![]() ![]() But, despite how harrowing these incidents seem, Ratajkowski is honest about the competitive pride and pleasure that she took in being able to sustain such indignities, and triumph over them. This is just one of many physical violations that Ratajkowski recounts having incurred from the licentious men in her orbit. Ratajkowski long maintained to the press that there was nothing anti-feminist about the video, in which she cavorts suggestively around Thicke, but, in a new essay from the book, called “Blurred Lines,” she reconsiders, confronted by a memory of Thicke groping her bare breasts from behind without permission. She got her big break when she was cast in the music video for “ Blurred Lines,” the megahit single, from 2013, by Robin Thicke, Pharrell, and T.I., which stirred up a blizzard of debate over its questionable lyrics: “I hate these blurred lines / I know you want it,” Thicke croons. Ratajkowski recalls the unsettling working conditions she experienced and the crass comments she received on shoots as she navigated this universe early in her career. It still seems to have eluded the formal reckoning that so many adjacent industries have faced in the wake of #MeToo. ![]() ![]() The modelling industry, as examined in documentaries like “Picture Me” and “Girl Model,” is exploitative by design. “Money meant freedom and control.” The central, and perhaps most exasperating, contradiction of “My Body” is Ratajkowski’s warring descriptions of her career path-one moment, being on display is an act of pure empowerment that makes her feel “badass,” “special,” “in control.” The next, her career is a hideous double bind that she pursues strictly in the name of financial security, or because people won’t take anything but her looks seriously. “I considered my life and work as a model as a temporary situation,” she writes. She dropped out of college after a year to pursue modelling full time, a choice that, she explains, coolly, was purely about money. With the support of her parents-whom Ratajkowski lightly condemns as overenthusiastic about the prospect of having a professionally stunning daughter-she signed with a modelling agent as a teen-ager. Ratajkowski’s mother was particularly fixated on her beauty, observing with glee the way men reacted to her daughter when she was as young as twelve. Ratajkowski grew up in Southern California, a child of the nineties and early two-thousands who, like most of her peers, eagerly lapped up the images of complicated pop stars like Britney Spears. Beauty is not an antidote to emotional anguish or self-doubt, but, instead, a breeding ground for more insecurity: “I so desperately craved men’s validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect,” she writes. If there is a thesis statement to be drawn from Ratajkowski’s somewhat muddled, overly lyrical début, it’s that physical beauty-in particular, a near-perfect, if outdated, sort of beauty-is a heavy cross to bear. In her new essay collection, aptly titled “ My Body” after her foremost preoccupation, Ratajkowski attempts to reckon with how her appearance has shaped her personal relationships, her career, and her psyche. Lauded for her beauty since she was a young girl, and made world-famous by her topless appearance in a music video, in 2013, Ratajkowski has spent decades receiving the world’s lecherous gaze, metabolizing it, inviting it, rejecting it, capitalizing on it, and agonizing over it. assumed by the mass media, and often by magazine readers and movie watchers as well, to be eternal, transcendent.”) This is the position from which Emily Ratajkowski, the model and entrepreneur, writes. Even in the era of supposed body positivity and self-acceptance, the amount of resources devoted per woman to grooming, primping, nipping, and tucking toward some aspirational physical ideal is extraordinary, and yet so easily shrugged off as part of everyday life.īut what about the rare women who are those physical ideals, the women born with the supernatural beauty to which others aspire? (These are the women whom Naomi Wolf crudely described, in “ The Beauty Myth,” as “gaunt, yet full-breasted Caucasian, not often found in nature. The undue burden placed on women to maintain their appearance-and to be constantly appraised on the basis of physical attractiveness, both covertly and overtly-is one such injustice. Some injustices are so self-evident and quotidian that they lose their capacity to enrage. ![]()
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