Is Bianca Censori a victim? When Ye (Kanye) goes out for a bit with Bianca Censori, we are no longer surprised by the outfits, the nudity, the vulgarity. We are just appalled by her consent, her obvious fear in her eyes and we wonder why she is doing this and is she happy? Some argue that if she is not well, she should seek help, and since she is not asking, that she is completely fine with it and that she is enjoying it.
Bianca Censori – pleading gaze and dissatisfaction
But footage of Ye and Bianca's entire red carpet walk at the 2025 Grammy Awards showed her hesitating, looking at him in disbelief, him saying something harsh to her, and then taking off her fur coat and showing us what critics are trying to call a see-through dress, but in fact it's some strange material, revealing everything, including her genitals.
Some call this simplicity, performance. But why is the nudity of Bianca Censori different from the nudity of Madonna in Miami, for YSL. Or a picture of Helmut Newton, or a naked John and Joko Lennon? Or “Naked Athens” at the Black Lives Matter protests? Why does it seem to all of us that the first is abuse, and the latter really have a code of protest?
Madonna for YSL: provocation and emancipation
Let's break the code and the codes. For example, in the case of Madonna and YSL, only Madonna is in most of the pictures (except for a couple, there is one where she bites a man's nipple, but again she dominates there). Here Madonna has no one to whom she submits, she enjoys her body, it's her decision, it's her pubic hair that she shows, her breasts – she is there to disrupt the context, disrupt the environment when she hitchhikes, shakes up the city. She abandons the codes of society and her nudity is an expression of women's emancipation, just like the miniskirt once was before.
At the time Madonna did it, it was an act of provocation and rebellion. Today there is an oversaturation of profanity, Onlyfans, the availability of pornography and the normalization of abuse, as we saw in the tragedy of Gisele Pelicot.
Let's not forget the very sensuous, sensual music video for Chris Isaak's song for Wicked games, in which Helena Christensen is topless. Aesthetically highly sophisticated, but also provocative, this video is free-spirited and truly beautiful.
Nudity as a protest
With John Lennon and Yoko Ono, there is equality – they are both born from the same mother. And in the case of Ye-Bianca. he is dressed in black, which emphasizes his power, she is in a fur coat and he asks her to take off her fur coat. The fur coat (we do not know if it is real or faux fur) in this context makes her his animal, his pet. Let us never forget that Bianca is also an architect, so she is not an uneducated woman. In this case, the message is that even if a woman is educated, she will be stripped of her humanity by such a man and will be turned into an animal. Into a creature. Into a basic being, a basic layer. One-dimensional.
Nudity is sometimes used as a protest tactic to draw public and media attention to a particular problem, and in some cases the very act of public nudity is the goal of the protest. This type of demonstration was first recorded in the 1650s, when Quakers used nudity as a symbolic act. Yes, shy pious Quakers invented nudity as an expression of protest .
Later, this tactic was used by freedmen in Canada in 1903, and their naked protests were even documented and published in photographs. After the 1960s, more and more groups began to use nudity as a means of protest. However, acceptance of this method largely depends on cultural and legal norms in different parts of the world. Critics of public nudity claim that such an act is indecent, especially when children are present, while others believe that it is a legitimate form of expression protected by the right to freedom of speech.
Even where public nudity is somewhat accepted, it still evokes surprise, so activists often manage to attract media attention when they use it as a conscious protest tactic. An example of this is the event of July 19, 2020, when a young woman, wearing only a protective mask and cap, stood in front of the police during a protest for George Floyd in Portland, Oregon. Although the police officers used tear gas and rubber bullets, she calmly posed in front of them for several minutes, after which they retreated. Her photos soon became viral and attracted a lot of public attention.
In Berlin, Germany, it is not uncommon to see fashion shows featuring scantily clad people for one reason or another.
Berlin, 2019. in front of the Brandenburg Gate, photo by NG
PETA's “I'd Rather Walk Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign was one of the most visually powerful campaigns of the past 40 years, especially the image of a naked Christy Turlington. The campaign was so successful that PETA discontinued it after they were able to force a number of design houses to stop using fur.
On 29 June 2016, University of Cambridge academic Victoria Bateman walked naked into a meeting of the Faculty of Economics to protest the result of the referendum on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union. On her chest and stomach she wrote the message: “Brexit leaves Britain naked”.
Two protests called “Topless Disturbance” were held on Parliament Hill in Canada in 1987 and 1988 in opposition to the proposed (and later finalized) Canada-US Free Trade Agreement.
The Ukrainian feminist group Femen repeatedly protested topless against sex trafficking, patriarchy, Viktor Yanukovych…
Nudity as art
The path of nudity from ancient Greece to today as a means of expression was a long one – from an ideal, through shame, to protest.
Theater of Cruelty (Théâtre de la Cruauté) is a concept developed by the French playwright, actor and theorist Antonin Artaud in the 1930's. He believed that Western theater had become too intellectual and alienated from real emotions, so he proposed a radical change – a theater that would have an intensive effect on the audience through a physical, visual and sound experience. An experience that shakes the viewer.
The plays of this theater featured nudity, but not as a provocation or erotic element, but as a means of expressing human vulnerability, instinct, and liberation from social norms. Artaud advocated the use of the body as the primary means of communication on stage, and actors often used their bodies in ways that were raw, expressive, and beyond normal social constraints.
Hippies and other participants in the 1960s counterculture embraced nudity as part of their daily routine and to emphasize their rejection of all things artificial. Communes sometimes practiced naturism.
Helmut Newton's erotic photos, which sometimes cross the line and can be seen as high pornography, are still art. Sharp edges and shadows, torn socks, dominance and submissiveness, fetishes, such as a model with a saddle on her back or a model in slightly milder versions of Japanese tying with ropes, arts called shibari and kinbaku, power games – all this highly sexual context that varies from the glorification of the body as an ideal to absolute pornographic commodification, is a game for Newton.
It is also worth mentioning the Mugler video from 2012, Brothers of Arcadia, directed by Nicola Formichetti, in which for a split second we see frontal male nudity in a masturbationscene and many other suggestive things, including BDSM and an allusion to gangbang.
In 1977, in a gallery in Bologna, Marina Abramović and her then-partner and collaborator Ulay stood naked in a narrow doorway, gazing intently at each other, as the audience squeezed in between them. The people squeezing in could choose which lover they wanted to watch, but what was most interesting was the feeling of intruding on the intimate space between the two lovers, not their nudity itself, the feeling of interrupting something, of being a third person in bed, of being an intruder, a burglar, almost a rapist.
But Ye doesn't have these moments. There is no celebration of the body either, although it is obvious to all of us that Bianca Censori has a wonderfully toned body. This is about commodification, using one body to better sell your “fashion line”. He experimented on Bianca with very bizarre outfits that cross between hospital diapers, maternity bras and Japanese binding, but it's about as far from art as it gets. This is a show of power, and knowing Ye's admiration for the Nazis, which in normal times would have been a reason for arrest and not an exhibition of freedom of speech, this is very reminiscent of the nudity of prisoners in concentration camps. Because the undressing of prisoners, as well as rapes, especially in war, aim at humiliation. The bodies of victims in camps such as Jasenovac, Auschwitz, Dachau, Birkenau… were naked, thrown onto trucks and thus unloaded into pits. And in death, their dignity was taken away.
At the same time, we should also mention the other side of the Nazis’ relationship with nudity. The Nazis used nudity for propaganda purposes to glorify the Aryan race as the standard of beauty, as reflected in the Nazi propaganda film about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin by director and propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia .
This is different and darker than mere submissiveness and the game of dominance and submissiveness.
There is protest, defiance, beauty in nudity, only if it is expressed by the free will of the person who is naked. Commodification of abuse, possibly, if it is not an act of free will (ok, I know there are those who say there is no free will).
Finally – I believe that many will wonder why we are writing about this bizarre case on a science website. That's right. Because the humanities are sciences and we need a critical perspective and commentary on many things in this world.
Jelena Kalinić, MA in comparative literature and graduate biologist, science journalist and science communicator, has a WHO infodemic manager certificate and Health metrics Study design & Evidence based medicine training. Winner of the 2020 EurekaAlert (AAAS) Fellowship for Science Journalists. Short-runner, second place in the selection for European Science journalist of the year for 2022.
