Balenciaga and Mass Psychosis
Balenciaga and Mass Psychosis
Why is everyone seeing "abuse" that never actually happened?
By Eric Shorey
[CW: child sexual abuse, rape, mental illness]
Freudian psychoanalysis has always been concerned about the specifics of child sexual abuse: it was Freud who notably claimed that many mental disturbances stem from early experiences of sexual overstimulation/sexual abuse in children. His claims were particularly shocking in the Victorian era from which he was writing — in that they went against an aristocratic, highly mannered view of the world in which children were pure and innocent, and sex was meant to be discussed only behind closed doors. In fact, Freud eventually walked back his ideas (known as Seduction Theory) and later in life asserted that psychological disturbances are generated from children’s (repressed?) fantasies about sex as much from actual, literal sexual abuse — a claim which in today’s political climate is imminently cancel-able.
The specter of child sexual abuse haunts our entire media landscape to the extent that the Republican party’s entire ethics seem shaped around this fear; the fantasy of child sexual abuse is the organizing structure around which QAnon is built. I’ve previously argued that the True Crime media landscape operates with the same logic at its core. And this weird fixation is not only an obsession of the right: QAnon was able to insert itself amidst yoga-loving, granola-eating young liberals in a movement that later became derisively known as Pastel QAnon. Far-right #SaveTheChildren rallies in early moments of the pandemic unwittingly ensnared well-meaning Democrats who thought they were simply protesting against child sex trafficking — little did they know they were showing up to demonstrations against cannibalistic Satanic cabals.
Having worked in a psychiatric hospital, I can absolutely affirm that the structure of these fears is a patently psychotic one, and that the ramblings of Fox News hosts, QAnon diehards, and unmedicated schizophrenics have almost no differences at all. There are no Satanic sex cults — most child sexual abuse happens in the home.
But the right is particularly adroit at summoning this specific boogeyman in their political efforts to vilify LGBTQ+ people — to phantasmatically transform all queer people into “groomers” so as to justify their cruel legislation and overt anti-gay violence. Thusly, it was not particularly surprising to see Tucker Carlson take aim at fashion house Balenciaga for their recent advertisements, essentially asserting that the brand was sexualizing children and promoted perversion.
A scandal begins! Psychopathic super sleuths found “secret messages” contained in other Balenciaga campaigns: one particular image showed a model sitting atop piles of paper. When zoomed in, said papers were revealed to contain text “from the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Williams, a case which confirms as illegal and not protected by freedom of speech the promotion of child pornography,’” according to a statement Balenciaga provided to CNN.
I feel stupid even going over what happened next. Kim Kardashian and Bella Hadid both announced they were reconsidering their involvement with the brand, with Kim saying, “The safety of children must be held with the highest regard and any attempts to normalize child abuse of any kind should have no place in our society — period." Balenciaga at first claimed the ads were unapproved before being distributed, then mounted a lawsuit against the photographer who took the images, then dropped the suit, and then apologized. The photographer meanwhile asserted the aforementioned Supreme Court papers were meant to be generic legal documents and had been rented from a prop house. Demna Gvasalia, the brand’s creative director, ultimately took responsibility for the aesthetics of the ads, saying, “It was inappropriate to have kids promote objects that had nothing to do with them … [I] would NEVER have an intention to do that with such an awful subject as child abuse.”
“I need to learn from this, listen and engage with child protection organizations to know how I can contribute and help on this terrible subject,” Demna added.
Who the fuck knows what Demna meant to “say” with these advertisements. Certainly the brand has made a habit of purposefully provocative gestures including the creation of a haute couture hoodie, selling a $1800 trash bag, and the presentation of a fashion show in which models trudged through what appeared to be gigantic piles of shit. Demna had always flirted with an almost Zoolander-esque anti-fashion aesthetic and had shown his previous collections with Vetements at a notorious gay sex club in Paris. None of this is new information.
Was Demna trying to be edgy in his advertisements by juxtaposing the vaguely queer accessories of his comically expensive teddy bear with the innocence of a child wearing $440 sneakers? Probably! Was the ad campaign distasteful? Well, distasteful to who? Clearly to Tucker Carlson, but what does he know about taste?
What I think is perhaps a frightening inflection point in the terror around child sexual abuse is the claim around which the entire media sphere — both the left and the right — seemed to coalesce: that these images depicted child abuse or that the production of these images themselves constituted a kind of abuse.
Let’s take a second here and really think about this. Is the above a depiction of child abuse? Is this child being abused? Is this child being sexualized?
I think the answer is pretty clearly: no! Aside from the fact that there are specific laws in the United States about using child models and child actors that were created for the explicit purposes of protecting children from the kinds of things parents deeply fear (all of which I’m sure were adhered to in this photo shoot, run by a company whose estimated worth is around $65.66 billion) — does this child appear to be in danger? Is this child hungry, scared? Is this child in pain? Does this photograph contain sexual imagery?
People seemed to really get hung up on the coincidental usage of the Supreme Court text in an otherwise unrelated campaign— but the answer remains, quite obviously: no.
Acknowledging this fact somehow became impossible amidst discussions of Balenciaga in fashion magazines and feminist blogs alike. Some said Demna had gone “too far” in attempting to be transgressive. In conversations around the controversy, every website I read took it at face value that this image was either about sex abuse, trivialized or glamorized sex abuse, or was itself sexually abusive. To question the facticity of this was to question to reality. On one blog, I even saw Demna compared to Terry Richardson, a photographer who allegedly raped at least one model. Can you hear how fucking insane that is?
Every response to this scandal, including Demna’s, acknowledged that “child sexual abuse” is “serious” and that this was a mistake — but no one could actually say who was harmed by these images.
Here are a few takeaways from this mess:
The right wing campaign to effectively associate any depictions of gayness or queerness — or any art by a gay or queer person — with child sexual abuse in the minds of your average person is absolutely working, even amongst liberals. Carlson knows that Demna is gay and that Balenciaga is proudly queer as a brand — and that he could successfully drum up a panic around this gayness by suggesting that Demna had something to do with child abuse. And the entire mediascape ran with his psychotic narrative unquestioningly.
Depictions of children — in any context — are slowly becoming as verboten in the minds of Republicans (but also increasingly in the minds Democrats, liberals, and leftists too) as depictions of sacred prophets in certain fundamentalist religions. Perhaps this is a reaction springing forth from heterosexuals who (consciously or unconsciously) see the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights as an inherent threat to their lifestyles and futures, which then, in turn, must be protected at all costs.
The reaction to this ad campaign effectively constitutes a kind of mass psychosis, in which suddenly people were asserting definitively that they were “seeing” abuse when there was, in fact, none. The Balenciaga scandal is structurally analogous to the panic of Pizzagate or to the Satanic Ritual Abuse phenomenon of the late 80’s and early 90’s — but, actually, even scarier! In refusing to accept the “truth” of the “abusive” aspect of the campaigns one could be politically aligned with “groomers” and thus targeted for violence. I almost didn’t write this article for this exact reason.
The eruption of this particular kind of mass psychosis can partially be blamed on social media, where bizarre and patently psychotic “theories” about child sexual abuse and misinformation about child sexual abuse proliferate with alarming speed. Twitter, specifically, and even more so post-Musk Twitter, is almost designed for the purposes of propagating this kind of “theorizing,” because it keeps people on the site, rapt with a kind of demented moral panic.
As described by academic writer Freddie DeBoer, The Maw — that is, “the expression of the culture war as operationalized by the consensus opinions of media” — is becoming increasingly powerful in its assertions and that the assertions themselves are becoming more delusional by the moment.
A fully-clothed child holding a teddy bear wearing a tiny harness isn’t abuse, it’s not a depiction of abuse, it’s not trivializing abuse, it’s not glamorizing abuse, it doesn’t have anything to do with abuse. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills! For all that right-wing fanatics talk about the “woke mind virus,” what’s really at play here is a kind of child sex abuse mind virus, a QAnon mind virus: in which suddenly, anything can be misconstrued or hallucinated as evidence of the omnipresence of child sexualization and child abuse. If we don’t begin to question this strain of thought, the right will quickly win in convincing the public that LGBTQ+ people are the villains in this story — and violence is sure to follow.