Emily Ratajkowski takes stock of what she gained and lost by selling her image

The New York Times

On a September morning in New York’s Soho neighborhood, Inamorata’s bright, airy office was filled with women. They sat at communal tables, between racks from which hung swimsuits, bikinis, and “city sets” (sets of round-necked blouses and cycling shorts, all carrying versions of the company logo, which also adorned the bathroom towels), and they were all delighted with a baby.

Sylvester is eight months old and is the son of the fashion company’s founder and CEO, Emily Ratajkowski. The baby and Colombo, Ratajkowski’s giant husky, were the only boys present.

“As you can see, we’re in my safe space,” said Ratajkowski, sitting on a pink velvet sofa in front of the room where the company’s staff was tending her son. “When you own your company, you decide which images of your body will circulate in the world.”

For her, control is very important. Since 2013, when she became famous dancing half-naked in the video for “Blurred Lines”, by Robin Thicke, images of Ratajkowski have been circulating on the internet. Of the movie “Exemplary Girl”, from David Fincher, to photos taken by paparazzi, to fashion photos, to Ratajkowski’s social media posts, her face is omnipresent. And he is even identified by “tags” when people see him in tattoos.

In 2018, when she was at the height of a career as a model that she thought would be temporary (she left her studies at the University of California at Los Angeles in 2010 and needed money), Ratajkowski was informed that her mother, Kathleen Balgley, was English teacher, she suffered from amyloidosis, a chronic and abnormal formation of protein in her hands.

And it was at that moment, said Ratajkowski, that she began to “realize that something was missing.” Alone in Los Angeles while her husband, film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, worked in New York, she began writing.

The resulting essays, collected in the book “My Body,” which comes out on Metropolitan Books on Nov. 9, reveal a person whose political position and sense of identity are clearly in progress.

“I wrote to try to find out exactly what I believed in,” she said.

In the essay “Blurred Lines”, Ratajkowski returns to the set of a video that has been criticized as degrading and even “like a rape“, and reflects on misogyny and the role she played in it. At the time, she was 21 and saw the experience as an “empowerment”, she writes, as an opportunity to show her sexuality on camera and use it in your benefit.

Now, at age 30, she realizes how naive she was.

“Whether you’re wearing a burqa or whether you’re wearing a bikini,” he said, “we operate within the very specific limits of a capitalist, patriarchal, cisgender, straight world.”

(She added that “I always shock people when I use words like that, because it’s like I’m trying to annoy.”)

It may not be especially radical to explore the power imbalance between those who pose and those who contemplate. But Ratajkowski, who has worked to create tens of millions of followers on social media, comes to this topic with an unusually influential voice.

“It’s like she’s a secret agent inside the beauty industry who has reached its highest peaks and is now revealing to us the way things are, without mincing words,” said Michael Schulman, a journalist who moderated a conversation between Ratajkowski and comedian Amy Schumer at the New Yorker Festival in September.

But the sector has also infiltrated the secret agent. In the “Bc Hello Halle Berry” essay, Ratajkowski has an existential crisis about being paid to post a photo of her ass during an all-expenses-paid trip to the Maldives, writing that “I wish I could have my scheme on Instagram, sell bikinis and everything else, and also to be respected for my ideas and my political position and, well, for everything else besides my body.” She writes that her hypocrisy gives her headaches.

To gain the respect he seeks, Ratajkowski has done his homework. In December 2019, she contacted writer Stephanie Danler (“Sweetbitter”, “Stray”), to ask for advice, and the two became friends.

“Actually, she taught herself how to write the book,” said Danler. “He spent a lot of time reading just nonfiction, book after book, as if he were doing a self-employed master’s program.”

Among Ratajkowski’s influences, there are “The Empathy Exams”, by Leslie Jamison (“obviously”), “The Reckonings”, by Lacy Johnson (“one of my favorite books and nobody knows it, which I think is crazy”), as well as “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel”, by Alexander Chee, and “Three Women”, de Lisa Taddeo.

Sara Bershtel, editor of Ratajkowski at the Metropolitan, said the contract for the book was signed in late 2020, shortly after The Cut website published “Buying Myself Back”, an essay that is part of the book. In the text, Ratajkowski reports moments when she saw images of her being bought, sold and shared without her permission, in one case by a photographer she accused of sexual assault. It was the most read text of the publication that year.

“I learned that my image, my reflection, does not belong to me,” she wrote.

The rehearsal resulted in numerous expressions of support. Still, as she prepares for the book’s release, Ratajkowski insists that her renown actually hurts her.

“I ended up incorporating the fact that I wasn’t taken seriously, and that I was treated just like a body,” she said. “If you’re a celebrity who wants to write a book,” she added, “it’s just that a lot of doors open for you, but not in the right way.”

Ratajkowski said he asked the Metropolitan to publicize “My Body” as a work comparable to “Misfits”, the memoir of Michaela Coel, actress and screenwriter awarded like Emmy.

“I love the way things turned out for her on ‘I May Destroy You.’ I think it was very interesting, it started a dialogue, and that’s all I want,” said Ratajkowski. “It was weird to realize that, oh, it won’t be the same for me.”

She made a point of distancing herself from a genre of books, especially. “Look, there are a lot of decent celebrity books on the planet,” she said. “My book is not in that category.”

Bershtel clarifies the distinction. “The purpose of the book is not to increase her fame,” said the publisher. Instead, “it’s a book dedicated to exploring the ideas and contradictions and paradoxes that preoccupy her.”

For Ratajkowski, “My Body” is not about her life as a model. “Every woman I know – no matter what she looks like, or whether she has marketed her image or not – knows what it’s like to be looked at, to be rejected, or to receive attention for her appearance,” she said.

In the book, she articulates the pressures she felt to give in to male dictates, whether dancing in a flesh-colored thong for Thicke and Pharrell, or dating a boy who forced her to have sex in high school (“I wish I did.” someone had explained to me that I didn’t owe him anything”), whether by playing the “perfect woman” at a party for Bear-McClard in Hollywood, where she was grabbed and insulted by colleagues from the “boys club” of your husband.

But “one thing I hope people will learn from the book is that it’s not just another story of someone who’s been hurt, another #MeToo story,” she said. “The book is about capitalism. I have a very specific asset, and I used it, and I think a lot of women do. Even in marriage.”

Ratajkowski doesn’t plan to stop modeling because he likes the job, and because “I want to keep making money.” Plus, even if it did, she said, “I’m still going to continue to be connected to the celebrity because we all are.”

Ratajkowski knows he is in a minority among models – and writers – for his ability to control the narrative the way he does: creating a self-portrait like NFT and sell it at auction for $175,000, which she did in May; not resorting to babysitters to take care of the child, “because it’s something I like to do for myself”; or create a personal brand. But at the same time, releasing a book also means giving up control.

“It’s scary to think that someone is going to extract a quote from the book and say that’s what I said about some juicy gossip,” said Ratajkowski, correctly predicting a headline circulating in the Times of London weeks later: “‘Blurred Lines’ singer Robin Thicke attacked me on set, says Emily Ratajkowski.”

(Thicke representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)

Thicke is just one of many subjects covered in a narrative that will inevitably be exploited to generate “views” on the internet.

“This is not a book where I try to cancel the men I’ve met in my life,” she said. “I’m trying to defy expectations and also talk about nuances – in my identity, but also in life and my political beliefs. And we’re not living in an era of nuances.”