My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

 

To be paid $25,000 to show up to an event was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. In 2014 my manager at the time, Evan, informed me that the billionaire financier behind The Wolf of Wall Street was offering to pay me that much to go to the Super Bowl with him. He explained that this person, Jho Low, “just liked to have famous men and women around” and there would be other celebrities going too. “He’s just one of those insanely rich guys from Asia.” Jho Low’s fortune came from family money, Evan said.

 
“I’m sure Leo will be there, and a bunch of other people you’ll know, or, er, recognize. You know their movie is up for five Academy Awards next month?”
 
“I don’t have to, like, do anything specific, right?” I asked. Was being at the Super Bowl my only task or was there some other more covert expectation? Evan told me he’d insisted that he accompany me, “Just to make sure you feel comfortable.” I knew Evan was coming along as a chaperone; but what he was protecting me from exactly, I wasn’t sure. The money, of which he got a 10% commission, would be wired ahead of time.
 
I’d never cared about football, but my father did. When I told him I was going, he yelped, “Ah, Emily! I’m so jealous!”
 
We’d been instructed to meet at the Plaza, where we were directed immediately on to a bus. Evan had been right about the other guests: there were two famous models, one known for her recent appearance on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition and the other for her stint as a Victoria’s Secret Angel. There were a few male actors, accompanied by their posses. The rest of the group seemed to work for Jho Low. He boarded last. I was surprised by how young he looked in person, younger than 31. As his short, pudgy frame moved down the aisle, Evan jumped up to introduce me. Was it part of the job to act excited? I mustered some enthusiasm.
 
“Thanks so much for having me,” I offered, smiling up at him.
 
“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.” He nodded and grinned distractedly before taking a seat in the back.
 
Several police cars and motorcycles appeared, surrounding the bus. Evan explained that we were being escorted to the stadium to avoid traffic. “The city shuts down an avenue so that people who can afford it get this treatment.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Nuts, right?”
 
As an adolescent, wealth was an abstract concept to me. I was not yet able to grasp the difference between rich fathers from my hometown and billionaires like Jho Low. To me, rich was just rich.
 
I started making my own money at 14. I thought it important to never be indebted to anyone. In high school, I once paid for a date with a boy I wasn’t interested in, just to ensure that I wouldn’t have to go out with him again or, my worst fear, owe him something sexually. Paying made me feel that I was in control.
 

When I moved to LA and started working full-time, there was a girl who had a look similar to mine. Even though we were both 19, I felt older than Isabella. She was soft-spoken and timid. We’d see each other at castings, where we bonded over the loneliness of living in a new city. She told me she’d recently started going out to clubs with her housemate, Chloe, a blond model who was almost six feet tall. “You should come with us sometime,” she offered.
 
I’d only spent a handful of nights in clubs, but I knew that I didn’t particularly enjoy them. I didn’t like the music they played, or how drinks spilled on my bare legs, or how someone always seemed to be groping me. Still, it seemed stupid to turn down an opportunity to meet new people. We made plans for the following week.
 
We met at a Japanese restaurant that felt more like it belonged in Las Vegas than in Los Angeles. I told Chloe and Isabella that I was nervous because I’d lost my fake ID. Chloe laughed and reassured me: “You don’t have to worry about anything like that.”
 
A short man in his mid-30s, wearing a black button-down shirt, greeted us at the entrance to a private dining room, kissing Chloe and Isabella. I was surprised – I’d assumed we’d be going out with people closer to our age. He smiled widely and introduced himself to me as “Sacha, Chloe’s friend”, telling me to drink and eat whatever I wanted. Unfamiliar with extensive cocktail lists, I blanked when the waiter came for my order, and asked for a tequila sunrise, a drink I remembered my mother liking. The sweetness of the grenadine made me feel nauseous and my teeth ache. As dish after steaming dish theatrically appeared on a long table, underage models trickled in, smiling nervously as Sacha stood up to greet them.
 
“What do you need, ladies?” he asked every time, signalling to a waiter. He was animated and anxious, unable to sit still.
 
“What up, Sach!” a woman dressed in chunky heels and a leather jacket hollered as she strutted over to the private dining room. Sacha popped up. “Kim! Gorgeous as always.”
 
Kim was our age, but it was clear that she was different – confident and at ease, a veteran. She wrapped her arms loosely around Sacha, placing her chin in the crook of his neck, and surveyed the table of quiet young women, assessing us, her gaze jumping from one to the next.
 
“The guys are almost here,” she whispered, pulling away from him and taking a seat. Not long after, Sacha announced it was time to leave. The long table was still covered with full plates of food. When I stayed seated, waiting for a check to appear, Isabella whispered to me, “No, no, no. We just go.” Realizing that someone else was paying, I felt a twinge of uneasiness.
 
Outside Sacha directed us to several black SUVs and told us to “hop in”. As I climbed in, using one hand to hold down my short dress to keep it from riding up over my ass, I saw several men around the age of 40 already in the car. “Hello,” said a big, bald man who appeared too large for his seat. His massive hand sat heavily on the thigh of a petite, pale woman who seemed just a few years older than me. “This is my fiancee,” he said. She waved listlessly. From the back seat, an unshaven, chubby man with a greasy nose called out, “Hi girls, let’s party!”
 
At the club, the men kept offering us cocaine, which they snorted with their backs to the dancefloor. They ordered bottles of alcohol that arrived with sparkling flames, grabbed our bodies and fed us shots, sang along to the music and pumped their fists in the air. Mostly, though, Isabella and I stood around in a booth, not speaking much. Chloe was slouched in a corner. At some point the three of us must have managed to leave, because I woke up the next morning in Isabella’s room with a pounding headache to a text: “So much fun last night! It’s Sacha btw, save my number.”
 
After that, I made a habit of ignoring Sacha’s weekly texts, which were always versions of the same message: “Hiiii babe. Thursday. Big meal at Nobu tonight before we go out! Gonna be sick, roll through.” When I told another model about him, she said that Sacha was a party promoter.
 
“He got your number? He’s never going to stop texting you, girl. The rich dudes pay him to wrangle models. They always start the nights off with a big dinner, so that girls who aren’t making much cash come for a free meal.”
 

The whole situation gave me the creeps, but when Sacha texted me along with Chloe and Isabella about a free trip to Coachella, including tickets to the festival, a place to stay and a ride out to the desert in a limo bus, I was too excited to turn it down. The three of us pored over the lineup and circled the acts we wanted to see.
 

Coachella was expensive. Just the year before I’d driven there with my best friend and spent two nights sleeping in my Nissan with the seats laid flat, parked in a hotel lot. It had been fun, but now I could be in the VIP section and the front row at the concerts. The prospect made me feel grown up.
 
“I mean, if we’re there together it’ll be fine,” Isabella texted me. We figured we could ignore the men while taking advantage of their setup.
 
We hit gridlock traffic leaving Los Angeles. There were about 15 of us plus Sacha on the party bus, which was tricked out with purple neon lights and a bar filled with ice and bottles of alcohol. Sacha kept the music loud, walking the length of the aisle refilling drinks and smiling broadly. A tall model with thick black hair and a nasally voice came and sat next to me.
 
“So you know the big bald one is, like, a prince, right?” She melted into the seat, her long legs extending across the aisle. She was dressed straight out of the 70s: long skirt, crop top and stacked bracelets. “His mom is super-famous obviously. But yeah, I’ve heard him and his fiancee like to have threesomes.” Grinning, she retied a colourful silk scarf around her forehead. “So they’re, like, always looking for girls for those.”
 
When we finally arrived at the massive Spanish-style house in the desert where we’d be staying, we’d been in traffic for nearly six hours and were all exhausted and ready for bed. Sacha became frantic. “Girls! Look how dope this house is!” he squealed when we entered the foyer, grabbing at us and ordering us toward the pool in the backyard. “Go for a night swim!” Outside, we found the prince and his pale fiancee in the Jacuzzi, along with some broad-shouldered man I’d never met before. We stood uncomfortably around the edge. A few girls changed into their swimsuits and got in the water. When I stripped down to the bikini I’d been wearing under my denim shorts, I felt the prince’s eyes land on my body.
 
“OK,” he said, nudging his friend. “I’m always interested in something like this.” He pointed at me. “A girl like you, what do you want to change about your body? Like, what’s the thing you’re hung up on?” They both stared at me. I froze.
 
“I don’t know,” I responded, mentally running through the things I’d like to change about myself: a smaller nose, longer legs. He sipped his drink as his attention shifted elsewhere, bored when I didn’t play along. Despite being a little scared of him, I felt a strange sense of loss. Powerful men have always had that effect on me; they make me want to be noticed but also to disappear. I watched the prince as he laughed. The lights from the Jacuzzi lit his face from below, casting grotesque shadows.
 
I went back inside. The unshaven guy with the greasy nose I’d met in LA was blasting music in the kitchen and pouring drinks, wearing sunglasses and a pink hat with oversized bunny ears. I let out a small laugh at the sight of him. He looked up and shrugged. “Care to join?” He seemed goofy and self-deprecating in a way that endeared him to me, or at least made me less afraid. I threw on a hoodie and sat on a stool, bringing my knees up to my chin. “Have some chocolate,” he offered. “It’s mushrooms and maybe some MDMA, mostly just a body high.” He broke off a piece and popped it into his mouth. “It’s mellow. Trust me, you’ll feel great.”
 
I bit off a small chunk and opened a bag of chips while he did a line of coke off the counter. He told me his wife and kids thought he was on a weekend yoga retreat in the desert.
 
“They have no idea. They think I’m recharging,” he muttered, and bent over to snort another line. “Did you know I recently slept with a girl who woke up before me in the morning and blow-dried her hair and did her makeup, and then crawled back next to me to pretend she’d been asleep?” Spit flew out of his mouth. I thought about the girl and how much she wanted to impress him, to look naturally beautiful first thing in the morning.
 
I could barely keep my eyes open and my jaw was tight because I’d been grinding my teeth, from either nerves or the drugs, I wasn’t sure. Isabella came in from the pool and quietly said she’d found a room off the kitchen with a queen-size bed that we could share with Chloe. We tiptoed off, found our bags piled up in the comically grand foyer, and carried them into the bedroom. The music from the pool got louder before we shut the door. Chloe face-planted on to the bed. Isabella brushed her teeth and I put on sweatpants, hoping we’d escaped.
 
But Sacha found us almost immediately. He opened our door. “What is this? Chloe!” he whined. “Chloe, wake up!” Chloe was a party girl but she was not one to be bossed around. “Too tired,” she muttered into her pillow. He scowled at me and Isabella, knowing we were even less likely to rally.
 
Then Kim, the girl Sacha had greeted so warmly at the restaurant in LA, suddenly appeared behind him in nothing but a black string bikini. He turned to her, his tone shifting. “All right,” he said seriously. “Remember what we talked about? I need you to go and do your thing out there.” She nodded twice quickly and, without speaking a word, swivelled around and skipped out of sight.
 
“Jacuzzi time!” I heard her sing out. Silently, I shut the door, wondering what I’d just witnessed. Was Sacha Kim’s boss? Or were they cohorts? And what was she expected to go and do exactly?
 
I could not sleep that night, squished between Chloe and Isabella under a comforter that smelled stale and of someone else. I thought about the way the Jacuzzi’s pink and green lights lit up the prince’s face and how his body had appeared monstrous next to his tiny fiancee’s. I realized I’d felt safer last year sleeping in my car in a crummy hotel parking lot. Isabella and I had been wrong. This was no free ride.
 
At the Super Bowl, I was surprised to find that we weren’t in the stands but an indoor suite, complete with a full bar, several attendants, and a lavish spread of food. An Oscar-winning actor and his girlfriend stopped by. Jho Low beamed when the actor became loud and gregarious. The image of a king being entertained by a jester came to mind. I wondered how much Jho Low was paying him, and thought of our fees tallied in a ledger on some underling’s computer.
 
Hours passed. People looked at their phones and sank down in their seats. I hadn’t realized how long the game would be, and after a glass of wine and several trips to the buffet, I was bored and tired. Jho Low himself seemed unenthused, staring vacantly. I wondered whether he even liked football.
 
Toward the end of the game, Evan reported that we were headed to an afterparty. I was surprised and disappointed; I’d been looking forward to the end of this uncomfortable day. I asked Evan when he thought it would be OK for me to leave. He checked the time. “Probably a few more hours, let’s feel it out.” I’d been reminded: I was not free to come and go as I liked. I was on the clock.
 
The music was loud and the lights were low at the party space, a two-story lounge dripping with red velvet. After an hour or so, Evan finally indicated that I’d stayed long enough. I peered around. Who had released me?
 
As I walked toward the exit, I passed a group of people dancing. I saw that Jho Low’s face had grown red and sweaty. He was drunk. A tray of shots appeared in front of him, and he grabbed two, handing one to the Victoria’s Secret model. She had ignored me and the other guests, her attention focused on Jho Low. Now she kept her eyes locked on him as he took his shot, throwing her head back dramatically as he did, only to quickly toss the alcohol over her shoulder. When he faced her again, her eyes sparkled and the famous dimples appeared on her cheeks. Damn, I thought, what a manoeuvre.
 
I liked to think that I was different from women like her and Kim. But over time, it became harder to hold on to that distinction or even believe in its virtue. I watched models and actresses guarantee themselves financial success and careers by dating or marrying rich and famous men.
 
I couldn’t help but wonder whether those women were actually the smart ones, playing the game correctly. It was undeniable that there was no way to avoid the game completely: we all had to make money one way or another. So they were the hustlers, and I was – what, exactly? I posted paid Instagram ads. And I was no stranger to commodifying my physical presence, posing next to CEOs in their suits at their store openings and parties. Wasn’t I hustling just like they were?
 
A few years after the Super Bowl I learned, along with the rest of the world, that Jho Low didn’t come from a super-rich family after all. He had stolen billions of dollars by funnelling money from the Malaysian government into a fund that he managed.
 
Jho Low is now an international fugitive, wanted by the Malaysian, Singapore and US authorities. Federal prosecutors seized almost a billion dollars in assets that were purchased with his stolen money: properties, yachts, artworks and entertainment (more than $100m was put into The Wolf of Wall Street). The film’s star, Leonardo DiCaprio had been given a Picasso and Basquiat, both of which were returned to the feds.
 
A week after the Super Bowl, Jho Low threw the Victoria’s Secret model a birthday party and gave her a heart-shaped diamond necklace engraved with her initials. It had cost $1.3m. Eventually, she had to return an estimated $8m in jewelry. One of his gifts, a translucent baby grand piano, was not seized. It was so big that there was simply no way to take it out of her house.
 
 This is an edited extract from My Body by Emily Ratajkowski, published by Quercus.

 

Crooks, creeps and indecent proposals: Emily Ratajkowski on being paid to hang out with rich men. By Emily Ratajkowski. The Guardian, November 13, 2021. 

Already famous as a model, an influencer, and the owner of a fashion brand, Emily Ratajkowski is known to the world in such saturation that anything she says on the subject of her body will inevitably be read through the lens of her own self-commodification. Or so we might think. It’s not unlike the trap of capitalism that Ratajkowski tangles with in her debut essay collection, the mechanism that’s punished her as much as it’s allowed her to thrive: How can one enter into an economy with the freedom to both criticize and participate? There’s a hint of self-aware humor in all of this, as when Ratajkowski’s Instagram captions solemnly intone, “My Body is on sale now.”
 
But what the reader is ultimately presented with in Ratajkowski’s book is candor. In 13 essays, she details the evolution of her thinking and her relationship to her body, her sexuality, and the currency both provide. The narrative isn’t chronological so much as it is emotional and intellectual, charting a sinuous path through coming-of-age stories and meditations on capitalism and power, female friendship, and finally motherhood. Ratajkowski writes with an incisive vulnerability that can give way to images of striking beauty, as when she recalls visiting her mother, who is sick. “An image arises,” she writes. “I am in the living room, on the white couch, looking out at the neon-green lawn. A thick tube descends through a pane of the window, attaching itself to the side of my neck like an artery. This is my mother’s love for me, I realize.”
 
A month before the book’s release, a page leaked from the chapter “Blurred Lines” painted Ratajkowski’s text as a call-out, accusing singer Robin Thicke of sexual assault. It was accompanied by a minor media frenzy online, utterly removed from its context—precisely the phenomenon that My Body seeks to avoid. Asked about the leak, Ratajkowski responded in a measured way, saying that she hoped “people would be able to hear things in my own words.”
 
We spoke with Ratajkowski about the process of writing My Body, critiquing capitalism even while excelling at its games, identifying as a socialist, and much more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
 
—Larissa Pham
 
LARISSA PHAM: I wanted to ask you about your relationship to visual art and to art-making more generally. How do you navigate the balance in being on both sides of a creative process—both as a collaborator and wanting to be a director or producer of a narrative? And what does art and art-making mean to you?
 
EMILY RATAJKOWSKI: Well, I think that one of the ideas I was always really interested in, even when I was in art school, was of the muse and the artist, and this feeling that they’re distinct and different. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve read more about female painters and their experience, and where they live in this weird, strange tradition of muse and artist. So that was something that I tackle and think of in the book. And then as far as the creative process goes, I think that the answer is: I don’t like being on one side of the process—I like being both producer and director. But it’s actually pretty difficult to switch sides. Especially if you have sexualized yourself and commodified your image and body, you’re seen in a certain way, and it’s very hard to prove yourself as someone who can be a creator. And that’s something that’s been frustrating for me—was frustrating, especially in my 20s. It’s one of the reasons why I think I wrote a book rather than directed a movie: because you don’t have to rely on anyone else—you just do it yourself. I didn’t need to raise funds to write a book or get anyone else on board; I just did it. The work was kind of the proof that I could do it at all.

 
LP: John Berger, Rebecca Solnit, Hannah Black, and Audrey Munson are among the artists and writers you mention in the book. Can you tell us more about who you were reading and what kind of research went into My Body?
 
ER: Everybody that you just mentioned, obviously, were the people I was thinking about. Audre Lorde was another person. There’s so many writers, but when I think about the texts that were important for my thinking, especially early on, I read The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf when I was in high school, and Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett. There were a lot of texts that informed me throughout my life, but specifically for this book, I was looking at books of essays as well: Lacy Johnson’s The Reckonings, Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. And Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, which isn’t a book of essays but has a really unique structure. Obviously, some of my book’s subject matter crosses over with what I was reading, particularly with Tolentino, Jamison, and Johnson. But I was also figuring out how a book of essays can take shape—because when you’re working on each piece, you know, it can be hard to see it as a whole.
 
LP: Can I ask you more about what that process of learning to write an essay collection was like?
 
ER: I think I had accumulated quite a lot of writing—I had 50,000 words or something—and one of the beautiful things about my career up until that point is that I didn’t have to work every day. So I had this time to write, and it was like, “OK, do I want to share this stuff?” Especially as somebody who has always been an avid reader, I was really nervous about—I know this is awful to say—being the kind of writer where you’re like, “Oooh, you should’ve kept that to yourself.” So I did a test of sending them to friends, and I cold e-mailed some writers out of the blue and was like, “Hey, I have these essays—would you mind telling me if you think I should continue to write?” And some of them very generously responded. At that point I sort of said, “OK, maybe I’m gonna get an agent and think about writing a book.”
 
 
LP: You’re in a unique position as a debut author, because you are a known figure, but you’re known for something different. I was thinking about this in light of politics, and this idea that people with platforms are expected to speak about various things or that people go to you for comment. And this book feels like something different. Do you consider the essays as part of your platform, or is it something completely different?
 
ER: It’s completely different from that. In the past two years, I used to very much be somebody who’d be like, “I would love to talk about activism and what it meant to be a public persona who speaks out”—but now, I don’t know. I have mixed feelings about it—partly because, as much as I do think we can bring awareness to issues and ideas, there’s now this ego thing built in, like, “Oh, I posted about the news du jour, so make sure you text this number to donate,” or “Here’s what you need to be aware of around blah.” And I haven’t decided where I land on that yet. If anything, I feel like if people want to read the book, I’m kind of inviting them to hear my thoughts and experiences as a very particular kind of person in the world.

 
 
LP: I saw the news about the “Blurred Lines” paragraph getting leaked, and when I read your response, what you said about wanting people to have the whole package really resonated, because it does need the context of the book, which I find is an evolution of your thinking.
 
ER: Yeah, it was really interesting because, you know, the Internet is obviously pretty brutal. But then there were also women who were like, “Well, thank you so much for speaking out”—and in person somebody said that to me. And I was like, “But I didn’t speak out! You haven’t gotten to read the book yet!” It’s not like I issued some statement where I decided that this was the moment to speak out. I want people to read the essay, is really the truth.
 
LP: I had a question about capitalism for you, which I see you grappling with a lot—not only the question of the economy, but also networks of power and how women in particular acquire power through beauty, sex, things like that. You also touch on the trap of capitalism—you were a Bernie Sanders supporter, but you also acknowledge that everyone has to play the game. So do you see these things that everyone has to engage with, and that you in particular have engaged with, as conflicting with each other? And how do you see the relationship between capitalism and art?
 
ER: Angela Davis has to sell her books, so Angela Davis sells her books on Amazon—you know what I mean? I think that’s the example I kind of point to sometimes. And a lot of people have asked me, “What about the contradiction—you’re somebody who’s commodified your image, your body, but you’re also sort of criticizing it.” And it’s like, “Well, we live in a world where that’s the reason I’m even able to criticize it—because I succeeded in the system that I’m now talking about.”
 
I feel that same way about capitalism. I have really complicated feelings! Basically, one of the big, big drives for wanting to have the career I have wasn’t just the validation it brought me personally, but also money. I really wish people talked more about money in general, but I tried to make it kind of a through line in the book, because it’s been a through line in my life: feeling like I want to have the freedom that money provides—and even the ability to write a book. I don’t fault anyone for living in our world and trying to make a living. What I want to do is be able to criticize the system that I live in. And I think that’s true for feminism and that’s true for capitalism.
 
LP: Do you identify as a socialist?
 
ER: I don’t know… I don’t know. I’ve never thought about identifying as a socialist or not. I’d probably say that people close to me would say that I am a socialist.
 
 
LP: But identifying personally is an answer that’s always changing.
 
ER: Yeah, and it’s such a weighty thing because of the associations with the word. It’s like why Bernie Sanders called himself a “democratic socialist.” I would say that I am certainly very interested in socialism. And I’m very displeased with capitalism, so…
 
LP: How do you navigate the relationship between your image, which is so widely known, and this new aspect of your work, which is textual and rooted in your experience?
 
ER: I guess, for me, as somebody who has been part of the public sphere, someone who’s really just an image—or images of me are what have been consumed—that’s just by definition voiceless, and there is no articulation in that. So this book is sort of the antithesis of what I have represented before. But I also think that there’s a reason why my name is big on the cover, and why I wrote it as first-person essays: because I think that what people have known about what I represent as a sexualized woman and model is important and informs the text and the experience. Because there is obviously power in the fact that people are just going to read this book because of the career I’ve built off of using my body to succeed. So I think that is kind of the background: having the experiences I’ve had in my life where I have had success. But also, I would hope it is clear that there was a double-edged sword in that success that comes with being a public woman who succeeds through objectification of self and by others.

 

LP: I wanted to ask you about the role of vulnerability in these essays. Reading them, I was struck by how much is revealed, but I also know that your work is very well curated, and it’s very clear what’s private and what’s not. What was that negotiation like as you were setting out to write this?
 
ER: At first, I just didn’t think at all about self-editing and about vulnerability, because I wouldn’t have written anything if I had been worried about it. But it’s been a weird balance where I’ve been trying to choose my words carefully, because I don’t want them to be taken out of context—but at the same time, when I start overthinking what I’m trying to say, there’s nothing interesting being said. So I think that basically I threw three sheets to the wind and was like, “Nope, I’m just going crazy.” And I did that. And then, through editing, I was really intentional about what I wanted to share and how I wanted to share it. But the greater truth is that I was most interested in being as honest as possible. And that meant including details that sometimes felt brutal or vulnerable to myself and to other people. This book can be contradictory, but I also hope its nuance can be recognized.
 
LP: I wanted to ask about the role of friendship, specifically female friendship, in your life. Some of my favorite parts in the book are when your friend Barbara shows up, and the mask comes off a little bit? Not that there’s necessarily a mask, but there’s a kind of softness and vulnerability in your relationship. I was curious about those sections.
 
ER: I’m really interested in female relationships and friendships, and my close female friends are probably the most powerful and impactful relationships I have in my life. I think in a lot of ways, this book is just about female relationships. Partly because I found that female relationships can be the most terrifying and most revealing dynamics that I’ve been exposed to, like meeting other women, and they also can be the most beautiful relationships. I was thinking a lot about the conversations I had with my closest friends while I was writing this book, when we were both really vulnerable and were sharing our experiences of what it means to be a woman and the difficulties of how to succeed and be happy. I don’t think those conversations happen enough in a public way. That’s one of my hopes for the book: that the closeness that really good female friendships have given me, I want that to be something that’s more shared in our culture and our society.
 
If there is a call to action in this book, it’s just to have these conversations about misogyny and about patriarchy and power dynamics that we don’t typically want to look at, but it’s also the idea that women could just talk about these things with each other, instead of feeling like there’s scarcity and that we have to compete with each other. It makes sense why we feel that way. But I want that to be different.

 

Emily Ratajkowski: “I’m Very Displeased With Capitalism”. By Larissa Pham. The Nation, November 17, 2021.

“I have so much anxiety about this,” says Emily Ratajkowski from the floor of her Manhattan apartment. “Even my body has responded to the desire to know how this book will be received.” Ratajkowski has long since come to terms with relinquishing control over her image, but for the 30-year-old San Diego native, the project of removing her body from the conversation has been a challenging one. After more than a decade spent embodying what many—Ratajkowski included—would say is an impossible beauty standard, the model and businesswoman has endeavored in recent years to shine light on the toxic aspects of an industry that long held her up as the epitome of female sexuality. Last fall, she published an essay about her experiences with on-the-job assault and exploitation, naming a prominent photographer in the process. The essay sparked seismic reactions—both positive and negative—in the fashion and art worlds. But instead of dwelling on the public’s reaction, Ratajkowski, a new mother, has done her best to focus on the process of creation.
 
My Body, Ratajkowski’s recently released book of essays, is the latest step in this process. Over 12 essays—concerned less with her body itself than with its status as an object of fetishization—Ratajkowski confronts with unflinching frankness topics like shame, solidarity, and the search for male validation in a culture that often confuses exploitation with empowerment. The result is a book that, in the opinion of the philosopher Amia Srinivasan, opens itself up to just about anyone—teenage boys and feminist scholars alike. “I’ve always been drawn to sparse, unpretentious writing,” Ratajkowski says. “The purpose of an essay is to get to the root of something, to investigate it.”  To mark the release of My Body, Ratajkowski joined Srinivasan over Zoom for a discussion about money, the myth of being a muse, and what it means to raise a son in today’s world. – MARA VEITCH
 

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EMILY RATAJKOWSKI: It’s so nice to meet you!
 
AMIA SRINIVASAN: It’s really nice to meet you too, congratulations on the book!
 
RATAJKOWSKI: Thank you. I’m such a huge fan. I love The Right to Sex.
 
SRINIVASAN: I read your book in one sitting and it reminded me of something Marilyn Monroe said in her final interview. She said, “Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control.” It seems to me that this theme of power and control is maybe the central theme of the book? It runs through all 12 essays. When you choose to take off your clothes or post an Instagram photo of your ass, is this an act of control? Is being able, so successfully, to make men want you, to understand what men want and play on that desire, a form of power? Or are all of these things just simulacra of power and control? My sense is that you give a pretty ambivalent answer to these questions. On one hand, you rightly condemn those who criticize you and other women for capitalizing on their beauty. And you acknowledge that the way you look has given you a certain form of power. But in the book, you tell these stories again and again of realizing that the real power lies with men. The men who direct, film, and manage you, who own the companies and production houses, and who so often treat you as fungible and stupid, simply a body to be sold, consumed, and unfortunately occasionally assaulted. Again and again, you express contempt for the control that these men exercise, and a longing for more creative power. Someone, as you say, who might make a movie one day, rather than get naked in one. Do you think that this is a fair assessment, and to what extent was power and control at the forefront of your mind as you set out to write the book?
 
RATAJKOWSKI: I didn’t know that Marilyn Monroe quote but it’s interesting that she was talking about control, because even when I believed in choice feminism in my early twenties, and believed in the power that I had as somebody who had worked the system, I definitely didn’t feel in control very often. Instagram was one of the places where I first experienced feeling some kind of control, because I was the one who was able to choose the images and put them out. I could go into a whole thing about my relationship to the internet and women and control. I think it’s something that is at the forefront of our cultural conversation right now, around Only Fans and revenge porn and maybe even related to crypto and NFTs and the free internet, but that’s a separate conversation. When I was writing the book, I knew that power and control were huge topics for me, but it wasn’t, “This is a story about power and control.” It was more like, “This is a story where I have a lot of shame, and a lot of complicated feelings about how I acted.” But, maybe there’s something there that is related to these ideas. I experienced what the double-edged sword was like—wearing something tight to school and then realizing that the popular girls weren’t paying attention to me because the boys were paying attention to me, while also feeling my vice principal snapping my bra strap. So much of what women experience is this feeling of, “I’m the one seducing, I’m the one who’s getting this attention, so I have the power.” But it wasn’t until I got older that I was able to look at these experiences that have stuck with me and think about control, and through thinking about control, think about power.

 SRINIVASAN: What was so fascinating about the second essay, which is about “Blurred Lines,” was the way you focus on the means of production of it. It was a production run by a woman, mostly staffed by women, and you were with two other women models. You felt playful and in control; that no one was asking you to do things you didn’t want to do. And you were working, and as a work experience, it felt pretty positive. What I like about that so much is that you make a move here that a lot of women who work in sex work make, which is actually a fundamentally Marxist move. It’s to say, “Don’t just fixate on the representation, the thing that comes out and that you see, and ask about the gendered meaning of that. Also think about what goes into the production of it and the making of it.” But then of course there’s a shift, and you talk about this really awful moment when a mediocre pop star feels entitled to put his hands on you, and everyone freezes and no one can really say anything. It’s one of these moments of puncturing, where it turns out that he’s fundamentally in control.

 

 

 

RATAJKOWSKI: Absolutely, especially in relation to sex work, I relate to it a little bit in the way that all of these women are using their bodies and compromising and also finding power, potentially. That essay in particular is really about industry, capitalism, and commodification, because I had approached modeling as a job. I was only interested in the money that I could make. I knew that there was potentially other power with becoming famous or becoming an image of a beautiful woman and what that represented. I grew up in the early aughts, and I’d seen what powerful women looked like. To me they were Britney Spears, and then there were powerful men who were presidents. That was sort of my understanding. So of course I wanted that, but I’d really hardened myself and thought, “I’m never going to have that kind of power, so I’m just going to make as much money as I can.” That meant often, as I write in the book, feeling like a mannequin, working with men who were maybe twice my age and stripping down and turning into their fantasy. “Blurred Lines” was this experience where a bunch of women asked me how I felt. Did I like makeup? Did I like my hair? I let myself relax and enjoy myself on that set. I think it’s one of the reasons that the music video had the success it did, because it isn’t just girls pouting. There’s a silliness to it and that’s a reflection of how I felt on set. The part where the power dynamics became clear was one that I had buried. I found it humiliating and incongruent with what I wanted to believe and feel about my position in the world. Ultimately, when I first wrote an early draft of this, the experience was buried inside of another essay, because I didn’t want it to be “the ‘Blurred Lines’ essay.” Then I realized that it needed to be its own.

 

SRINIVASAN: You were in an impossible position. You either hide it or bring it up. No matter what, the revelation, which is handled with such subtlety and care, would generate the kind of headlines it has. Like in The Sunday Times, which is a terrible right-wing newspaper. You’ve seen the headline.

 

RATAJKOWSKI: Not only the headline, but the images have been pictures where my breasts are exposed, and it says, “Emily Eroticakowski Accuses Robin Thicke of Sexual Assault.” It’s such a diminishing of what I actually wanted to say. Even having people approach me and say very kindly, “It’s so wonderful you spoke out,” is kind of missing the point of the essay. I’m looking forward to people being able to read and, I hope, understand why I decided to write it and what the point is of sharing that experience.

 

SRINIVASAN: If it’s any consolation, another terrible right-wing British newspaper described my book with the headline “‘The Right to Sex’ by Amia Srinivasan: Soviet-Style of Sex Reeducation.”

 

RATAJKOWSKI: Wow, that actually does make me feel better. [Laughs]

 

SRINIVASAN: A lot of people experience that kind of mistreatment, especially women who want to think about questions with nuance and ambivalence. A lot of the mainstream press can’t handle that. You expressed a hope that people will actually read the book as you wrote it: a set of complex, ambivalent, sometimes funny, very sharp, and also cold and dark meditations on representation and sex, embodiment, and capitalism. But you also expressed anxiety in the book that you won’t be taken seriously, because women who look like you in particular, and who also capitalize on how they look, are especially not taken seriously. I wonder how confident you are that you are going to be read properly, or are you going to still be read through a lens of male sexual fantasy?

 

RATAJKOWSKI: I have so much anxiety about this. I’ve lost a bunch of weight in the past month because I’m concerned and scared. My body has actually responded to the desire to how this book will be received and it’s a continuation of the metaphor. But something that I think the book could be criticized for and I totally understand is that I don’t give a lot of solutions, and I can often be cynical. What I’m about to say is not cynical and kind of positive, which is that ultimately, I write about being a muse versus an artist. I didn’t even realize that it was such a large part of the book. In some ways I wish that I had written more about it, but also I have realized that the book is a relic that is about creation and about the muse taking back power and becoming the artist. The act of writing the book has been an attempt at control, but ultimately, you have to release control in order to be happy and just to survive and exist in a meaningful way. I think, with publishing it and knowing that there’s this huge risk of people not reading it at all, and only looking at the headlines, I have to focus on the act of creating the book and the fulfillment that it’s given me, which is really all I ever wanted.

SRI ININ: Let’s talk about the shift from being the muse to the artist. I’m interested in the process that went into the actual writing of this book. It’s a very finely honed and controlled literary object. Your prose is spare, often cold, especially when you’re describing moments of male creepiness and assault. It reminds me of early Bret Easton Ellis, that same cold description of a certain toxic superficial culture. But in its places of coldness, it’s very affecting. You also do this very intricate interweaving of different temporal moments and different narratives. In the essay called “Toxic,” you’re interweaving this discussion of Britney Spears with the account of this high school almost-friendship. Then in “Beauty Lessons,” which opens the book, you’ve got this series of numbered vignettes about your childhood formation, your relationship with your mother, beauty, loveability. Can we talk about the craft of essay writing and what it’s about for you?

 

RATAJKOWSKI: I’ve been an avid reader my whole life, and it was one of the reasons I didn’t write more, because I had so much respect for wonderful writing that I felt like, “Why attempt, why not just appreciate?” I’ve always been drawn to sparse, unpretentious writing. Flowery language doesn’t really interest me. It covers it up. It’s often difficult to be very direct and not flowery because you really have to figure out what the fuck you’re saying. I have so much respect for people who are good at that, especially in essays, because the idea of an essay is to get to the root of something, to investigate it. That was what started the writing. It was not just, “I’m going to write a book,” but more feeling like I wanted to explore experiences and ideas that I couldn’t verbally lay out or organize. I would start on a note in my phone and that was really helpful, because once you start writing inside of essays, you can lose the stream of consciousness that you want to have. You do that particularly well. I think Leslie Jamison also does that really well, where you feel her mind working in the writing, which is very difficult because anyone who’s written knows that once you edit, you’re completely lost in the sentences and you lose the larger shape. So the notes thing allowed me to jump from one idea to the next. And as somebody who has grown up in the age of the internet and enjoys reading long books but can have a short attention span, I appreciate the way you can pick up and put down a book of essays.

 

SRINIVASAN: Can we talk about money?

 

RATAJKOWSKI: Yes. I love talking about money.

 

SRINIVASAN: You describe why you first got into modeling, and it’s because of money. You immediately contextualize it within the 2008 financial crash, which was so formative for people in our generation. You were watching peers moving back home and picking up the service jobs they had in high school, but you didn’t want to do that. Modeling was something you were already doing, but then you went full gung-ho into it. It reminds me of a move that, again, a lot of sex workers make, which is that whenever they write about sex work, they remind people that it’s something they do for money. And the reason you have to remind people is it stops the pathologization of a certain form of activity, because otherwise, people ask, “Why are you taking your clothes off, why are you uploading so many selfies?” Well, it’s a way of making money. It’s only when you forget about money and the broader capitalist system in which we operate that things start to appear pathological.

 

RATAJKOWSKI: Yes, and that was so important to me because there’s shame around, or at least I felt shame around, being money hungry. Autonomy and freedom and control come with money, and I knew that at a very young age. Nothing terrified me more than watching my friends who went out into the world have to return and give that up. My parents come from the generation where you go to college and get a decent job. Student debt wasn’t really on their mind. When I was a senior and I was deciding to go to UCLA, I took a job at a store. I thought, “I’m going to stop modeling now, and I need to get used to making this kind of money and have some experience in a real situation that I can bring to a place in L.A. and say I’ve actually worked. And I hated it. So even though modeling has all these things about it, I’d rather do it. Everybody also always reminded me that modeling has a very specific window and that if you don’t do it when you’re young and beautiful, it goes away. So I made the decision to jump on that, directly into an industry that when I got sick with the flu and lost some weight, I watched the number on the scale go down and the number of my paychecks go up. So all of a sudden I became hyper aware of how to have more. It’s kind of another conversation for a different book, but when do we start saying, “I have enough financial security, so I’m not going to compromise myself in certain ways because I feel safe and secure?”

 

SRINIVASAN: You said it’s a topic for another book, but that was actually the question I was going to ask you. When is it enough money?

 

RATAJKOWSKI: I’m wrestling with that. I write about the experience of being around really rich men. I’ve seen what real money looks like and what kind of lifestyle that guarantees. But I have noticed, and since writing this book, that I feel much more comfortable saying no to things. The money is, to me, still shocking.I kind of can’t believe what I’m offered for my actual time.

 

SRINIVASAN: One of the suggestions that comes through in “Beauty Lessons” is that there’s money and there’s the very real material drive for money, but there’s also for you and for many women, the internalized misogyny that results in a constant drive for male validation. You talk about how that’s inflected through social media, like the actual oxytocin hit, and I was amazed to find that you get an oxytocin hit off of an Instagram like. People who get like 10 Instagram likes definitely do, too, but it seems like the particular relationship that you were brought up to have with your beauty where you think that you’re lovable insofar as you’re beautiful, is expressed writ large by social media. So there is a sense in which that is what love is now.  Love is how many likes you can have. How easy would it be for you to separate yourself from that economy of validation?

 

 

 

 

RATAJKOWSKI: I’ve started to, and it’s strange unlearning the ways that I understood love and specialness. I lost the distinction between the two, as a young person. That was true of my upbringing, and then I became a famous model with this instant feedback loop of specialness of lovability. It was spooky when I figured out that parallel. What I’ve learned, even just writing this book and why I dedicate the book to my son, is that the way that I’m actively trying to relearn what love and lovability can be is my attempt to be the best person I can be and, ultimately, the best mother. But it’s an ongoing process, because validation like that is really powerful.

 

SRINIVASAN: What do you think about the economy of validation and desirability in the literary world?

 

RATAJKOWSKI: I’m terrified. I think it’s going to be really interesting, too. I’ve already sort of dipped my toe in it and it’s a whole other thing.

 

SRINIVASAN: One thing that’s really bracing about the book is that it’s filled with creepy, shitty, abusive men. Not all of them, you do have good men in your life. But you have this extraordinarily intimate knowledge of male shittiness, of patriarchal sexuality and masculinity. The book ends with an essay on giving birth to a son. What does the project of raising a male child look like to you?

 

RATAJKOWSKI: When you said “good men in your life,” and you write about this as well, I think there just aren’t good and bad men. Yes, it’s not all men, and at the same time, it’s all men. In the same way that women are existing in the world that we exist in, there’s moments where any man can, always with ignorance, but whether knowingly or not, take advantage of the power dynamics that we so often ignore. My son, babies, have this genderless quality to them, and so I love affording that to him right now. I’ve just been  treating him as this wonderful little human who’s being introduced to the world. Actually, I noticed that as soon as people know that he’s a boy, the way that they interact with him is different than they would have with a baby girl. Sometimes I feel frustrated by that because I think there’s even a tendency to throw a little boy in the air, be a little bit rougher with them than you would a little girl. That stuff already bothers me because I can see where it’s leading. I don’t have the answers, but the second that I knew I was having a son it came to mind. The best I can do is teach him compassion, and about these power dynamics that men don’t have to inspect in the way that women do, and make him aware of them and make him care about them. How’s that going to happen? I’m not entirely sure. I also think that this culture that I’m writing about in the book, is very bad for men. There are books about how bad it is for men. I see it in my life, the ways that it limits men, and how depressing their existence and their lives can be when they have to adopt this toxic masculinity. So I also feel incredibly protective of him in the same way I would with a daughter, from this culture.

 

SRINIVASAN: So many of the men you described in the book have a profoundly desperate quality to them. So while they might be exercising a huge amount of power, usually decision-making power backed by money, there’s also clear anxiety about their own masculinity, their place in the world, their desirability. They feel female desirability as this profound threat to their supposed mastery. And I totally agree with you, I think feminism that isn’t interested in the complexities of the distorting effects of patriarchy on the male psyche is not really feminism worth having. I want to recommend a book to you, which is usually the book I give to my friends when they get pregnant. It’s Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born.
 
RATAJKOWSKI: I know Adrienne Rich but I haven’t read that book.
 
SRINIVASAN: It’s my favorite of her books. She was the mother of two sons and it’s pretty much a meditation on that question, but in a profound and poetic way. It ends with this extraordinary image of what it means to set your son down on the shore of a river and cross that river and leave him there having the confidence that he’ll be able to follow. And how that possibility really is the most politically emancipatory thing we basically need to do: allow men to learn how to accept both that they have been radically dependent on women, but also to grow up.
 
RATAJKOWSKI: I’m crying because it’s so difficult and scary and sad to watch. Actually, one of the early reviews somebody wrote about the book was that these men had jealousy, there was a sort of jealousy of power, a threat of the validation I could give them or that a beautiful young woman could give them. I feel like that is the source of that, and it’s something bell hooks writes about so well. I thought the book you were going to recommend is Men, Masculinity, and the Will to Change. That book is wonderful in being compassionate towards men but I do think that so many of these things that I’ve experienced have come out of real fear and a need to prove something. I do feel incredibly empathetic towards that and am aware of it.

Of Money and Men: Emily Ratajkowski  in Conversation With Amia Srinivasan. Interview , November 16, 2021.

I’m not going to tell you what the hostess said to Emily Ratajkowski. Instead, I will tell you this: We are having lunch at a restaurant. We consult the restaurant’s menu, which boasts many items. Ratajkowski, a model who first became famous for appearing naked in a music video, orders something. I, who have never been in a music video but have been naked many times, also order something. We remark casually on the restaurant’s ambience, noting its proximity to various locations. I turn on my recorder. Each of us is wearing clothes.

 We are here to talk about Ratajkowski’s new book, “My Body.” In it, she reflects on her fraught relationship with the huge number of photographs of her body that have come to define her life and career. The book’s marquee essay, “Buying Myself Back,” which describes how Ratajkowski ended up purchasing a print of her own Instagram post from the appropriation artist Richard Prince, was published to great notice in New York magazine last fall. Ratajkowski also wrote that the photographer Jonathan Leder sexually assaulted her in his home after a photo shoot when she was 20.

 At lunch, Ratajkowski explains that New York magazine took “Buying Myself Back” from her book proposal. In fact, she began working on “My Body” without anyone but herself in mind, jotting down notes on her phone as they occurred to her. One day she realized she was writing a book. Several times, Ratajkowski characterizes writing as a means of “organizing” her own thoughts — not as an act of branding but out of what strikes me as the genuine curiosity of a woman whom constant exposure has deprived of the possibility of self-knowledge.

 But Ratajkowski knows she is in an impossible position as a model-turned-writer. Indeed, the author has spent her career dodging the backhanded compliment that she is the “thinking man’s naked woman.” Failure will be met with schadenfreude; success, with smug surprise. Someone recently asked her who her ghostwriter was. Others asked if her face is on the book’s cover. (It isn’t.) After “Buying Myself Back” came out, a journalist unearthed a 2018 profile in Marie Claire in which the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams lavishly praised her breasts while expressing surprise that she’d read Roberto Bolaño’s daunting novel “2666.” An irritated Ratajkowski tweeted her exhaustion with profiles that have boiled down to “She has breasts AND claims to read.”

 We cannot see ourselves. This is an existential fact, as sure as death. Yes, we can look down at our limbs and trunks, but we cannot enter our own regard as subjects; we cannot see ourselves seeing. For a model, this existential fact is promoted, or relegated, to a professional one. “I don’t even know what I look like anymore,” Ratajkowski confesses to me. “I can’t even tell what’s a good or bad picture in the same way. It’s just another picture.” Sixteen years in the modeling industry — over half her lifetime — have left Ratajkowski burned out and grasping for narrative.

 With “My Body,” Ratajkowski has created a new mirror for glimpsing her own reflection. Some essays recount the author’s hustle as a young model who often found herself in troubling situations with powerful men; another is written as a long, venomous reply to an email from a photographer who has bragged of discovering her. Throughout, Ratajkowski is hoping to set the record straight: She is neither victim nor stooge, neither a cynical collaborator in the male agenda, as her critics have argued, nor some pop-feminist empoweree, as she herself once supposed. Today she is just a girl, standing in front of 28 million Instagram followers, asking them to take her seriously.

 Whether she’ll succeed remains to be seen. While Ratajkowski wrote “My Body” to reassert control of her image, publishing it will mean releasing yet another piece of herself into the world. “That’s the misery and the joy of it,” she tells me, comparing the process to giving birth to her son, now 8 months old. In the book, Ratajkowski remembers asking for a mirror when she was in labor, so she could see her body. “I wanted to witness its progress,” she writes. This is a modest goal, and equally profound, especially for someone who is looked at for a living — to regard oneself, without preconception or judgment.

 Photography, for all its ambition, cannot bear witness; nor, for that matter, can the mirror, save perhaps in moments of rapture or deep quietude. Before the mirror, we had the mysteries of water to betray our forms; before that, the glowing eyes of another animal. Ratajkowski knows there is something hungry in the camera. It takes what it wants and holds it forever — “like a footprint or a death mask,” as Susan Sontag wrote. To cope, Ratajkowski has internalized the gaze; walking a red carpet, she hears the clicking of photographers and knows, as if by echolocation, what each photo will look like — and that none will capture the real her. Ever since her private photos were posted to 4chan by hackers, she has started to assume that every picture taken of her will become public, just to quell her anxiety. “There are no images that are just for myself,” Ratajkowski remarks sadly.

 The phrase reverberates in my mind as we talk. “For better or worse, I’ve always been drawn to overexposure,” Ratajkowski writes in “My Body,” describing the thrill she still gets when uploading a photo of herself to Instagram. I’m drawn to exposure, too; I’ve written extensively about my own body, and like Ratajkowski, I’m ambivalent about the attention it has won me. (I can confidently say it’s why I was assigned this article.) “I knew that when I met you,” Ratajkowski discloses later; it’s why she feels comfortable talking to me. But if I’m sympathetic to her compulsion, I’m not doing her any favors by writing a profile about her, which is just another kind of portrait. Then again, she was the one who called it “My Body.”

 Could we help each other out, one woman to another? In this context, the idea of equality would be a fantasy; we cannot step outside our roles and histories and meet, as it were, in the wild. But it could be interesting to try. I ask Ratajkowski if she would like to take some Polaroids with me. As I imagine it, we would take photos of ourselves, by ourselves, and then share them with each other — and no one else. Ratajkowski interjects. “It would be about the experience of taking them,” she says simply: how we felt, whether we could trust each other, whether we could see each other, ourselves. She agrees to the exercise, fascinated by the idea of a photograph of herself that, by some miracle, nobody will ever see. “I do love the idea of our bodies being in conversation,” she later tells me. I am struck by the tenderness of her remark. When I ask what we should do with the photos afterward, Ratajkowski smiles. “We have to set them on fire.”

 Ratajkowski was born in London in 1991, but raised in Encinitas, Calif., a surf town outside San Diego. Her mother was an English professor; her father, a painter and high school art teacher. The house where she grew up, which her father built himself, was filled with eccentric details: mismatched doorknobs, exposed beams and walls that stopped short of the roof. “It’s an artist’s house,” her mother would tell guests sheepishly. As a girl, Ratajkowski would be awakened by “the rhythmic sound of my parents having sex” — or more often, their vicious screaming matches. She would sink onto the floor of her bedroom and play with imaginary friends until it ended. But even when the house was silent, Ratajkowski writes, “I could hear my parents’ thoughts.”

 Early in “My Body,” Ratajkowski describes a diptych of herself and her mother as young girls; when guests see the photos in her parents’ living room, they ask who is who. From a young age, she sensed that her mother felt entitled to her beauty, “like a piece of bequeathed jewelry.” Ratajkowski’s parents, and especially her beauty-obsessed mother, took immense pride in their daughter’s modeling career, which began when she was 14. When, as an adult, Ratajkowski finally persuaded her mother to take down an ostentatiously placed print from an old photo shoot, the latter responded matter-of-factly, “You’re more beautiful than that now.”

 This is a portrait of a young girl with no privacy and a single avenue for self-worth. In bed, Ratajkowski prayed for beauty, squeezing her eyes shut to “focus on the expanding spots of light behind my eyelids,” developing the wish like a photograph. As a teenager, she would scrutinize herself in her bedroom’s full-length mirror, which her father first hung for a ballerina ex-girlfriend. In her freshman year at San Dieguito Academy, where her father taught painting, word spread that “Rata’s daughter models.” After graduating from high school, Ratajkowski studied art for a year at U.C.L.A. before dropping out to pursue modeling full time, appearing fully naked on the cover of Treats, an artsy Playboy imitator, in 2012. She liked to tell friends that the French word for “model” was “mannequin.” “I’m a mannequin for a living,” she would say, shrugging ambivalently.

 The Treats pictorial caught the eye of the recording artist Robin Thicke, who recommended Ratajkowski for the music video for his 2013 single “Blurred Lines.” The unrated version of the video, which YouTube censors removed within a week of its posting, featured Ratajkowski and two other models flouncing around in nude thongs next to Thicke and his collaborators T.I. and Pharrell Williams. “Blurred Lines” arrived at the peak of the feminist blogosphere — an unfederated group of scrappy writers and websites that approached the crude oil of personal experience with the blowtorch of moral certitude — and bloggers seized upon the video as an emblem of “rape culture.” “I know you want it,” sang Thicke, a declaration of predation putatively excused by the nudity.

 The controversy rocketed a bewildered Ratajkowski to international fame. “I and, more specifically, the politics of my body were suddenly being discussed and dissected across the globe by feminist thinkers and teenage boys alike,” she recalls. When Ratajkowski told reporters she had found the experience “empowering,” some dismissed her as complicit in her own victimization — or worse, a clueless agent of rape culture. At the time, Ratajkowski responded defiantly; these days, she’s not so sure. She knows that her fashion-week invitations, brand ambassadorships and short-lived film career (she played Ben Affleck’s topless mistress in “Gone Girl”), to say nothing of her massive Instagram platform where she hawks bikinis and endorsed Bernie Sanders — this is all the fruit of male attention.

 Perhaps. The language of objectification has followed Ratajkowski like a hungry dog for her whole career, waiting for her to let down her guard. Her reputation as thoughtful and well read, coupled with her support of socialist policies, has only heightened for her the growing expectation that famously beautiful women be able to justify, politically, the act of being famously beautiful. Caught in the wrong video at the wrong time, Ratajkowski became an effigy for the exhaustion of a pop-feminist framework; if the author of “My Body” cannot decide whether her success has been empowering or not, that’s because this is a trick question.

 It is by transforming one’s body into an object that one can sell it; it is by selling it that one may gain food, housing, status, influence and, yes, “power.” This is as true for the poorest sex worker as it is for the most celebrated actress; it is also true, by the way, for Amazon workers, short-order cooks and (my neck hurts as I write this) magazine writers. I am not mocking our differences; I am saying that the experience of becoming an object for pay is so general as to be trivial. That the tiny sliver of this experience to do with female sexuality should be singled out by feminists for censure reflects, certainly in Ratajkowski’s case, a gratuitous inflation of male power’s scope and reach.

 Accordingly, the best parts of “My Body” are when Ratajkowski realizes that the best way to stop thinking about the male gaze is to think about something else instead. “I’m very obsessed with women,” she tells me. When Ratajkowski arrived on the set of “Blurred Lines,” she was pleased to find that the director Diane Martel had stacked the crew with women; for many hours, Thicke and the song’s other co-writers weren’t even present. Ratajkowski remembers wiggling around in her platform sneakers “ridiculously, loosely, the way I would to entertain my girlfriends.” The “Blurred Lines” video, viewed today, is clearly self-parodic. If anything, with its mismatched props, barnyard animals and flat beige cyclorama, it depicts a group of attractive people amusingly failing to make a music video. “There’s something risky and sexy about relationships with other women when you’re aware of the gaze, but the gaze isn’t there physically,” Ratajkowski observes.

 But the blurred lines between one woman and the next, unacceptable to misogynists and many feminists, too, will most likely disappear next to Ratajkowski’s allegations that a drunk Robin Thicke cupped her bare breasts during the shoot. “I felt naked for the first time that day,” she writes, ashamed that it would take her years to call it sexual harassment. The allegations have already leaked to the tabloids, which have cast Ratajkowski as a helpless victim. “Remind me why I decided to do this?” she texted me after The New York Post called her childhood “sad” and “sexualized.” (Representatives for Thicke didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

 The book contains many accounts of violation, sexual and otherwise. In one essay, it is not until after the death of Ratajkowski’s first boyfriend, who she says raped her when she was 14, that she is able to whisper to herself, “Owen, no.” (Owen is a pseudonym.) In “Buying Myself Back,” Ratajkowski is incredulous when she is sued for posting a paparazzi photo to Instagram; horrified when hackers leak her nudes on 4chan; furious when Jonathan Leder, who she says digitally penetrated her without her consent, publishes Polaroids of her with an allegedly forged release form. (Leder has said that Ratajkowski’s allegations are “too tawdry and childish to respond to,” telling a fact checker for New York magazine, “This is the girl that was naked in Treats magazine and bounced around naked in the Robin Thicke video at that time. You really want someone to believe she was a victim?”)

 But the author of “My Body” has no investment in herself as a victim. If the men who hurt Ratajkowski in “My Body” are predators, she does not depict them as predatory. On the contrary, they are small, insecure people desperate to prove themselves, as pathetic as they are powerful. As Ratajkowski is quick to note, her experiences are neither disintegrating, even when traumatic, nor especially unique; her point is simply that they are no one’s but her own.

 Instead of focusing on her damage — she considers suing Leder, but says he isn’t worth the trouble — Ratajkowski would rather create. “My Body” is only one example of that. Last May, she cleverly auctioned off an NFT, or nonfungible token, of a photo of herself standing next to the Richard Prince print, coolly reappropriating Prince’s appropriation of her image. (The NFT sold for $175,000 through Christie’s.) There was cheerful wit here, and more deliberateness in her self-presentation than the model took earlier in her career. These days, Ratajkowski is not looking for vengeance, or even recognition, but something quieter.

 For the book’s epigraph, Ratajkowski selected a lucid passage from the late John Berger’s influential book “Ways of Seeing,” adapted from the 1972 television series of the same name. “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure,” Berger wrote, addressing an Everyman painter. “The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.” The point is clear: If Ratajkowski is complicit in being looked at, the crime is ours for looking.

 When I have told female friends that I am writing about Emily Ratajkowski, most have asked me some variation on the question “So how hot is she, really?” We often forget that, when we speak of women’s envy for one another, we are also speaking of the ever-present gap, hardly unique to women, between one’s self-image and one’s reflection in the mirror. Indeed, it is a particular cruelty of popular feminism to have mistaken the universally alienating experience of examining one’s reflection for a uniquely female one, solvable through self-love and political consciousness. “I hate women who compare themselves to other women,” Ratajkowski imagines yelling at her therapist in “My Body,” knowing she is talking about herself. But feminism can be just as competitive as any beauty pageant: yet another mirror in which to examine one’s blemishes, and yet another means — the irony is exquisite — of comparing oneself with other women.

 For what is wrong with wanting to be beautiful? Pop-feminism, for its part, is so preoccupied with criticizing what we rotely call “conventional beauty standards” that it has surprisingly little to say about beauty. It may be tempting, given the evidence of Ratajkowski’s own career, to deny the possibility of a beauty that would transcend male taste, at least in this world. Of course, the imagined saturation of the beautiful by male preference is immediately disproved by the existence of at least one lesbian (me); but it is further refuted if we acknowledge that the envy that heterosexual women have for one another is indeed an authentic expression of female desire.

 When Ratajkowski was 15, beauty’s name was Sadie. Tall and magnetic, Sadie was a cool girl in the “Gone Girl” sense — eating burritos, getting high, hanging with a crew of skater boys. Ratajkowski was in awe. “Sadie seemed dangerous,” she remembers, “like she was built of weapons she had yet to master.” That year she fell into the older girl’s gravity, catching rides with her to the Ford modeling agency in Los Angeles (Ratajkowski helped her friend sign) and attending drunken house parties where Sadie would play fight with boys until she collapsed on the concrete.

 After high school, the two fell out of touch. Sadie went off to college in San Francisco, then to art school in Los Angeles. Ratajkowski, after a year at U.C.L.A., dropped out to focus on modeling, commuting from San Diego to Los Angeles for catalog jobs. When she was 19, she showed up at a casting for Treats. Waiting at the studio, Ratajkowski spotted a large poster for “Blow-Up,” the 1966 film about a fashion photographer by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, his first English-language work. “I love that film,” she told Treats’ founder Steve Shaw, who excitedly produced a book of Helmut Newton photographs to show her the tasteful nudity he was after. Then he asked her to take her clothes off. “A mere mention of a pretentious film — it was so easy to subvert your expectations,” Ratajkowski writes in an essay addressed to Shaw. But she hadn’t feigned her admiration for “Blow-Up,” which she watched in high school, struck by the desperation of the film’s beautiful models. She even owned the same poster, which features the film’s protagonist straddling the German supermodel Veruschka as he searches for the perfect shot.

 Later in “Blow-Up,” the fashion photographer, whose name is Thomas, wanders into a park and takes candid photos of a pair of lovers. When he enlarges the photos, Thomas is startled to notice a gunman hiding in the bushes, as well as what might be a dead body. But before investigating further, he is interrupted by two aspiring models who demand that he photograph them. When he gropes one of them, she panics and gestures at her friend. “She’s got a better figure than me!” she squeals. In the infamous sequence that follows, the girls end up rolling around laughing on one of Thomas’s paper backdrops while he peels off their nylons. “Much was made of the nudity in 1967,” remembered the late film critic Roger Ebert. “Today, the sex seems tame, and what makes the audience gasp is the hero’s contempt for women.”

 But does the male gaze really have any more control over what it sees than Thomas does in the park? All photographs are clues in search of a mystery; they tell us something happened, but they do not say what. This is as true of “Blurred Lines” as it is of “Blow-Up,” right down to the possible crime. “I don’t know that a woman giggling sheepishly means what these male directors think it means,” Ratajkowski says to me, wondering how the actresses must have felt on set. The sequence is far too chaotic to be choreographed. The models tug at each other’s bodies, crunch awkwardly on the paper beneath them. They are as interested in each other’s bodies as they are in the photographer, who remains mostly clothed; when they first wrestle each other to the ground, Thomas is not even in the room. What kind of sex the models have offscreen with him — or with each other — is left to our imagination.

 When I ask if she thinks her friendship with Sadie had a sexual charge, Ratajkowski is hesitant. “I don’t know if it was true homoeroticism because I do think it was about male desire,” she answers, recalling how much the boys at school liked seeing the two of them together. When they were alone, Ratajkowski was unsure what the older girl could possibly want from her. On the weekends, the two friends would crash with Sadie’s boyfriend, Mike, the three of them crammed onto one bed together. One night, Ratajkowski awoke to the feeling of Mike’s hands on her bare breasts; Sadie lay beside her, still asleep. Ratajkowski rolled over out of his reach, and never told Sadie. “I told myself that in choosing to reach over Sadie’s body to touch mine, Mike had complimented me,” she writes. “I knew that if Sadie found out, she’d blame me.”

 Ratajkowski, Sadie, Mike — this is a classic triangulation. But what does it mean? “Did it give me some power over her?” Ratajkowski wonders in retrospect. “I even started to convince myself that I liked the feel of Mike’s touch. Maybe I was into it? Turned on even?” Mike had crossed a line, yes. But if anything was arousing, it wasn’t his attention but the prospect of Sadie’s jealousy. “Your boyfriend likes my boobs better than yours,” Ratajkowski imagines needling her friend. And as for Mike? If the author’s teenage attraction to her friend indirectly expressed the lust of skater boys and male photographers — that is, if Ratajkowski liked Sadie because boys liked Sadie — then it is equally plausible that Mike’s fumbling betrayed the intuition that his girlfriend’s relationship with Ratajkowski had, at root, nothing to do with him. (Sadie and Mike are pseudonyms.)

 My point is that heterosexual male desire — that vaunted juggernaut of psychic space — is just as often a convenient vehicle for women, gay or straight, to reach one another. I ask Ratajkowski if she has seen “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” the 1988 adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel about a love triangle. (She has.) In the film, a photographer named Tereza asks her friend Sabina, an artist whom Tereza correctly suspects of being her husband’s mistress, to pose nude for some photographs. Initially meek, Tereza begins to order Sabina around, pushing her naked body into the carpet; behind the lens, Tereza is crying. When they are finished, Sabina slips on her robe and snatches the camera. “Take off your clothes,” she says, pinning Tereza to the couch and miming sex. By the end of the sequence, the two women have collapsed in laughter.

 Ratajkowski remarks on the husband’s absent presence in the scene. “There’s this very clear power thing where the women are both aware of how men look at them, and specifically one man,” she says, “and yet they also have their own relationship.” Then she asks me for my reading. I tell her that the women are trying the camera on like an article of clothing, experimenting with the gaze, seeing if they can see each other. They are nervous, titillated, ashamed, jealous, vicious. They role-play as Tereza’s husband; they role-play as each other. They want to humiliate each other, and they almost have sex. Their laughter, like the laughter of the groupies in “Blow-Up,” expresses both the futility of escaping and the fact that, somehow, they already have.

 I arrive first at the studio, a cavernous space with massive windows overlooking SoHo. Before the official photo shoot for this article, Ratajkowski and I are going to take the Polaroids we discussed. In the dressing room, I take a seat in front of a vanity lined with glowing light bulbs and exchange a few halting words with Ratajkowski’s publicist and stylist. In my tote bag are two lighters, a box of matches and a little brass pot, for fire safety. The night before, Ratajkowski told me she was excited to destroy the photos. “The chemical inside the Polaroids is sticky,” she texted.

 Ratajkowski walks in a few minutes later. Unprompted, she tells me she’s been meaning to read “Camera Lucida,” a book on photography by the French writer Roland Barthes that I mentioned to her in passing. Barthes built the book around an old photograph of his mother as a young girl standing in a glass conservatory. Discovering the photo while sorting through her possessions, the grieving writer felt that he could glimpse in the faded image the full being of his late mother. Nevertheless, Barthes refused to print the photograph in the book. “It exists only for me,” he told his readers. “For you it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.” Shortly after the book was published in 1980, Barthes himself died after being hit by a laundry van in Paris. “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen to us,” Ratajkowski quips.

 We retire to the greenroom upstairs with a vintage Polaroid camera provided by a crew member. Ratajkowski suggests that we photograph each other in addition to ourselves; I agree. To decide who goes first, we play rock, paper, scissors. “Paper covers rock,” she says triumphantly, before realizing we hadn’t specified what winning meant. She’s up, I say. “You just want me to go first,” she teases, picking up the camera. I step outside, closing the door behind me, and sit at the top of the stairs. I can hear echoes of the crew setting up for the shoot below.

 The door opens. Ratajkowski hands me the camera, grinning. “You’re up.” Alone, I hop up on a long table opposite a full-length mirror and take two shots before letting Ratajkowski back in. With childlike solemnity, we place our undeveloped Polaroids facedown on a small bench in the room’s odd glassed-in corner, which looks out onto the studio like a private box at a stadium. Then Ratajkowski directs me to sit in a chair. I laugh when she points the camera at me, because I do not know what else to do. I know how my face will look — and that I will not like it. When it’s my turn, I position her against a dark mahogany wall. “Tell me what to do,” she says. “I like being directed.” I say, “Look away. Don’t look at me.”

 We seat ourselves in the glass corner. There are now eight Polaroids total: four of her, four of me. I pick up the photos Ratajkowski took of herself, and she does the same with mine. For a moment, we look. The first thing I notice is that the vanity she chose has caught the glass window across the room, producing a ghostly series of mirrored lights. I try to describe her expression to her, but to my frustration I cannot find the words. “You know, I’m about to have a million pictures taken of myself,” Ratajkowski explains, gesturing at the studio below. She decided to make these different.

 Ratajkowski turns over the photos we took of each other. “Oh, whoa,” she mutters. We forgot that the vintage camera didn’t have a flash; without the luminescence of a mirror, these Polaroids are dark and ethereal. In some, we are not recognizable. To my surprise, Ratajkowski can’t bring herself to destroy the photos, suggesting that we exchange them instead. “It feels nice to take each other’s picture and then take them away,” she explains. “Like a handshake or a hug.”

 I’m not going to tell you what Emily Ratajkowski looks like in the Polaroids she gave me. Instead, I will tell you this: Like millions of people around the world, I have seen many pictures of Ratajkowski. Now I have seen a few more. These, no one else will ever see. Does that make them any more real than the thousands of other Emilys that Ratajkowski describes in “My Body,” dispatched into the world with the click of a shutter? “Everybody is going to write about me in terms of what I represent in the zeitgeist,” she says wistfully as I end our final interview. “The real Emily will get lost.” She leaves to get dressed for the big shoot and I decide to stay. I watch her pose in front of the camera, disappearing once more behind herself.

 

The Emily Ratajkowski You’ll Never See. By Andrea Long Chu. The New York Times Magazine, November 8, 2021.

Rewatching the music video for “Blurred Lines,” the totemic Robin Thicke song, is an interesting project. In 2013, when it was released, the song spawned a new microeconomy of commentary denouncing it as a distillation of rape culture, or fretting over whether enjoying its jaunty hook was defensible. (“I know you want it,” Thicke croons presumptively over and over, even though honestly, no, I do not want it at all.) In the video, directed by the veteran Diane Martel, three models dressed in transparent thongs peacock and pose with a baffling array of props (a lamb, a banjo, a bicycle, a four-foot-long replica of a syringe) while Thicke, the producer and one of the co-writers Pharrell Williams, and the rapper T.I. dance, goofy and fully clothed, around them.

 

As an artifact of its time, it’s a remarkably deadened and nonsensical thing. But what most surprises me now is how pitiable the men seem, pulling at the models’ hair and playing air guitar for attention, less musical superstars than jejune dads who don’t exactly know what to do with the women they’ve paid to be naked. This is the raw power of the female body, and yet what kind of power is it, really? At one point, Thicke seems to push the model Emily Ratajkowski against a wall, hollering into her ear while she gazes away from him, a picture of barely suppressed disdain.

“Blurred Lines” instantly made Ratajkowski a star. She commands the video in both the PG-13 and unrated versions like a supernova, a vortex of pulchritude and screen presence and sticky red lip gloss. “They were the talent; we were more like props,” Ratajkowski writes of the men in her new book, My Body, and yet the women are the ones viewers can’t look away from. They’re so casual in their nudity, so composed, so unperturbed by the antics of the men objectifying them. Their sexuality seems to exist somehow outside the range of the camera’s gaze, outside the atmosphere of mortal men. But, of course, it doesn’t. In My Body, a collection of essays in which Ratajkowski scrutinizes the blessing and the curse of her physical self, she writes that Thicke groped her during filming that day, and that she said nothing; the incident was, in her eyes, a reminder of “how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at.” (Thicke has not publicly responded to the allegations.)

 

This book is Ratajkowski’s attempt to come to terms with her existence as a person who is, in the words of Derek Zoolander, really, really ridiculously good-looking. This experience is, she knows, particularly fraught for women and girls. Starting in middle school, Ratajkowski writes, she received mixed messages about her body—whether it provoked offense or pleasure, was too big or too small, made her strong or vulnerable. Commodifying it as a model at first brought her satisfaction. She writes: “All women are objectified and sexualized to some degree, I figured, so I might as well do it on my own terms. I thought that there was power in my ability to choose to do so.” Now? She’s not so sure, but nor has she entirely changed her mind.

My Body sits in this liminal space between reappraisal and self-defense. It’s a fascinating work: insightful, maddening, frank, strikingly solipsistic. Ratajkowski admits in her introduction that her awakening is still a half-finished one, and that the purpose of the book wasn’t “to arrive at answers” about the contradictions of selling her own image as a model, actor, and Instagram influencer with 28.5 million followers, but rather to “examine the various mirrors in which I’ve seen myself.” She senses, maybe, that she’s caught in an age-old quagmire (what the academic Sandra Bartky called “the disciplinary project of femininity”), but not that she’s become, by virtue of her fame and self-presentation, potentially complicit in the things she critiques. Writing, for Ratajkowski, seems to let her assert the fullness of her personhood and interiority, a rejection of the world’s determination to make her an object. But the narrowness of her focus—her physical self, essentially, and everything it’s meant for her—is limiting. Even her title, My Body, suggests conflicting things: ownership and depersonalization. What do you do when the subject you know best, the topic upon which you are the ultimate authority, is the same trap you’re trying to write your way out of?

The day I read most of this book was also the day that Ratajkowski uploaded to Instagram a series of photos published by the French magazine M. In the first, she holds a flesh-colored lollipop against her tongue. The third reveals her midriff, her nipple, and her leopard-patterned nails, but not her face. The cover line for the shoot reads: La Feminité à l’Offensive, with faux cils et ongles longs in smaller type, just to clarify that the aesthetic for the revolution is false eyelashes and long fingernails. Ratajkowski’s waist is tiny; her ribs are visible; her lips are pursed.

 

She has the right to find these pictures, this self-presentation, empowering. (“I love these images so much!” her caption reads.) But we also, as observers, have the right to interpret them—to wonder if doubling down on archaic tropes of female sexuality and the “tyranny of slenderness,” as Bartky put it, is actually good for anyone else. In her book’s epigraph, Ratajkowski pulls a quote on vanity from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a seminal BBC series and book that, among other things, crystallizes the bind women find themselves in as objects to be surveyed. The M pictorial made me think of a different Berger argument: Portraits are organized to reinforce the hierarchical status quo, and the women within them are arranged, he wrote, “to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.” Whose appetite is the lollipop feeding? Does it matter?

Ratajkowski doesn’t say much in the book about how women and girls might respond to images of her. That myopia is frustrating, because she’s so astute on the subject of how her body is interpreted by men. The project that became My Body began as an essay published last year in New York. In “Buying Myself Back,” the magazine’s most read story of 2020 (not exactly a quiet news year), Ratajkowski wrote about being sued by a paparazzo who took a picture of her on the street after she subsequently posted the photo on her Instagram, and buying half a Richard Prince “Instagram painting” based on an image of herself. She also alleged that she was sexually assaulted by a photographer who later published a book of nude photos of her without her consent. (The photographer denied the accusations to New York, saying, “You do know who we are talking about right? This is the girl that was naked in Treats! magazine, and bounced around naked in the Robin Thicke video at that time. You really want someone to believe she was a victim?”)

The essay was bracing and sharp. It distilled in careful prose the absurdity and powerlessness of being a product in the internet age. “I have learned that my image, my reflection, is not my own,” Ratajkowski writes. To cope, she starts to think of herself in split form: the “real” Emily and the one whose picture is appropriated by men in ways she can’t control. If Marx were alive, he might refer her to his theory of alienation: Under capitalism, Ratajkowski has essentially lost control of the work she produces, and her sense of self is fragmenting as a result. (Even Marx might be stunned by the audacity of Prince charging $80,000 for a picture he ripped right off Instagram and modified merely with the addition of his own sleazy comment.)

 

That Ratajkowski’s response to so much injustice might be to seize back control (and the means of production) for herself is understandable. But burning down a house that you are still very much inside is hard, which is maybe why so much of the rest of My Body feels impotent. It’s less a rallying cry for structural change than a dispassionate series of observations by someone who still sees themselves primarily as a commodity. Its tone is measured and numb. In the essay “Bc Hello Halle Berry,” the author develops headaches during a stay in a luxury Maldives resort paid for by a Qatari billionaire (in return for some Instagram uploads). As she posts a photo of herself wearing a bikini from her own line, only slightly mollified by the hundreds of thousands of likes it receives in under an hour, she ponders the ethics of using her body for profit. “Money means power,” she thinks. “And by capitalizing on my sexuality I have money. The whole damn system is corrupt and anyone who participates is just as guilty as I am … I have to make a living somehow.”

 

It seems uncharitable to point out that she’s drawing a false dichotomy—that there are options in between trading pictures of herself for free vacations and starving on the street. But that’s not the point. The issue that kept sticking with me as I read was that Ratajkowski so clearly wants to have it all: ultimate control over the sale of her image; power; money, yes; but also kudos for being more than an object, for being able to lucidly communicate how much she’s suffered because of a toxic system—and is still suffering because of her ongoing participation. It is, as they say, a lot to ask.

To her credit, Ratajkowski seems to occasionally sense the innate hypocrisy of her desires, her impulse “to have my Instagram hustle, selling bikinis and whatever else, while also being respected for my ideas and politics and well, everything besides my body.” In the essay “Beauty Lessons,” a recollection of how her priorities and self-esteem were shaped in part by a mother with her own internalized misogyny, Ratajkowski recalls learning as a child that the suffering attractive women endure at the hands of the world “was actually a good thing, a consequence of being beautiful and having access to male attention.” The world, she realizes, “isn’t kind to women who are overlooked by men.” When she starts modeling, she can’t remember ever actually enjoying the process of it, but she does enjoy the money she’s able to make, and the things she can buy. But the industry and its nebulous edges also present new compromises. In the essay “Transactions,” Ratajkowski writes about being paid $25,000 in 2014 to go to the Super Bowl with a Malaysian financier, a deal brokered by her manager at the time. She’s troubled by the “unspoken task I’d been hired to perform: to entertain the men who had paid me to be there.” To be a beautiful woman, she seems to conclude, is to exist in the hustle between obligation and power, this particular “spectrum of compromise.”

 

Becoming an author allows her to reject this setup. Writing a book that’s effectively a literary portrait of your own physical self, though, is to risk reinforcing all the preconceptions anyone has ever had about you. Ratajkowski is a graceful and thoughtful writer, and as I read her book I longed for her to turn her gaze outward, to write an essay about marriage plots or coffee or landscape architecture or Scooby-Doo. Or, beyond that, I wanted her to risk fully indicting modeling as a paradigm—to not merely note that her career took off after she lost 10 pounds from stomach flu and kept the weight off, but to probe what looking at images of so many skinny bodies all day does to girls as delicate and unformed as her own teenage self. To wonder not just how the inherently flawed bargain of modeling has damaged her, but how it damages everyone. To risk letting herself feel or uncover something that might be a catalyst for not just observation, but transformation.

What would that kind of growth cost her? At the very least, perfection. In her final essay, “Releases,” Ratajkowski writes about how she has long resisted anger because she sensed that anger makes women physically repulsive. “I try to make anything resembling anger seem spunky and charming and sexy,” she writes. “I fold it into something small, tuck it away. I invoke my most reliable trick—I project sadness—something vulnerable and tender, something welcoming, a thing to be tended to.” Thinking about women’s emotions being modulated by the primacy of staying sexy isn’t exactly new, but it’s dismaying all the same. If Ratajkowski still can’t get angry, unpleasantly angry, even in writing, for fear of sacrificing her power, what about the rest of us?

The Problem With Emily Ratajkowski’s My Body. By Sophie Gilbert. The Atlantic, November 11, 2021.

Uncomfortable honesty from the model and actor in an examination of what it means to be paid for your beauty and the boundaries of power

One afternoon, Emily Ratajkowski’s therapist took her up to the roof and presented her with a bowl of water balloons. Ratajkowski had awoken from a dream where she had been fighting, in a terrible rage, but when she tried to hit out it was “like being a ghost,” she explained, “something without a body”. Her therapist had suggested she throw things to access her anger, but the balloons were too colourful. They popped too gently. So her therapist handed her a jar and told her to think of someone she wanted to punish. It flew from her hand and shattered noisily against the wall. The essays she went on to write, now published in a collection titled My Body, read as those shards of glass, landing with purpose.

A couple of times I was reading her book in public, and acquaintances made variations on a snort at the idea of a collection of feminist essays by a person such as Ratajkowski, a model and actor who became famous dancing in a thong in Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines video, whose Instagram glitters with nudes and shots advertising her bikini collection. There was a similar noise internationally in 2020 when New York Magazine published one of these essays, Buying Myself Back, about the many ways in which she does not own her image, from attempting to buy a piece of art that is a screenshot of her face to the sexual assault by a photographer who later sold three separate books of Polaroids he’d taken of her that night. After people read it, the noise quieted. Rather than simply a story written from a place of great power and privilege, it was a story about that power and about that privilege. About the boundaries of a power that lies solely in beauty. Hers, readers found, was an extreme version of a reality familiar to many women who had also been forced to consider where their image ended and their self began.

The book continues in the same vein; essays that shock and illuminate as they walk around the central themes of what it means to be a woman and a commodity, poking at them with a variety of sharpened tools. One essay sees Ratajkowski waking in a $400m Maldivian resort with her husband, where she has been paid “a shit ton” to post pictures of their sponsored holiday. A headache blooms over the course of a restless day spent on the beach, checking Instagram as a picture of her ass collects a million likes and thinking darkly about money.

The tone is that of a thriller or horror film – the sense something terrible is looming, perhaps in the waves, perhaps in her phone, perhaps in her body. Contemplating the “glistening skin” of her hips in a bikini from her swimwear line, “the whole of the ocean stretched out before me and yet I felt trapped”. In another she accepts $25,000 from a billionaire to join him at the Super Bowl. Watching a model grind purposefully against him, Ratajkowski contemplates the transactional nature of her industry, both contracted and unspoken. “I liked to think I was different from women like her. But over time it became harder to hold on to that distinction or even believe in its virtue.” The model went on to marry a tech mogul, and peers who married pop stars suddenly got Vogue covers. “The world celebrates and rewards women who are chosen by powerful men,” she notes. “Wasn’t I on the same spectrum of compromise?” At times the reader is a popcorn-eating audience; at other times her therapist, offering balloons.

Throughout, glamour is tempered with boredom and, sometimes, pain. Early in her life Ratajkowski learned that beauty gave her power, but also that it was complicated. “It wasn’t just the way I looked that made the boys notice me, it was also my perceived status in the outside world as an attractive girl,” she writes, one eye then on Britney Spears, “a warning”. She learned to be wary of people who responded to her beauty; there’s a hidden violence present as she walks through parties. While filming the video that made her not just famous, but “famously sexy”, pop star Robin Thicke grabbed her breasts. It only occurred to her recently that “the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place.”

She describes the night in 2012 when a photographer violently assaulted her after a lingerie shoot, and his response to the essay’s fact-checker too: “This is the girl that… bounced around naked in the Robin Thicke video that time. You really want to believe she was a victim?” She treats it as a valid question. One essay is a letter to another photographer who, it’s clear, underestimated her. She tells him the story of Audrey Munson, an artist’s muse whose likeness is scattered across New York, and who attempted suicide before being buried in an unmarked grave. “I think of her and the other naked women who line the walls of museums,” Ratajkowski writes, each one anonymous, forgotten, dead. Upon realising her nude shoots had led to her being cast in Gone Girl, after director David Fincher asked Ben Affleck for someone “whom men were obsessed with and women hated”, it’s clear all her achievements are curdled by a squeeze of lemon.

It’s thrilling, often, to sit with Ratajkowski in the roiling surf of her life, in elegant stories written with uncomfortable honesty. It’s revelatory, too, to explore digital life and body politics through the eyes of a person whose body shapes a discourse, and unexpectedly moving to see the bruises left behind. The only problem with this being a smart and glittering collection of essays, rather than simply the glamorous celebrity memoir Ratajkowski could have sold, is that its quality reveals its limits.

Read as memoir, it’s extraordinary; read as activism, it’s unsatisfying. Her commentary on the industry she’s chosen is passionate and chilling, and yet at times rings hollow, in part because of her reluctance to subvert the male gaze she critiques. She returns to the concept that her power lies in her body, without interrogating the idea that her body could also walk away.

It’s fair, of course, for her to criticise the system she works within, but it’s unclear whether she cares enough to change it. To do so would mean (among other things) leaving social media, where images remain commodities to be exploited and crushed, often taking women’s identities down with them. Just because she can see the problems (capitalism, beauty standards, misogyny) are structural doesn’t mean she is not implicated in them. Or, indeed, is not perpetuating them daily.

But perhaps this project is a beginning. Perhaps it’s not Ratajkowski’s responsibility to overthrow the patriarchy, or redefine beauty, or destabilise capitalism. Perhaps it is enough for her to simply write a dazzling book considering the contradictions of living in a body like hers. To hold her stories up to the light, shards of glass, and see which ones draw blood.

 

My Body by Emily Ratajkowski review – revelatory essays. By Eva Wiseman. The Guardian, November 14, 2021.