The very phrase “buying myself back” presupposes women’s bodies are products designed to entice male buyers. Still, for all her self-awareness, Ratajkowski stops short of exploring the full implications of her alienation. When she strips for a shoot, she “disassociates”: “I don’t even really recognize my body as me.” Women can neither fully escape nor fully inhabit bodies that men are bent on appropriating Her body is valuable only insofar as it functions as a commodity, “a tool I use to make a living as a model”. Though Ratajkowski grasps that her allure is a form of power, she also understands that “whatever influence and status I’ve gained were only granted to me because I appealed to men”. The anecdotes in My Body dramatise what is always true, if often implicit: that women can neither fully escape nor fully inhabit bodies that men are bent on appropriating. As I rifled through accounts of inappropriate advances and catcalls, I wondered why Ratajkowski chose to devote so much space to relatively common degradations, rather than focusing on the more exotic indignities that she endured as she became famous.īut as I read on, I realised that the depressing familiarity of the abuses that Ratajkowski chronicles is precisely the point. She recalls her fixation on Britney Spears, her childhood home in San Diego, and, above all, her relentless objectification at the hands of various romantic interests and employers. My Body is more of a non-linear memoir than a compendium of essays – though Ratajkowski’s musings are nominally organised into discrete sections, they seem to bleed into a more general autobiographical jumble – and many of Ratajkowski’s reminiscences date back to her adolescence. At first, I suspected this made the book boring. “And then obsessively check the likes to see if the internet agrees.Few women are this prominent, and even fewer turn out to be unwilling fodder for celebrated artists – but on the whole, what is striking about My Body is not how different a renowned supermodel’s experiences are from those of an everywoman, but rather how continuous. “I post pictures which I think are a testament of my beauty,” she writes. “Why did I moan and whimper softly? Who taught me not to scream? I hated myself.”ĭespite her model looks, Emily insists she’s actually very insecure. “Why did my 15-year-old self not scream at the top of my lungs?” she writes. Heartbreakingly, she recalls a traumatic incident where a 16-year-old boy she trusted in school “forced” himself on her when she was 15. “I hated that he might have found another girl more attractive than me,” she confesses, and admits she spent “hours” looking up the girls and comparing herself to them. She remembers lying in bed with her first boyfriend after having sex and feeling jealous when he started talking about other girls he’d been with and describing their bodies. Her obsession with her image started at a young age. “And this particular ensemble brought me validation attention from both adult men in the streets and my peers at school.” “My mother always told me to take pleasure in the way I looked,” she reflects. When she was 13 her father quietly asked her to get changed before a family dinner after she donned a pink, lacy top and a push-up bra. Picture: emrata/InstagramĮmily remembers feeling “confused” by her beauty and how she should use it. “But in other, less overt ways, I’ve felt objectified and limited by my position in the world as a so-called sex symbol.”Įmily remembers feeling “confused” by her beauty and how she should use it. “I built a platform by sharing images of myself and my body online,” she writes in her deeply personal book. The music video has been viewed over 721 million times on YouTube and is one of the best-selling songs of all time.īut her fame came at a price as she claims she lost “control” of her image – and her body. I was nothing more than a hired mannequin,” she writes. “I didn’t have any real power as the naked girl dancing around in his music video. He smiled a goofy grin and stumbled backward, his eyes concealed by sunglasses.”ĭespite feeling embarrassed and “shocked”, Emily admits she didn’t complain, fearing it could ruin her career. “I instinctively moved away, looking back at Robin Thicke. “Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt the coolness and foreignness of a stranger’s hands cupping my bare breasts from behind,” she writes. Emily in the music video for Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines.
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