Much to my chagrin, I found Anna Peele’s Vanity Fair profile of Bianca Censori rather fascinating. Under the headline “Bianca Censori, Uncensored: For the First Time, Kanye West’s Wife Is Speaking for Herself,” Peele paints a profile of a tortured, intellectual artiste who’s going to great lengths for her craft and is simply misunderstood.

(Here’s an Apple News+ link.)

The only reason I—and probably you—have even heard of Censori is because of her shockingly revealing outfits and the rampant speculation she was coerced into wearing them by her notoriously controlling husband, Kanye “Ye” West:

The public perception seemed to be that Censori was a mute captive being trafficked in daylight and dressed by her husband like a sex doll […]. “I wouldn’t be doing something I didn’t want to do,” Censori says. Every time she has appeared nude, she says, it has been her choice.

This interview casts Censori as a once-“precocious little girl” who “would read books of factoids so she’d have something to say about any topic that arose,” and today lives for her artwork and speaks animatedly about affordable housing.

The revelation, though, that captures everything I needed to understand about Censori and her relationship with Ye, is this:

Censori says she has always been guided by overwhelming emotion. Her parents had to remove the phone in their living room because she would incessantly call her father at work, demanding to know when he was coming home. If the clock went one minute past the ETA, Censori would ring him back. “You’re a liar!” she’d yell. “You’re not here! Why would you do that to me?”

“I wasn’t able to regulate for my whole life,” Censori says. “I also pair-bond so intensely and so deeply that that person becomes part of me. That’s my person. You know that movie Together, where they’re getting into each other’s skin? I loved that one. That’s kind of who I am.” In the 2025 film, actors and real-life spouses Alison Brie and Dave Franco slowly fuse into a single being. This depth of feeling tracks with how Censori describes nearly every relationship: As a girl, she would sit by the fence and wail when she couldn’t be with her young neighbor; of her husband, she continually repeats, “I love him…. I love him so much”; when we part, she tells me she feels like she made a friend. “It’s only ever brought joy to my life,” she says of codependency. “I just love that person so deeply, so intensely, that I want to be around them.”

Some people lack emotional control and have an irrational need to make any perceived slight—no matter how small or imagined—all about them. Such people will make wild claims—or take extreme actions—to train and maintain attention on themselves. These folks often feel deeply lonely and “unworthy” of love. I’m sure we’ve all witnessed it—I sure have.

Censori may well be the “artistic, sensitive” person who “is currently into a cryptography puzzle app,” and is using her body to make “a statement about control and sexuality”—that person peeks through in this interview—but it’s also hard to ignore the massive amount of attention she and West both seem to crave.

With Censori’s only joy coming from codependency, and with her lack of emotional control, I doubt she needed to be coerced into anything. I suspect that to feel “loved,” she’d willingly perform any extreme act to avoid feeling alone and abandoned.