Worth reading the whole thing, but this

The esteemed, celeb-loved Spanish fashion house Balenciaga has been slammed for putting out images of young kids holding teddy bears wearing kinky bondage gear. The odd pics feature in its Christmas advertising campaign. They show sad-eyed toddlers holding teddies that are dolled up in fishnet tops, lock-and-key collars and wrist restraints. Normally, you’d have to go to some dingy club on a dark street in Soho to see get-up like that. Now, Balenciaga is putting it on fluffy bears and giving those bears to actual children.

In one of the images the kid is holding her X-rated teddy while standing on a bed. In another, a child is lying face down on a couch, looking miserable, surrounded by wine glasses and with two of the weird bears propped up behind her. One of the bears appears to be in a kind of leather harness, the sort you’d see at a BDSM party.

It gets worse. Another photo features a handbag on a pile of documents. Seems innocent. It’s a nice bag. Only internet sleuths have zoomed in and discovered that one of the documents is a printout of something to do with Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition, the 2002 US Supreme Court ruling that struck down a section of the Child Pornography Prevention Act and ruled that fake child porn is protected speech. Wow.

This needs an explanation, surely? It cannot be a coincidence that an ad campaign with very young children holding sex teddies also makes a sly reference to a court ruling that said not all sexualised depictions of kids should be illegal. Someone involved in this, whether someone at Balenciaga or someone in the set-designer or photography teams it hired for this campaign, knew what they were doing here.

There’s more and it contains an interesting thesis, well worth a read.