from a range of Black male celebrities, including Kanye West, Ice Cube, and Lil Wayne. But it’s also true that Black men support Harris, and Democrats more generally, at much higher rates than men from any other racial group, despite Obama’s efforts to single them out. If anything, Trump’s inroads with traditional Democratic voting blocs between 2016 and 2020 were most pronounced among Hispanics and women. Even Harris’s shakier numbers with Black men casts doubt on the idea that if she loses, Black men will have played an outsize role.

The more fundamental assumption of Obama’s remarks concerns Black political identity, which in his view entails a broader set of ideological commitments. To hear the former president tell it, these commitments include rewarding allyship of Black women in kind while punishing denigration of them by Trump and his racist-misogynist acolytes. Setting aside the fallacy of equating Harris, a Black former law-enforcement official, with Black women protesting police violence, you could infer that a commitment to racial equality and opposing bigotry in general are included as well. Yet if these obligations form the pillars of a Black political agenda that must naturally reject Trump, it is less obvious why they should naturally embrace Harris or most Democrats.

Black loyalty to the Democratic Party in the post–Civil Rights era has become something like a law of American politics, and the argument for its continuation is relatively strong: civil rights, reproductive rights, and workers’ rights are better served by a Harris presidency than a Trump one. What, then, do we make of the fact that, just as Trump has denigrated Black men as feckless criminals whose human rights are negotiable, Obama has used his bully pulpit to cast us as lazy and uninterested in politics? What are we to make of Obama undermining protest actions that sought to deliver us justice, such as urging NBA stars to halt a strike called in protest of police brutality?

[darkeagleruins]

The democrat playbook is more transparent than the dress of Kanye West’s soon to be ex-wife.

These lawsuits are not legitimate. They have been preplanned. Plaintiffs have been pre-selected. And Democrats are trying to stop in the courts what they were not able to stop in November.

They lost. They don’t care. The amount of disdain they have for the American people and their audacity to elect whoever they want is limitless. They don’t care about elections. They don’t care about people. They don’t care about their voters. They care about raw power. And they will do whatever they have to do to get it.

That’s what all this lawfare is about.

It is about once again, trying to unseat the duly elected president of the United States of America.

Except instead of literally, this time they’re just going to do it figuratively with the courts who will step in and tie his hands.

[justforbooks]

The exposure of Bianca Censori’s body is contrasted with the enigma of her mind

No one knows what she thinks of her own public nudity or of her relationship with Kanye West – or of anything at all, for that matter, since she never talks

Apparently, they got kicked out pretty quickly. On Sunday night, the rapper Kanye West and his wife, the Australian former model and “Yeezy” brand architectural designer Bianca Censori, appeared at the Grammy awards. West wore black sunglasses; Censori wore basically nothing. In a stunt for the cameras, West posed behind Censori as she turned her back to the paparazzi and lowered a long fur coat down her shoulders. When she turned to face the photographers, she was wearing a fully transparent mini dress, and no underwear. The effect was that she appeared completely nude. According to Page Six, the pair were “escorted out” following the incident, though others claim that the couple left of their own accord. West, after all, was only nominally a contender for a Grammy this year: he was nominated in just one category, best rap song, for Carnival, his collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign. He ultimately lost, but he didn’t come to the Grammy awards expecting to win. What he wanted out of his attendance was what he got when Censori dropped her coat.

The clothing, or rather lack thereof, is typical of Censori in her appearances with West. Since the pair married in early 2023 – shortly after West finalized his divorce from reality star Kim Kardashian – Censori has rarely been seen without West, and rarely wearing clothes. On a 2024 trip to a restaurant in Los Angeles, she wore a sheer flesh-colored bodysuit with long sleeves but no coverage over her breasts; that same summer, at the Chateau Marmont, she wore thong underwear without any pants; on a trip to the movies, she wore a sheer crop top with no bra, and a pair of shorts so short, they tipped into the genre of briefs. The effect of her nudity and near-nudity is heightened by the proximity of Kanye West, her husband, who is usually wearing too much clothing beside Censori’s too little: long pants, long sleeves, high necks, and layers of jackers, sweatshirts, and ponchos, often combined with a beard and dark sunglasses that conceal his face.

Risque fashion is a tradition of its own, and the bodies of celebrity women are offered up for exposure and visual consumption in a kind of conventional ritual that often carried its own critique. In terms of sheer exposure, Censori’s “outfit”, as it were, at the 2025 Grammys is not so different from Rihanna’s famous sparkly-sheer flapper-inspired number from the 2014 Council of Fashion Designers of America awards. And yet Censori’s habit of nudity is darker, less playful, and not just because it declines to partake of the coquettish ritual of faux-concealment that is typical of so much other revealing fashion – and, indeed, of celebrity itself.

There is a clear desire to shock in her appearances with West, but there is no playfulness. In vain one scans the photos of Censori in search of a smile, a twinkle in her eye, a sign of conspiratorial pleasure, or of being in on the joke, or even of mere willingness. One sees only the blankness of her expression, vacant and somewhat sad. Writing in the New Yorker, Naomi Fry called her a “pure, mute spectacle of flesh”.

The exposure of Censori’s body is contrasted with the enigma of her mind. Officially speaking, no one knows what she thinks of her own public nudity, or of her relationship with West – or of anything at all, for that matter, since she never talks. West, however, is somewhat less of a mystery. Around the time of his messy divorce from Kardashian, with whom he shares four children, West’s behavior became erratic. He launched a half-hearted run for president before endorsing Donald Trump; he praised Hitler and tweeted that he would “go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”.

This public behavior was allegedly paired with increasingly disturbing private actions, especially concerning sex and women. Back before he lost his partnership with Adidas, he showed executives there pornographic videos on his phone during a meeting. He is being sued by at least two women for sexual assault. One, a model for a music video that West worked on, says that he strangled her and shoved his fingers in her mouth during a music video shoot at New York City’s Chelsea hotel in 2010, allegedly yelling “This is art, this is fucking art,” during the attack. Another, his former assistant, accuses West of sexually assaulting her on multiple occasions, including one incident in which she claims that West drugged her in the presence of the rapper and accused sex trafficker Sean “Diddy” Combs. West has called the allegations “baseless”.

As for Censori, her mother came to California from Australia not long after the marriage, reportedly because she was concerned about her daughter. On one of the visits, according to West’s former assistant, West told Censori that he wanted to have sex with Censori’s mother and to make Censori watch.

It would be generous – and easier on our consciences – to imagine Censori and West partaking, together, in a critique of gender and celebrity. In this version of events, what West is doing when he stands behind Censori and watches her undress for paparazzi photographers is not using her degradation and vulnerability as proof of his status, but indicting us, the viewer.

His vampiric consumption of her body becomes ours: the brutal depiction of heterosexuality as a practice of domination and value extraction is shown to be the same as the practice of celebrity and its consumption. But if that critique is contained in West and Censori’s spectacle, it may be we, not them, who puts it there. Censori’s consent and knowingness is not, actually, in evidence here; and even if it was, consent exists, often, even in situations of asymmetry and violence, even in situations where great harm is being done. Critiquing Censori as an artist allows us to see her differently, as something more hopeful and complicated than a victim of brutality. But sometimes things are what they look like.

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