A $50 million (around £37.3 million) bra covered in 4,410 natural diamonds may not sound like a run-of-the-mill undergarment someone would have in their closet. However, for a Victoria's Secret fashion show, it definitely made people fantasise about having it in the top drawer.
On a much less fabulous note, for one rape survivor, Victoria's Secret's record-breaking Fantasy Bra somehow sparked a small yet impactful connection to rape culture. Threads creator @okuntakinte used the diamond-covered design as the unexpected starting point for an elaborate video about victim-blaming and what happens when women's pain becomes rage. Rather than focusing on Kylie Jenner, who wore the bra at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show on Sunday, 18 October, he followed the diamonds somewhere entirely different.
The Diamonds Reminded Him of Karaba
The content creator connected the bra's thousands of diamonds to Karaba, the sorceress from Michel Ocelot's animated film Kirikou and the Sorceress. His video examines Karaba as a woman whose anger cannot be separated from the violence inflicted upon her after being gang-raped. Afterwards, he drew parallels with another woman repeatedly rewritten as merely a monster: Medusa.
He specifically invokes the version of Medusa's story in which she is sexually assaulted by Poseidon before Athena transforms her into a gorgon. This punishment shifted the consequences of male violence onto the woman who experienced it.
The Threads video argues that across centuries, women's suffering has repeatedly been transformed into monstrosity while the violence behind it becomes secondary. That pattern takes his video from mythology into real life.
What Happens When Women's Pain Becomes Rage?
One strong example in his video is Marianne Bachmeier, the German mother who fatally shot Klaus Grabowski in a courtroom on 6 March 1981. Grabowski was on trial over the rape and murder of Bachmeier's seven-year-old daughter, Anna, when she opened fire. The creator uses Bachmeier alongside other stories of women responding to violence to ask a deliberately uncomfortable question: what happens when victims decide to turn pain into anger?
'Anger is healthy, I think,' Maya Angelou says in archival footage included in the video. 'It burns out all the dross and all the stuff.' That anger becomes the thread connecting mythology, sexual violence, femicide, and women whose responses to trauma are often judged separately from what happened to them in the first place.
The video eventually turns towards South Africa, where @okuntakinte points to the country's devastating levels of gender-based violence and femicide as another reason that anger cannot simply be dismissed as irrational or excessive.
A Rape Survivor Turns the Question Back on Society
The video's most profound moment comes when it stops asking why women are angry and starts questioning the conditions that produced that anger. After all, no matter the precautions, the only thing that causes rape is rapists.
A society can repeatedly give women reasons to fear for their lives only to condemn how they respond to that fear. Silence can be questioned, and anger can be demonised. Victims can find themselves scrutinised while the violence committed against them slips out of focus.
The content creator ultimately reveals that the subject is personal. He identifies himself as a rape survivor and a Greco-Roman wrestler living with post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. He adds that the video forms part of his series, Dismantling Rape Culture. That makes the journey from a diamond bra to rape culture sound less strange than it initially appears.
Victoria's Secret presented 4,410 diamonds as stunning fantasy. A survivor looked at those same sparkling diamonds and saw something dim: a society still quicker to question victims instead of the people who victimised them.
