Did you view the images shared online of Bianca Censori, wife of Kanye West, vacantly staring straight ahead as she turned to face the Grammy paparazzi sheathed only in a nude stocking, her naked body exposed to the watching world?
Did you zoom in to see if she really, really was naked? At the actual Grammy’s?
And did you rewatch the video several times taking in (fully-dressed) Kanye’s stone-faced command for her to ‘take it off’, seconds before she removed her coat?
And did you take a swift intake of breath and then message your friend to say ‘Have you seen this!?’
And did you share the pictures on your social media? Perhaps admonishing Censori or West?
If you’ve answered yes to any of that then you’re not alone. I did a couple of them myself.
And afterwards, maybe an hour or so afterwards… I felt ashamed of myself. Complicit in the madness.
I realised what we had all watched, and rewatched and gawped at and shared, was, to my eyes anyway; a moment of domestic abuse. One which won’t leave bruises or scars, one which didn’t involve any screaming or fighting or police intervention; but one which was humiliating, degrading and damaging.
I also realised that we had all played directly into the abusers hands. He prizes himself as a disruptor, a celebrity who doesn’t shy away from controversy. We just gave him his biggest internet moment of all time. Most people will not remember Bianca Censori’s name in five years time. They won’t remember that she’s an accomplished architect in her own right. They will remember the name Kanye West and the stunt he pulled. Because anybody with eyes in their head and a heart beating in their chest can see this was not Censori’s stunt. This was not a woman who looked comfortable, nevermind consenting.
The problem with the internet is it’s immediacy isn’t it? We share now, think later. We press the ‘shock’ emoji reaction button now, empathise later. We consume so much content that we are anaesthitised to the very real situation that the subjects are in.
We will never know the truth of West and Censori’s relationship, behind closed doors. But we can look at the evidence of West’s previous controlling and humiliating treatment of women, not least his ex wife Kim Kardashian and the young starlet Taylor Swift whose Grammy wins he sought to destroy in a sea of media humiliation.
And there will of course be the people who will say ‘It was a stunt/She’s an actress/She wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t want to’, and unless Censori is ever in a position to give a true statement, we’ll never know how she really felt about it.
It doesn’t mean we can’t examine our own reactions. Question whether it was a kind, sympathetic response taking into consideration that Censori is a living, feeling, human being… or whether we acted as an unthinking, unfeeling, internet sheep… for want of a better comparison.
I spend a lot of time worrying about how the internet, gaming and social media has desensitised my kids. How they just don’t feel things as deeply as they might if their brains weren’t addled by the contant onslaught of YouTube shorts. I worry about how they consume news of war, famine, natural disasters, largely on Tick Tock, in seventeen second snippets. Swiftly moving from Ukraine to acne treatments to Gaza to Mbappe’s latest goal. I worry that the important things; ie - the people affected by the wars they’re seeing fleeting glimpses of, are forgotten in a heartbeat. How can that possibly foster empathy?
But what the Censori/West story showed me was how it’s not an issue for our teenagers at all. We adults are in many ways just as bad. Just as desensitised. Even as empathetic adults, what we are suffering from is emotional exhaustion. We simply are bombarded with so much information, that we don’t have the capacity to care deeply, or even think deeply about every single thing. It’s why it’s so easy to just act on our newly evolved instinct to hit the ‘haha’ emoji button and move on to the next story or meme.
We’ve all heard the Be Kind message; shared so widely (on social media of course, not in person) in the wake of Caroline Flack’s suicide. But it often feels we’ve forgotten.
The internet is the genie which is absolutely not going back in the bottle; so what’s the answer for us, as consumers of its content? It’s a huge challenge for us, and the children we are raising.
For me the answer has to be to pause, to think. We talk a lot about eating mindfully to avoid taking in unnecessary calories. What about scrolling mindfully, rather than mindlessly?
If you wouldn’t bitch about something to someone’s face, think twice about sharing it to your 500 followers. And if something feels off, if something looks like control, abuse, violence; listen to your gut. Let it guide you into doing the right thing. And more often than not; the right thing is to refuse to add fuel to the fire.
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