My Body, by Emily Ratajkowski: furious, conflicted and frustrating

The model and activist’s first essay collection meditates on her own #MeToo moments
Getty Images

Who’d be as beautiful as Emily Ratajkowski? My Body - the model’s first essay collection - is a quietly furious disquisition on flesh and capitalism, and the queasy commodification of women’s bodies, by a woman whose perfectly proportioned one has won her fame, acclaim, piles of money - and in turn, a fragmented, dissociative relationship with it. Extraordinarily perhaps, it is (often) sympathetic, (fairly) self-aware - and in an age of simplistic outrage, (quite) nuanced.

Ratajkowski’s reputation precedes her, of course: the cartoonishly beautiful Californian model who - as she notes - went from jobbing catalogue clothes horse to fetishised icon after starring in the Blurred Lines video, a now-cancelled song which treats consent as merely an obstacle to be sidestepped (‘you know you want it’). They were different times, the early 2010s. In it, Ratajkowski danced in very little. Eight years later, she has 28.5 million Instagram followers, her own bikini range, a contract with L’Oreal and - now - a book deal.

Ratajkowski seems tortured by how much of her fame, her career, her money she feels she owes to Robin Thicke, a man whom she alleges in her opening essay, also called Blurred Lines, groped her on the set of the video. (He has not responded to the allegation.) That essay, one of the strongest in the collection, is her attempt to explain the video and her gradual, horrified realisation that behaviour she’d considered to be empowering, was perhaps not straightforwardly so. “In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me 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 writes. “Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over”.

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Ratajkowski, pictured in New York this month
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Call her naive, though she was barely out of her teens in the Blurred Lines video, and her agency was complicated by the fact she was a pawn for an actual modelling agent. Anyway, this complicated equation between empowerment and exploitation is the theme of the book and the admission, that she feels complicit in her own commodification, is by turns fascinating and frustrating. Modelling is her resistance, sometimes her ruin; she can’t seem to reconcile it herself. Though sometimes, she is more straightforwardly unsympathetic. See: the free holidays to exotic resorts in exchange for a few sunset Instagram photos. It is also at points galling to have a beautiful white woman talk about how difficult it is to be these things.

Still, she seems truly tormented by how her looks can also limit her and longs to be seen as more than just a “piece of ass”. Dismiss her and you feel complicit too; mostly, the book left me confused and very affected by her vulnerability. She has been treated appallingly by men at all stages of her life, from a toxic, abusive high school boyfriend to noxious (male) model agent after noxious (male) model agent. In Buying Myself Back, the best essay of the collection, a version of which was published in The Cut last year - she recalls dealing with male photographers (and their fans) who have abused her trust and her body. I’d defy anyone not to see her as the victim. Her honesty when discussing the complicated high of male attention feels blazingly taboo. You feel keenly that she came of age in the noughties (Ratajkowski was born in 1991) - a child of California in the era of Britney and Lindsay Logan, an era when young women were objectified and ridiculed and hounded by paparazzi.

Many of the essays tread similar ground; some of them feel gauzy, pondering and over-written, and don’t quite fit into any coherent narrative. She is at her best when she is clear-eyed and angry. Beauty Lessons is about how she internalised the notion of beauty as a prize - in part thanks to her parents - and how this set her up for a life of seeking validation. Transactions spotlights the seediness of Hollywood, a #MeToo montage that is by now feels depressingly old hat but finds power in its sleazy, specific details (being paid $25,000 to go to the Super Bowl; a druggy, compromised trip to Coachella) and in Ratajkowski’s own complicated feelings about it all. I was reminded that we’re still in the aftershock of #MeToo, working through it and what it means and how it can actually effect change that changes anything for real women. Ratajkowski is acknowledging that ambiguity.

Time and again, she wonders how much she gained and how much she lost from her career. “On a good day,  I’d call people sexist who condemned a woman for capitalising on her body; on a bad day, I’d hate myself and my body, and every decision I’d made in my life seemed like a glaring mistake.”  Knowing something is complicated does not absolve you from being complicit in complicating it, and the collection never really comes up with an answer to this. But perhaps there isn’t one.

My Body is out now (£16.99, Quercus)

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