The fact that Balenciaga thought that it was a good idea to publish a ad campaign with young children -- very young children -- says some things that we already knew, and some brought up a few new things that we have to attack head on.
One thing that we knew is that the high fashion industry is full of sexual deviants. Everybody knew that Terry Richardson was sexually abusing models for years, even after #metoo started, and still kept throwing tens of millions of dollars at him. We also know that people who can afford to spend as much as a used car on a pair of pants that were mangled into an ugly, ill-fitting shirt, and will spend that money on that shirt, are usually brats who think that they're entitled to anything and everything.
So, no surprises there.
The thing is, I didn't even realize how gross, and how plentiful, these people are, and must be, until now.
With all of the horror stories of abusive behavior in the entertainment and fashion industries that we've become used to, there's usually some plausible deniability. How many people knew that Terry Richardson was pressuring models to perform fellatio on him? When did they know? How many people knew about Harvey Weinstein? How much did they know?
In this case, this went through dozens of people. Dozens of people in multiple departments of a $15 billion company thought that it was a good idea to put out a campaign of toddlers with a bunch of sex and bondage toys.
Why did they think that it was a good idea? Well, it's gotta be, at least in-part, because they think that a lot of their customers would be enticed. Of course, these are all adults.
Also, on top of all of this, the company put out ads which included texts of court cases regarding child pornography. You put those things together, you got a look that's worse than that monstrosity that Balenciaga put Kim Kardashian in for the Met Gala.
Still, the reactions are even more telling.
Of course, publications on the Right have attacked the ads -- everyone should. Still, most of them have been attacking the ads for all the right reasons. Namely, it's wrong to sexualize young children; and, if you're an adult who thinks this is cool, you're gross.
It wasn't until Leftist commentators came in that the LGBTQ+ community was the focus. I thought that it was the Right that was supposed to associate that community with pedophilia. This time, it's the Left that are jumping in to make that connection.
We should have put a line in the sand a long time ago about boundaries between sex and children. Now, people with defensible moral values need to push back as hard as we can.