‘What game is she really playing?’: Bianca Censori’s new low exposed

Yes, no. 

In, out. 

Divorcing, still married. 

Staying on top of the breaking news developments involving the union of Australia’s own Bianca Censori and Ye aka Kanye West nearly requires a pin board, some red string and an anti-whiplash neck brace.

This is not a hobby for the faint of heart or easily confused.

Mr and Mrs West are, at the time of writing, still together – a fact we know thanks to their spokesman Milo Yiannopoulos, the former far right agitator who has phoenix-ed himself into the couple’s trusty mouthpiece. 

(Mr Yiannopoulos, for anyone playing along at home, was cancelled in 2017 over posts appearing to normalise pedophilia. What’s that saying about the company you keep again?)

“Ye and Bianca are in Los Angeles, about to enjoy Valentine’s Day together,” Mr Yiannopoulos told The Hollywood Reporter last week, a sentence I read as positively slicked with a certain unctuous coating of smugness and smarm.

How lovely for them. How bloody confusing and tricky for us.

Because while Censori is off “enjoying” a romantic dinner with her boo, we are left with the massive problem that is what the hell to make of her.

Oh, that Bianca. That woman is only becoming an ever-bigger headache.

And not because of what she wears – or more accurately, does not wear – but because she appears to be staying married to a man who last week posted, “I’m a Nazi … I love Hitler”. A man who then started selling a swastika T-shirt on his website with the product line “HH01”- believed to be code for “Heil Hitler”.

How do we even begin to make sense of a woman who is willing to “enjoy” Valentine’s Day with a “Nazi”?

Earlier this month, it looked like we had an answer. We finally had a good/bad, yes/no basket to put Censori conveniently and easily into.

At the recent Grammys, she stripped off her coat to reveal she was wearing a transparent dress. The video appeared to show West pressuring her and in that moment, she became something that we could understand – she was a victim. 

This we could metabolise – a bad man who exhibited a terrifying degree of control over his wife.

However, the longer Censori stays in this union, the shakier that supposition becomes and the more complicit she seems when it comes to his vile politics.

The disquieting fact is that Censori went into her marriage to West fully aware of his abhorrent views.

In October 2022, West posted on social media that he was “going death con 3 on Jewish people … You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda”. (It was only then that Adidas had enough of making billions of dollars off Ye, and dropped him. Such standards).

Then, in December 2022, he told podcast host Alex Jones, “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler”. He also dined at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump and white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. More duck a la blanc, Mr West?

That very same month, Censori wed god’s gift to the gold teeth grill industry.

The question that no one can answer about her is, who is using who here? Both she and West seem to feed vampirically off attention.

Is he playing with her, or is she playing with us? Or both?

Public discourse usually tries to cast people into easy categories – we need to understand the world through the prism of villains and victims. It is nearly impossible to do this with Censori. The longer she dominates headlines, the more this all offends and defies our neat ordering of the world.

There is also another reason Censori is so baffling and upsetting a figure. It’s one thing to be conservative or liberal, a Dutton-ite or an Albo-nista, but Australian political life will hopefully never tilt as horrifyingly far right as it has in the United States or vast swathes of Europe. (France’s far-right Marine Le Pen came within a whisker of the Elysee Palace last year and the upcoming German elections have seen a resurgence in the far-right).

Censori upsets that very neat apple cart. How the dickens do we even begin to explain a young, privately and university-educated woman from a very middle-class Melbourne family who is now tacitly backing West’s vile politics?

Making all this stranger still – yes, still – is that we have never heard from Censori herself.

As far as I’m aware, she has never done an interview and has never explained herself. At a time when there is now nearly a moral requirement to make ourselves ever explicable via social media, she clearly refuses to do that. She is happy to be a void, a cipher, a mystery wrapped in Glad Wrap masquerading as her Sunday best.

I suppose it really comes down to this – what game is Censori really playing? Is West a tyrant, or is she goosestepping all the way to fame and his fortune? How much agency does she really have – or how much blame does she deserve for co-signing, by way of staying married to him, West’s politics?

The real dilemma that Censori poses is, is she being puppeted by West, or is she a genuine co-Geppetto in her own story?

Maybe this right here – us talking about her and trying to puzzle her out and decode her, making all of this sound and fury – maybe we are giving both Censori and West what they really, really want.

Gloria Steinem said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will p*ss you off”. If only, in the case of Censori, we could quite work out if it’s her we should be ticked off, or repulsed, by.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles