At the Grammys on the weekend, something happened that has happened thousands of times throughout human history. A woman’s body was used by a powerful man to sell himself, and nobody really cared.
Bianca Censori and Kanye West have populated the pop-cultural annals for a few years now, and every time they arrive on our screens, the same fountain of public vitriol pours forth – but somehow, the vitriol always misses its true, deserving point.
Bianca Censori is, like me, an Australian girl in her late twenties living in the United States. She is also, unlike me, in a “spiritual union” with one of the most powerful billionaire men alive. We grew up in the same era of 2010s Australia – were both teenagers when Kanye West humiliated Taylor Swift as a tender 20-year old at the Grammys — and probably both danced to Gold Digger at a high-school party in the suburbs.
I’ve got an affinity for her, and to put it lightly, I hate what I’m seeing.
There is a staggering, willful silence in our collective zeitgeist around Censori and the enormous power imbalance between her and Kanye West. Whether it’s grainy, haunted paparazzi photos, cheap headlines squawking about her areolas or The New Yorker proudly writing a baby-boomer-town-crier piece in which a real human is unapologetically called a “pure, mute spectacle of flesh”, it’s clear that from high culture wank-dom to the Daily Mail swamplands, the same problem prevails: unbridled misogyny of the highest order, made all the more insidious by its quiet acceptance.
Post-Grammys, we once again are seeing Censori the way we’ve seen her since she became entangled with West in 2022: her naked body trussed up in some barely-there creation. Whether it’s her feet slapping on the sidewalk or a full-frontal nude on the red carpet, Censori is generally portrayed (by Kanye West, let’s be real here) as a lush-bodied, empty-eyed human canvas, whose inert presence seems to exist as a cipher for his insatiable need for attention.
When you see Censori and Kanye out together, their carefully constructed outfits further this dynamic. Censori’s wide, blank eyes and exposed skin stands in a stark contrast to Kanye, who is more often than not smirking while wrapped in structured, power-boi fits that inspire visions of Matrix warrior kings and intergalactic warlords. The balance is clearly off.
Kanye West has been using the women he’s with as an extension of his ego for a while now, and for the most part, this has been something left relatively uncontested. His public abuse of Kim Kardashian in 2021 and 2022 was widely treated as entertainment. After a string of anti-Semitism in 2022, he was somewhat cancelled — but now, in 2025, he’s still able to sneak back on the Grammys red carpet — all while steadfastly avoiding any real conviction for the way he treats his intimate partners.
There’s a stark difference between the way Censori is being incorporated in Kanye West’s narrative, and the way his past partners have been.
His space-age makeover of Kim was in many parts, a catalyst for her becoming the uncontested ruler of neutral shapewear and the internet. His evil-ego-dance with Taylor Swift (namely, when he made a creepy wax model of her asleep, naked without her permission, alongside former ex Amber Rose) has kept both of them firmly in the cross-hairs of cultural conversation for decades, which despite being seriously detestable for Swift, has had a clear financial benefit for all parties concerned.
When he took international cool girly Julia Fox out of her natural New York habitat and (briefly) let the world know that he thought she was hot, everyone lost their minds. Since, Fox has been delightfully forthright about the insanity of the experience, all the way from West controlling her outfits, only kissing her when cameras were on, and offering her a boob job that she didn’t ask for.
The big, singular difference between Bianca Censori and the Ghosts of Powerful Women from Kanye’s Past is the simple fact that they’ve all talked about it, and Censori hasn’t.
Almost all of the women in West’s most potent nexus of influence have leveraged this affiliation with his power for their own gain. They’ve talked about how fucked up it was in cameos on their own reality shows. They’ve written about it in memoirs, and sung about it massive music videos full of diamond snakes. Their agency has claimed this man’s abusive soak of influence as their own.
But when it comes to Censori, there is only silence.
We know she’s an architect for Yeezy. We know she’s from Melbourne. We know she’s 30 years old (17-and-a-half-years younger than West). We know that once, she talked to a random YouTuber in the handbag section of an anonymous mall. We all know exactly what her naked body looks like.
Other than that, we don’t know anything. And to be clear, not being told anything is fine – as long as the person not talking is doing so on their terms. And how can we be sure, that when it comes to Kanye’s history, that this is really the case?
In the last day or so, I’ve noticed people start to feel concerned in the comment sections below many stories covering Censori on social media. The words “captive” and “I feel sick” are repeated over and over again (like in the comment section beneath The New Yorker’s smug little story, that in its intellectualised self-righteousness, somehow forgets about feminism altogether). People are alarmed, and rightfully so.
Because, isn’t seeing someone being told what to wear and where to step in service of another more powerful person’s agenda, abuse?
Dr Mardi Wilson has spent years working on the ground in gender-based violence, specialising in sexual violence and coercive control. Her first book on consent and sexual coercion, Everyday Coercion, was published by Bloomsbury this year.
“Abusers who use coercive control exploit power that they hold in a relationship (and Kanye has a tonne of it) to limit the autonomy of the person they’re subjecting to abuse. They often do this by isolating them, eroding their self-worth and confidence, and punishing them for perceived ‘wrongdoings’, thus creating an environment of fear,” she says.
“When an abuser teaches their partner to fear consequences, the person subject to abuse can become even more entrapped, which can make it hard to reach out for help. That’s why we often don’t hear about abuse, or the extent of it, until the victim-survivor has fled the relationship.”
“Especially when it’s coercive control rather than some of the more ‘obvious’ types of abuse, like physical violence. Also, the more wealthy and powerful the person, the more tools they may have at their disposal to obfuscate how they exploit their privilege.”
The dynamic between West and Censori is indicative of the true gender, wealth and class engines that exist beneath the skin of our society. After centuries of women in the west battling to be seen for our humanity, we sit in a precarious moment where it feels like the clock has been firmly turned back. Because, frankly, in many ways it has.
Every day, we are seeing patriarchy become more emboldened and extreme. Whether it’s abortion rights being taken away from us, the end of DEI, rising incel culture and male radicalisation, soaring gendered violence— or an entire media narrative focusing on a young woman’s naked breasts rather than the fully clothed billionaire standing next to her, it’s clear that as a young woman in 2025, the fight is far from over.
There is, of course, the very real possibility that Censori is fine with all of this, that she’s fully consenting to wearing and showing up wherever she does. Of course, she has her own ability to make her own decisions, and I can imagine that she would probably hate to read otherwise. She is not a “mute, spectacle of flesh”, but rather a highly educated young woman who also may be clearly willing to partake in Kanye West’s strange, moneyed orbit.
The story here is complex, and we cannot assume anything to be an irrevocable truth.
There is power in Censori’s intentionally guarded mystery, in a society that hates mysteries more than it hates the truth (and that’s saying something). She knows that she is having an effect, otherwise I can’t imagine she would continue doing it. In her blank, doe eyes, there is something that we’re not allowed to know — and in that lack of knowing, she has power over us. And in that, I’m glad for her.
We may never know what Censori thinks, or feels. Perhaps, in 10 years, a shiny paperback memoir will hit the shelves that’s stuffed with glossy pictures, and her real truth. Maybe there’ll be a sudden reactivated Instagram account with a novel-length caption, or an appearance on some Los Angeles talk show.
In any case, I just hope that if, one day, Censori does decide to one day speak, it’s because she chooses to — and not because a bigoted billionaire with far-right tendencies and a messiah complex tells her that she can.