By Jenna Guillaume
Have you seen the “Khloe Kardashian photo”? You know, the one? If you have been on social media in the past week, there’s an extremely high chance you have.
You might think, with the way in which the photo has sent the Kardashian PR machine into overdrive trying to remove it from the internet, that it involves Khloe doing something heinous/scandalous/actually criminal.
But all she’s doing is existing, in a bikini, poolside, unedited and unfiltered. Which in the world of the Kardashians actually is quite scandalous, it seems.
Rumour has it the photo (which we cannot republish for legal reasons) was taken by MJ, Khloe’s grandmother, and uploaded to social media by “accident” by an assistant. It was quickly deleted, but fans had already taken screenshots and shared them across various platforms.
The story might have ended there, except the people who posted the image started claiming they had received copyright takedown notices from the Kardashian Kamp. It seems Khloe and her team have never heard of the Streisand Effect – a phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or censor something has the exact opposite effect and blows it up further instead.
The name derives from Barbra Streisand’s attempt to remove an aerial shot of her home from a photographer’s collection, which took downloads of the photo from six total (two of which were Streisand’s own attorneys) to more than 420,000 in a month.
Because this is the internet, and especially because the Kardashians are involved, a very similar thing happened to the Khloe photo – people started actively spreading the image in defiance of the attempt to cover it up. More people saw it and spread it, even more started talking about it and a Discourse with a capital D emerged. Hundreds of thousands more people were exposed to the photo than would have been in the first place, even as every post containing it disappeared thanks to those cease and desist letters.
When it became impossible to ignore just how impossible to ignore the photo was, Khloe posted what she says are actual “unretouched and unfiltered” videos of her body that show her much further from the camera, with less harsh lighting. It’s the “real” image of Khloe in a way that she can control – which of course is the problem with the actual unretouched and unfiltered image. It was completely out of her control on every level, despite her lawyers doggedly playing whack-a-mole with it.
Nobody should have their privacy violated. But it’s telling that it’s this image that has caused such a kerfuffle, and not the thousands of others the Kardashians either post themselves or have taken by paparazzi.
In the image, Khloe is standing comfortably, barely posing, a soft smile on her face. She looks happy. She looks, as many fans commented, like her old self – not the barely recognisable person that crops up in her often extremely edited and filtered social media posts. There’s even an aura of love in the photo — a grandmother taking a photo of her granddaughter, who is looking at her with affection. There is nothing wrong with it — actually, it’s rather lovely.
In Khloe’s Instagram post, she talks about her own body image issues as a reason for why she doesn’t want the photo that “isn’t flattering in bad lighting” out there. Anyone who has ever been involuntarily tagged in a photo on Facebook after a night out can probably relate. But Khloe follows up with a message to people who “feel the constant pressure of not ever feeling perfect enough” – she understands.
Does she, though?
One thing she doesn’t seem to understand is just how much her own, and her family’s, ultra-edited, completely unreal images actively contribute to that “constant pressure”.
Or that using filters and “an edit here and there” unapologetically (as she says she’ll continue to do), suggesting it’s the same as using make-up, actually masks just how false those images can be.
Or that by labelling the absolutely fine photo “unflattering” and treating it like some kind of criminal evidence, she further reinforces the narrow beauty standards she says she’s a victim of.
Forget the Streisand Effect — this is the Kardashian Effect: a distorted perception of reality and beauty. Here’s hoping we can escape it better than Khloe and her team’s adventures in Streisandland.
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2021-04-09 05:41:30Z
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