Where you stand on Kanye thinking Kim is too “sexy” is the ultimate feminist litmus test
As a much commented-on episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians shows, Kim’s wet-look, Thierry Mugler Met Gala look caused a rift in America’s most famous household. You can never be sure how much of KUWTK is fact or fiction but, seemingly, the night before the gala the 42-year-old rapper complained that he’d rather see his wife in something more demure than the custom-fit dress she spent eight months (!) preparing.
What ensued was a heated conversation that will be familiar to many (heterosexual) relationships, where a woman’s choice of clothes and decision to show her body how she chooses is questioned by a partner. In a textbook example of petty jealousy, Kanye took issue with his wife’s corset look. “Like the corset, underwear, all that vibe, I just feel like I just went through this transition of being a rapper, and looking at all these girls and then looking at my wife like; ‘Oh, my girl needs to be just like these other girls, showing her body off, showing this, showing that’,” he said. “I didn’t realise that that was affecting my soul and my spirit as someone that’s married and loved, the father of what’s about to be four kids. A corset is a form of underwear. It’s hot. It’s like, it’s hot for who though?”
Whilst he was promptly shut down by Kim (who looks uncannily like Kris when she’s pissed off, FYI) his comments have still sparked controversy — and an E! News segment. Amongst the think pieces, professional hot boy and possible Gigi Hadid ex-flame Tyler Cameron even waded into the fray to tweet: “Ye lost his confidence. Fellas, if you can’t stand the heat, get out the kitchen. Encourage your significant other to be all they can be. Not hold them back.” Tyler’s right, Kanye does need to get over himself — as the t-shirt slogan goes: “a man of quality is not threatened by a woman of equality.”
If you’re keen to defend Kanye and his desire to control his partner’s image, sorry but you’re cancelled! We should all be team Kim in this scenario because, let’s be real, no dude should be dictating what his partner can and cannot wear. Yet in the Kardashian context, the stakes are higher than most. Kim’s career was arguably launched by the release of a sex tape (which she and her mother may or may not have deliberately leaked) and a self-aware sex appeal has always been at the forefront of her public persona. Take her PAPER 2014 cover story, the sexual appeal of which promised to “break the Internet”. As the cover dropped, Kim tweeted: “And they say I didn’t have a talent…try balancing a champagne glass on your ass LOL”. As the tweet suggests, however jokingly, Kim does have talent: an unabashed, no-fucks-given approach to not just flaunting her sexuality but maximising its appeal.
In a different kind of think piece about that Met Gala dress, journalist Marie Le Conte pointed out that the highly restrictive outfit Kim was wearing harked back to “Victorian era” beauty standards, where doll-like upper-class women were immobilised by stiff skirts and crushed by corsets. To Le Conte, the Kardashian-Jenner clan’s claw-like acrylics and flawless beauty looks are both symbols and symptoms of their wealth. Without the need to maintain the kind of ‘functional’ bodies that must integrate into the workforce, they instead engage in a process of self-objectification that renders them immobile ornaments.
Yet any notion that the Kardashian-Jenners don’t “work” misses the point entirely. Their bodies — which clearly bear the rigours of work-out routines and the gloss of constant beautification — are a site of constant, self-directed labour. If anything, the family’s improbable fashion choices and gossip rags’ tireless dissection of whatever surgeries they’ve had helps to emphasise the fact that engaging with the ‘beauty myth’ is labour in and of itself. Yet, contrary to Naomi Wolf’s thoughts on the matter, the Kardashians are not being exploited by the contemporary beauty complex: they’re pushing the needle (and the knife) on how these standards are being defined. For Kanye to attempt to curb Kim’s sexual presentation, then, is not just an attempt to control her agency as a woman. It’s a struggle over her social, financial and cultural power: all of which are, by her own design, intimately linked to the body.
Epitomising our current age of feminism lite™, the Kardashian-Jenners have turned their beauty and sex appeal into the ultimate money-spinner — without ever critiquing the white supremacy and ableism inherent in our very notions of what “beauty” is. If we’re going to critique Kim Kardashian for anything, it’s not going to be for dressing too provocatively (sorry Kanye!). There’s a fine line between benefitting off the male gaze’s constant surveillance and actively maintaining, rather than attempting to deconstruct, the cult of beauty that pushes down on women. Whether it’s selling diet products or problematically named shapewear encouraging women to hate and change their bodies, Kim has crossed into the latter territory — to claim she does anything for“female empowerment” overlooks her exploitation of other women’s insecurity for profit.
