On Grammys night, outspoken Trump supporter and Holocaust denier Kanye West showed up on the red carpet with his wife, Australian model and architect Bianca Censori, who surprised everyone by throwing off a mink coat to reveal that she was wearing a see-through dress that left nothing to the imagination.
While many people on social media decried the stunt as another example of West’s misogyny—with the revelations of a lip-reader suggesting he was coercing Censori into disrobing—the media stayed largely restrained. The New York Times called it an instance of “minimalist fashion … pushed to an extreme,” while USA Today asked, “Do the Grammys have a dress code?”
After a couple of weeks in which Trump had issued a flurry of unhinged executive orders and pardoned all the January 6 rioters, it was difficult to feel shocked by some boobs; but the sight of Censori’s nakedness jolted me into an unsettling sense of recognition and sent me looking through old files on my computer, where I found an abandoned novel from 2003.
In it, I had envisioned a similar scene, in which a young female pop star I called “Ripley Street” (loosely based on Britney Spears) is forced by her abusive, controlling manager (loosely based on Diddy) to appear at an awards show buck naked:
She was hidden, the coat clutched about her throat. Enveloped in mink, she looked like a magic trick waiting to happen.
“We can’t see you!” the paparazzi yelled. “The coat!”
She threw it off.
And she was naked—except for a tiny, shining thong, encrusted with diamonds, sapphires and rubies (custom-made by Victoria’s Secret, for $26,000), shimmering in the design of an American flag, waving across her crotch.
The agent I showed the manuscript to, an older man known for his representation of older male writers, said he felt the scenario (which opened the novel) was too extreme—no one would believe it could happen. And perhaps he was right; it took until the second Trump administration for American misogyny to go completely naked.
It was there all along, of course, with a notable rise in the late 1990s and early 2000s—for example, in the ways in which Spears and her fellow starlets were treated by the media, mocked and humiliated and never taken seriously as the artists that they were. (Is “Toxic” not one of the greatest pop songs of all time?)
It was routine for TV shows and movies back then to present story lines questioning whether women could “have it all” or whether what they really wanted was the love of a big strong man (Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, and the deluge of rom-coms of that era). “Is Feminism Dead?” asked the cover of Time in 1998.
The virulent sexism of 2000s pop culture was completely normalized. Even today, you can find people who will insist that Wedding Crashers, the endless Hangover franchise, and even Two and a Half Men were just good fun. Can’t you take a joke? Women, as usual, had to either play along or be kept out of the boys’ club; and many did play along, endorsing trends such as self-sexualization, arguing that it was their choice.
It was interesting to see how, after West appeared at the Grammys encouraging his naked wife to drop her mink coat, many women on social media reacted with revulsion—the sight of a man seeming to orchestrate this moment driving home the question of whether, in a misogynistic society, sexualization is ever truly a woman’s choice.
Feminism has been one of the most successful social movements in history, bringing American women rights they had been denied for centuries. As the backlash against feminism grew in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and beyond, it was aided and abetted not just by right-wingers and angry, disgruntled men but by the media, Hollywood, the music industry, and other seats of pop culture.
While some may find themselves reeling at what the architects of Project 2025 envision for the future of women—a world of tradwives with little bodily autonomy—it’s actually not all that surprising that a large swath of Americans raised on seeing powerful women such as Taylor Swift continually attacked for their success (including by West) believe it would be better for women to just go back into the kitchen, where they can be “demure” and “safe.”
“Whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them,” Trump said a few days before the election.
It has been said that we are in a Fascist takeover of our government. Which unfortunately also comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. The rise of Fascism is almost always tied to a rise in misogyny. The Nazis—like the minds behind Project 2025, and like J. D. Vance—believed that a woman’s place was in the home, making babies for the fatherland.
In his first term in office, Trump went about dismantling the rights and protections of women, children, and those in the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community in cruel and numerous ways. In just his last few weeks back in office, he has continued to tear down women’s rights, and he has not stopped saying degrading things to women’s faces. But where is the outrage on behalf of women?
Grammy night was actually not the first time West put naked misogyny on display. In 2016, mainstream publications lauded West’s video for his song “Famous,” in which lifelike wax figures of 12 famous people, including Trump, Swift, and Bill Cosby, could be seen lying in bed together, naked.
The media called the video “provocative” and “thought-provoking,” when arguably it was just an early deepfake, offensive in its depiction of two men who had been accused of sexual assault (Trump and Cosby) in bed with multiple women without their consent, not to mention a domestic-abuse survivor lying beside her abuser (Rihanna and Chris Brown). For those of us on the sidelines, watching misogyny’s rise, the celebration of this so-called work of art was not only chilling but seemed another harbinger of where we are now.
“The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” wrote billionaire-in-chief Elon Musk on X after his one-armed gesture at Trump’s inauguration was widely seen as a Nazi salute. On February 6, West complained on X that Musk had stolen his “Nazi swag” and called for Diddy (currently awaiting trial for alleged sex crimes) to be let out of jail.
Nancy Jo Sales is a journalist whose 2010 article for Vanity Fair “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” inspired the Sofia Coppola film The Bling Ring. She is the author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers and Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
