Emily Ratajkowski on beauty, her body and double standards
There’s no point denying it. Emily Ratajkowski is beautiful. She has a beautiful face, a beautiful body. I think, should her debut collection of essays, My Body, have pretended otherwise, I may have thrown it across the room. But it does quite the opposite. It actively engages with it; it quite literally naval-gazes her naval. Ratajkowski has essentially put pen to paper to say: ‘I’m beautiful. Let’s discuss.’
The model and actress, now 30, shot to instant fame, aged 21, as 'that naked girl in the Blurred Lines video' – a moment which immediately cemented her body as her USP. That she has chosen her body as the central tenet of her essay collection, many might view as a facetious, yet that notion feeds into exactly what Ratajkowski is keen to analyse: female beauty and why we celebrate and commodify it as much as we diminish the intelligence of those who possess it. But make no mistake, My Body is an excellent – if we excuse the pun – body of work. Ratajkowski writes with curiosity, intellect, and an acute awareness, even celebration of, the thorny, messy web of contradictions that make up our relationship with female bodies.
“I will proclaim all of my mistakes and contradictions,” she writes in the penultimate essay of the book. When she speaks with me over Zoom from the New York apartment she shares with her husband, the film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, and their eight-month old son, Sylvester Apollo, she reiterates the central inconsistency of her book and, of course, her life: Emily Ratajkowski is sick of being reduced to just a body, but Emily Ratajkowski has often reduced herself to just a body.
“I do think that my experience as a public persona has so much been about image and that's been my doing as well – that's what I put out into the world,” she says. “ So I've had a hard time finding a way to communicate the nuance behind that image.” In that sense, I ask, would the book be, not so much a reimagined Emily Ratajkowski but a reintroduction to her? This is not a new Emily, but an Emily we just haven’t noticed before? “I hope so,” she laughs. “I don't want to be someone who wants external validation. But, of course, I’m looking forward to people thinking of me as more than just the kind of image that they're familiar with.”
While rooted in her relationship with her body, the essays cover a whole range of topics, from the tabloid-fodder revelations about abusive celebrities and photographers on sets, to incredibly personal, raw accounts of her childhood, the loss of her virginity and her early experiences modelling. These are at turns beautifully written vignettes, poetic snapshots, and polemics. What may surprise readers is not so much the quality of the prose, which is excellent, but that it is not an easy, pop-feminism read. It’s a searingly personal piece, which frequently asks more questions than it answers.
“I don’t have all the answers, and that’s the point, right?” she says, telling me she found the writing process, which she began for fun – long before she even dreamed of publishing – a liberating experience. “Most of this is stuff I’ve been saying just to myself, but putting them ‘out loud’ on the page in that sort of permanence was definitely cathartic.”
The first time Ratajkowski said something ‘out loud’ was in 2013 when she famously defended her choice to dance naked in the Blurred Lines video and proclaimed herself a feminist. Feathers were ruffled, think pieces were spawned. Can a naked gyrating woman next to a fully clothed man be a feminist? Who does this naked woman calling herself a feminist think she is? Thus, nudity became Ratajkowski’s first battleground, and, in many ways, it remains one in My Body. She begins the book with a quote from John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’: ‘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.’
It appears we are still failing to wrestle female nudity from its centuries-old image as a tool for male sexual titillation, and her essays add to an ongoing evaluation of this. She explores whether we can ever remove the female body from the male gaze and whether the shame we feel about our bodies can ever be extracted from the patriarchal double standard of enjoying female nudity and condemning the woman herself for having stripped. “In several of the nude photoshoots I’ve done there are elements where I feel confident and powerful,” she remembers. “But there’s always a point where I think, is the power of my body ever mine? That's sort of the question I'm asking, and I don't have an answer for that.”
“Back when I made those comments about Blurred Lines, I was fully into ‘choice’ feminism; that it’s feminist to be nude purely because it’s my choice,” she explains. “I don’t really believe that now. I’m more interested in the power women can have by either really engaging with their sexuality or completely avoiding it. Because I do feel like every woman is sort of on the same scale, trying to figure out where and how they want to find that balance.”
Choice is, of course, entirely relative in a patriarchal and capitalist structure where, unavoidably, your body may just pay the bills. But interestingly enough, Ratajkowski does not descend down this well-worn path – instead she takes a very refreshing deep-dive into the uncomfortable reality of the hierarchy of beauty and how frequently this is propped up by other women.
“My whole experience with my body has been that I knew from a young age it made me ‘special’, that boys would like me more, that it could make you cool or popular,” she says, with a candidness taken straight from her own pages. “I had an ex-boyfriend’s mother who only had sons and she said to me: ‘If I'd had a daughter, I would like make sure that she looked like you. I would talk to her about her weight.’ And, of course, my initial reaction was to be totally horrified. But you know, when I was writing this book, and thinking about these ideas, I realised that, in her way, she was trying to protect her daughter, because she's thinking, 'if my daughter's thin and attractive, then she's more likely to have success in the world'. And that is, unfortunately, just true.”
This frankness is the best part of Ratajkowski’s book. She is not afraid to point out her contradictions and she is equally happy to point out everyone else’s. We follow her because she is, let’s face it, hot. But we then vilify her for using that hotness to her fiscal advantage and refuse to allow her any more nuance than ‘hot girl’. We live in a world where female beauty is currency, and her essays explore that from both a personal perspective – she recounts her mother instilling in her the power of being beautiful – and a broader one: will we ever not judge a woman solely by her outer casing?
It is articulated most wonderfully when I ask her if she would have passed on these lessons about beauty and power to her daughter if she had had one. “When I found out I was having a son, I felt this huge relief, which I think is really telling because I realised I didn’t have to worry how I was going to teach my daughter about attractiveness and about the power of her body in that way,” she reveals. “You mean, you won’t have to teach your son these things?” I joke. “Exactly the point,” she laughs.
Before we end the interview, we discuss Ratajkowski’s feelings about the release of her second child: her book. Before it has even been birthed, it has been drawing attention and its fair share of cynicism. “I know how it will be discussed, before anyone has even read it,” she says, wryly, rolling her eyes. “But I want people to bring all the assumptions they have about me to the book, and hopefully they’ll see all the other parts of me: the disempowered parts, the empowered parts and the all-these-things-at-once parts.”
We say goodbye, and the image of Emily Ratajkowski – beautiful as ever – disappears from my screen. The person behind that image, however, lingers long afterwards.
‘My Body’ by Emily Ratajkowski is out now. SHOP NOW
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