This is what her critics find difficult to get around: her awareness of the limitations of ‘female empowerment’ and her insistence, nevertheless, on Go get it girl as a modus operandi. She cites sex workers as an example of women commodifying their bodies for survival, pleasure or control, saying she feels similarly about ‘girls and social media’: I’m like, go get it, honey if that’s what you want to do in the system that we live in. But, however much Ratajkowski allows for certain ambiguities in the way she exploits her own body, there is an implacability to her position. Mega-platforms such as Instagram and Facebook hold far greater responsibility than she does. If Ratajkowski stops promoting a certain version of femininity on Instagram, it won’t make much difference to how capitalism exploits and abuses the bodies and minds of young women. And, you know, it turns women against each other as well, in a way that I don’t like … I want to look at the larger cultural framework. It’s sort of like, you know, if I dress differently, then girls won’t think that they have to show their boobs in a shirt … I think that it again puts so much pressure on young women to kind of change the system. Ratajkowski agrees that it can be a ‘toxic’ place, but thinks it shouldn’t be up to her alone to change this – that the culture needs to think collectively, systematically, about the way it looks at women: That’s just not my politics. What, exactly, had changed? In her interview, Swisher asks if she worries about contributing to the ‘unattainable standard of beauty’ that Instagram promotes. I thought that there was power in my ability to choose to do so.īut she’s come to understand that she’s on a ‘spectrum of compromise’ that her body became a valuable commodity only ‘within the confines of a cis-hetero, capitalist, patriarchal world … in which beauty and sex appeal are valued solely through the satisfaction of the male gaze.’įrom the conciliatory, almost apologetic tone, you’d have thought Ratajkowski had put her sex kitten days behind her, but her Instagram postbook looks a lot like it did before. Having shot to stardom in 2013, dancing half-naked and meowing in a controversial video for the song ‘Blurred Lines’ by Robin Thicke, Ratajkowski describes the validation that came with all the attention she received: how her body increased in value as it was looked at and approved of, especially by men: All women are objectified and sexualised to some degree, I figured, so I might as well do it on my own terms. It’s a probing account of how, possessed of a (highly conventionally beautiful) female body, Ratajkowski negotiates issues of financial independence, control and consent within the omnipresent, all-seeing patriarchy. I’m listening to an episode of The New York Times podcast Sway, in which the host, Kara Swisher, interviews the model-turned-writer Emily Ratajkowski about her book, My Body (2021). – from the essay ‘Medusa’s Head’ (1922) by Sigmund Freud
We read in Rabelais of how the devil took to flight when the woman showed him her vulva.
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