Emily Ratajkowski reveals the cost of becoming a sex symbol in new book, My Body
Amid another media storm, Emily Ratajkowski speaks candidly about the moment she was assaulted on the set of the controversial music video Blurred Lines.
Emily Ratajkowski has a control issue. And a significant one at that. It’s four weeks out from the release of her debut book My Body – a collection of intimately rendered essays – and editors at a UK newspaper have leaked passages from the chapter detailing her 2013 experience on the set of the controversial music video Blurred Lines in which she claims singer Robin Thicke groped her breast.
A clickbait frenzy has ensued with ‘Sexual Assault!’ headlines dominating home pages worldwide. It’s not the kind of pre-publicity she had envisioned.
“It’s definitely frustrating and made me wonder if I’m doing the right thing by publishing the book,” the 30-year-old model, designer, activist and now author laments over Zoom, late one evening from her New York apartment.
“I felt a real sense of determination and purpose around it and now I just feel like it’s all just going to be diminished! All I can hope for is that people will read the book.”
It’s also ironic considering control is a major theme of the book. An immersive experience in which Ratajkowski delves into significant moments of her life, My Body is not a memoir: it’s more like listening to tracks off an album. Each piece stands alone rather than as a chapter and although it starts with her childhood experiences and builds through to present day, there’s no definitive chronological order.
She tells Vogue Australia that this work is a means of showing all sides to herself. “Making myself real to people. The more I modelled or the more success I had on social, the less connected I felt to that image and the person that the public knows as ‘Emrata’. The book is an evolution of my politics and beliefs, and the experiences that have led me to have a nuanced understanding of power.”
Growing up in San Diego, the only child of an English professor mother and a father who taught art, beauty was highly prized in the Ratajkowski household. She describes her mother as “classically beautiful” and “likened to Elizabeth Taylor [or] a young Vivien Leigh”. She recalls how her parents encouraged her modelling, driving her to castings the way her “classmates parents drove them to local soccer tournaments” and posting professional pictures of her on Facebook.
A role in television series iCarly, television commercials, lingerie advertising and music-video cameos ensued and at 21, Ratajkowski was cast in the infamous Blurred Lines video sporting nothing but a flesh-coloured G-string, white platform sneakers and bright red lips. It topped the US charts for 12 weeks and has chalked up more than 800 million YouTube views to date.
Some interpreted the lyrics as promoting rape (“I know you want it”), seeing it as sickening and misogynistic. Others found it compelling – inspiring young women to claim ownership of their sexuality: the goofy expressions; the cavorting around a suited-up Robin Thicke, Pharrell and T.I.; Ratajkowski’s epic eye-rolls. Her obvious ease made it seem as if she was very much in on the joke.
The work ramped up and a New York agency signed her. Sports Illustrated shoots, Super Bowl commercials, countless magazine covers, runway appearances for European fashion houses, screen-siren movie roles and a successful swimwear line (Inamorata) would follow over the next nine years, along with an Instagram feed currently clocking 28.5 million followers.
Predominantly bikini selfies and shots of Emily undoubtedly living her best life (cue black-and-white nude shots writhing around on a hotel bathroom floor while holidaying on tropical islands and dancing to Drake), Instagram also gave her a platform to share her political sentiments: women’s marches, Black Lives Matter material, and campaigning for Bernie Sanders and the non-profit Planned Parenthood.
Then three years ago, Ratajkowski started jotting down notes in her phone, which moved to a Google doc, that then morphed into essay form. “I never had any intention of publishing them,” she insists. “There were a lot of things I was working through – and how I saw the world.”
Growing up, she’d thought of herself as “savvy” and “a hustler”. Someone in possession of a commodifiable asset who took pride from building a successful and lucrative career off her physical assets. “All women are objectified and sexualised to some degree,” she writes in the book. “[So] I figured, I might as well do it on my terms. I thought that there was power in my ability to choose to do so.”
In hindsight, Ratajkowski recognises what she has experienced as being far more complicated. She talks about how being labelled a sex symbol has resulted in her feeling even more objectified and limited: indebted to the men whose desire granted her that power. And while her success has meant she moves in wealthy, powerful circles, that’s not true empowerment.
“I’ve capitalised on my body within the confines of a cis-hetero, capitalist, patriarchal world, one in which beauty and sex appeal are valued solely through the satisfaction of the male gaze,” she writes. “Whatever influence and status I’ve gained were only granted to me because I appealed to men.”
The realisation that this empowerment was a sham shattered the identity she’d created for herself, forcing her to confront the reality of the relationship she now had with her body. It’s something she believes many women experience. “Power – and that double-edged sword that comes with sexualising yourself – or being sexualised … I really want to start conversations around the power dynamics that have been hidden here.”
Conversations like those she has had with her girlfriends, fuelled by the writers who have inspired her: Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings, Audre Lorde’s Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women. Like Taddeo, Ratajkowski is fascinated with exploring female desire and judgment and how they impact our friendships.
“I’ve learned the way we judge each other can feel like life or death to a lot of women,” she says. “We become experts at assessing other women’s attractiveness and must have a sense of where we stand in the hierarchy of women. It’s the culture we live in and the way the world operates that makes women feel that way.”
Ageing is another area she’d like to explore further. “The fading of beauty will be a book when I know more about it,” she says. “I’ve watched the evolution of Halle Berry and Demi Moore and it can be liberating. But I also think it can be terrifying if beauty has been a big part of a woman’s life. It can shatter an identity.”
The conversation circles back to control again, particularly the intimate essay, Buying Myself Back, where Ratajkowski wrestles with incidents around exploitation, image ownership and consent. Within that she recalls an experience at age 23, when an Instagram image of her – a nude photograph taken for a Sports Illustrated cover – had been printed on an oversized canvas as part of the New Portraits series of artist Richard Prince’s Instagram ‘paintings’ that were exhibited at the Gagosian and sold for US$90,000.
“It felt validating and flattering to have an important artist say you’re worthy of being art,” she says. “But then it also made me feel irrelevant and insignificant.” She sighs. “At the time I definitely thought it was cool and exciting, but then in those quiet moments, something just felt off about it in my body.”
Male artists profiteering from her is a problem battled on a regular basis. There was the time paparazzi photographer Robert O’Neill sued her for posting on Instagram, a shot he’d taken of her walking on the street carrying flowers. Then there was the exploitation at the hands of photographer Jonathan Leder who she sat for in an unpaid editorial shoot, aged 20. Years later when her fame grew, Leder released an unauthorised book, Emily Ratajkowski, made up of Polaroids taken that day: images she describes as some of “the most compromising and sexual photos of me ever taken”. (She also reveals that on the day of the shoot, Leder plied her with copious glasses of wine and sexually assaulted her. Leder denies that allegation.)
Several exhibitions and book reprints followed, none of which she has had the power to stop without tangling both parties up in a draining and costly legal battle. “It’s a great example of how a young woman can commodify her image and body to succeed,” she tells me, “but the lack of control [I’ve had] is a perfect example of how that hasn’t been true.”
There are chapters in her life where Ratajkowski has had to surrender control. In March, she gave birth to her now eight-month-old son Sylvester Apollo Bear (aka Sly), an experience that made her see her body in an entirely new light.
“Everyone talks about the beauty behind pregnancy, but every day I’d wake up, experience a new symptom and wonder, ‘What’s going on inside my body?’ I was thinking, ‘I’m going to have an alien inside my body that’s going to take over!’ What happened for me was this new-found appreciation for what my body does day to day. It’s just not this thing to be looked at, but this thing that takes me through life.”
When I ask how she’s preparing to raise a boy, I’m imagining their dinner-table topics set to take place in the future – middle-class white dominance, systemic patriarchy and the Me Too movement – but Ratajkowski is taking it one day at a time.
“I definitely believe you need to communicate with your child and share your realities of the female experience – what it’s really like. And how that’s different from what he may know in his own space.”
I also tell Ratajkowski I’m passing on my preview copy of My Body to my 17-year-old daughter who is desperate to devour it. An admission that genuinely floors her. “That means so much. That’s the best. I’m curious to know what she thinks.”
As for my 16-year-old’s request to pester her about when she will be restocking the best-selling Figure Orpheus bikini top on the Inamorata website? I’ll leave that one for now. But what testament to her power.
My Body (Quercus Books, $32.99) by Emily Ratajkowski, is out now.
This article appears in the December issue of Vogue Australia, on sale November 29.
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