NOTE: The image below contains partial nudity
Hip-hop artist and self-proclaimed “Jesus” Kanye West released his latest music video, Famous, on Friday to a full house at California’s The Forum.
Both fans and celebrity pals were in attendance for the video’s reveal, which featured a gigantic bed filled from end-to-end with some of Hollywood’s most controversial celebrities, totally naked.
In the picture above, Taylor Swift, Ray J, Amber Rose and Caitlyn Jenner can be seen on either side of West and his wife, Kim Kardashian. (West has since revealed that they’re wax figures, modelled using some CGI.) Other celebrities featured in the bed shot include Donald Trump, Anna Wintour, Chris Brown, Rihanna and Bill Cosby. The full video is only viewable if you’re a member of streaming music service Tidal.
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The camera slowly pans over each of the celebrities, assumed to be post-coitus, and focuses on specific body parts. While some of the celebrities featured in the video seem to be taking it in stride, Girls creator Lena Dunham (who isn’t featured) calls the video “sickening” and emblematic of rape culture in a Facebook post.
After a preamble about how much she “admires” the Kardashian family, Dunham lays into West’s Famous, saying she has two competing schools of thought in her mind. One thing’s for sure: Dunham thinks Famous is “one of the more disturbing ‘artistic’ efforts in recent memory.”
She compares the showcase of nudity to the recent Brock Turner rape case.
“Let’s break it down: at the same time Brock Turner is getting off with a light tap for raping an unconscious woman and photographing her breasts for a group chat,” she wrote. “As assaults are Periscoped across the web and girls commit suicide after being exposed in ways they never imagined… while Bill Cosby’s crimes are still being uncovered and understood as traumas for the women he assaulted but also massive bruises to our national consciousness… now I have to see the prone, unconscious, waxy bodies of famous women, twisted like they’ve been drugged and chucked aside at a rager? It gives me such a sickening sense of dis-ease.”
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Dunham also feels disgust at the objectification of the women in the video.
She closes her long post by asking West to consider a different approach to women’s bodies.
“Here’s the thing, Kanye: you’re cool,” she concludes. “Make a statement on fame and privacy and the Illuminati or whatever is on your mind! But I can’t watch it, don’t want to watch it, if it feels informed and inspired by the aspects of our culture that make women feel unsafe even in their own beds, in their own bodies.”
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