This week's pathetic apologies
You took a purposeful action. Either stand by it, or tell me SPECIFICALLY what piece of NEW information made you have a change of heart.
Winner
Recently, fashion house Balenciaga has come under fire for an ad campaign featuring photographs of children holding backpacks made with teddy bears. The point of controversy is that the bears are sporting what might be called BDSM gear. In addition, a photograph from a seemingly separate ad campaign included a court document from a Supreme Court case about child pornography, but you could really only see that if you zoomed way in on a paper under a bag.
If this fiasco is really bringing to light some bigger child sex trafficking conspiracy, then that will be its own huge story. Aside from that, these photos are weird edgy art much like all the other weird edgy art in the world. The fact that it’s kind of weird, and maybe even unpleasant, seems to me to be part of the point. This fiasco kind of reminds me of the recent idea that’s poisoning some young adult fiction and adjacent spaces, that if any character, including a villain, says a statement, it means the author is promoting that statement.
I understand that many ads are of the form “if you buy our product, you will experience what is being shown in this photo/video,” but obviously, not every ad campaign follows that formula. With the seemingly uniform criticism of Balenciaga, maybe people don’t understand– or are pretending to not understand– that this ad is supposed to feel like something you would see at an art show, rather than a depiction of what Balenciaga and their customers most deeply and literally desire and endorse. Balenciaga could have pointed to the entire rest of the world of fashion to defend a claim that these photographs are supposed to be “art.” Or, if they were shown evidence that ads like these cause child abuse, or that the child models were traumatized by the experience, then a change of heart would make sense, and Balenciaga could express that.
But instead, they put out an HR-style doublespeak apology, saying in part,
“We would like to address the controversies surrounding our recent ad campaigns. We strongly condemn child abuse; it was never our intent to include it in our narrative […] The first campaign, the gift collection campaign, featured children with plush bear bags dressed in what some have labelled BDSM-inspired outfits. Our plush bear bags and the gift collection should not have been featured with children. This was a wrong choice by Balenciaga, combined with our failure in assessing and validating images”,
and in which they also asserted that those court documents were included by total accidental coincidence. Later, the creative director, Demna, apologized, saying in part,
“As much as I would sometimes like to provoke a thought through my work, I would NEVER have an intention to do that with such an awful subject as child abuse that I condemn. Period. 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.”
No actually, you don’t need to do any of that, and I’d prefer that you get back to focusing on your craft; and if you feel the impulse to contribute to a cause, contribute to one you’re drawn to from your own mind and heart, rather than one you’ve been bullied into Listening and Learning™ from. But now we are all super clear, the people over at Balenciaga are AGAINST child abuse – brave stance. I wonder which fashion houses are going to take to Instagram to announce their support FOR child abuse.
When I first saw the ad campaign, after thinking “that’s off-putting,” I wondered if whoever designed/directed those photos was actually reflecting, via this work of artistic fiction, on some unpleasant personal experience of being sexualized as a child. Or maybe they were saying something more abstract about the innocence of childhood, or making another type of symbolic statement. Or maybe they were simply juxtaposing concepts to make a weird image. These images are not ones that I would hang up in my house, but I might enjoy seeing them in an art exhibition. They didn’t really make me think one way or another about Balenciaga’s brand. But after this failure to defend their art and artists, with a somehow both half-assed and overly earnest apology, the name Balenciaga is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
Some people hold the cultural value that we need to keep anything to do with children as far away as possible from anything that, even by association, has anything to do with sex. That for children there should be no watching PG-13 movies, no listening to suggestive song lyrics, no imitating the dancing of heartthrob pop stars; that you should prevent your child from seeing any lingerie or condoms in the aisle of a drug store. Separately, some people believe parents should protect their children’s privacy by not showing their children’s faces on social media; if they’re being consistent, it seems reasonable to suggest that they would also believe that there should be no child actors or models. The Balenciaga people responsible for this ad campaign clearly don’t hold either of these stances, or they wouldn’t have produced these images in the first place. And I don’t buy that they transformed their value system in the few days leading up to the apologies. I do believe creative director Demna’s statement that “I would [...] like to provoke a thought through my work” – and I think this is a value worth upholding.
Runner-Up
An Israeli Kharedi1 news site, Behadrei Haredim, apologized for blurring the faces of the women in a photo of both male and female politicians & leaders. According to Times of Israel, “This was in line with the website’s general policy of refraining from publishing photographs of all women, on the grounds that doing so goes against Jewish laws of modesty […]”.
According to Haaretz, after a gender discrimination lawsuit was filed against Behadrei Haredim, they entered out-of-court arbitration and what resulted was financial compensation for the women and an apology on the site. Haaretz translates a portion of the apology as
“[the website] asks to express our regret at the hurt caused because of the publication of the photo to the women who appeared in it”;
Times of Israel translates a portion (the same one?) as
“The website apologizes for blurring the faces of the women in a photograph […], and wishes to express its regret for the damage caused to the women by publishing it”.
That’s so crazy that this financially-threatening arbitration totally changed the organization’s faith-based moral compass!
I suspect that some people think the following: apologies like these are public statements of good values and so even if they’re insincere, they’re virtuous. I disagree. I think having strong, considered principles of one’s own, and acting accordingly, with integrity, even in the face of objections, is the societal value we are deeply lacking right now.
This is my boutique spelling of “Haredi” since the initial consonant of the word is the same as the onset of Chanukah and challah, and I dislike ch in all of these cases because ch at the beginning of a word written in English makes one think “ch” as in “chair”.