room, they ask who is who. From a young age, she
sensed that her mother felt entitled to her beauty,
‘‘like a piece of bequeathed jewelry.’’ Ratajkows-
ki’s parents, and especially her beauty-obsessed
mother, took immense pride in their daughter’s
modeling career, which began when she was 14.
When, as an adult, Ratajkowski fi nally persuad-
ed her mother to take down an ostentatiously
placed print from an old photo shoot, the latter
responded matter-of-factly, ‘‘You’re more beau-
tiful than that now.’’
This is a portrait of a young girl with no pri-
vacy and a single avenue for self-worth. In bed,
Ratajkowski prayed for beauty, squeezing her
eyes shut to ‘‘focus on the expanding spots of
light behind my eyelids,’’ developing the wish like
a photograph. As a teenager, she would scrutinize
herself in her bedroom’s full-length mirror, which
her father fi rst hung for a ballerina ex-girlfriend.
In her freshman year at San Dieguito Academy,
where her father taught painting, word spread
that ‘‘Rata’s daughter models.’’ After graduating
from high school , Ratajkowski studied art for a
year at U.C.L.A. before dropping out to pursue
modeling full time, appearing fully naked on the
cover of Treats, an artsy Playboy imitator, in 2012.
She liked to tell friends that the French word for
‘‘model’’ was ‘‘mannequin.’’ ‘‘I’m a mannequin for
a living,’’ she would say, shrugging ambivalently.
The Treats pictorial caught the eye of the
recording artist Robin Thicke, who recommend-
ed Ratajkowski for the music video for his 2013
single ‘‘Blurred Lines.’’ The unrated version of the video, which YouTube
censors removed within a week of its posting, featured Ratajkowski and
two other models fl ouncing around in nude thongs next to Thicke and his
collaborators T.I. and Pharrell Williams. ‘‘Blurred Lines’’ arrived at the peak
of the feminist blogosphere — an unfederated group of scrappy writers and
websites that approached the crude oil of personal experience with the
blowtorch of moral certitude — and bloggers seized upon the video as an
emblem of ‘‘rape culture.’’ ‘‘I know you want it,’’ sang Thicke, a declaration
of predation putatively excused by the nudity.
The controversy rocketed a bewildered Ratajkowski to international
fame. ‘‘I and, more specifi cally, the politics of my body were suddenly
being discussed and dissected across the globe by feminist thinkers and
teenage boys alike,’’ she recalls. When Ratajkowski told reporters she had
found the experience ‘‘empowering,’’ some dismissed her as complicit
in her own victimization — or worse, a clueless agent of rape culture. At
the time, Ratajkowski responded defi antly; these days, she’s not so sure.
She knows that her fashion-week invitations, brand ambassadorships and
short-lived fi lm career (she played Ben Aff leck’s topless mistress in ‘‘Gone
Girl’’), to say nothing of her massive Instagram platform where she hawks
bikinis and endorsed Bernie Sanders — this is all the fruit of male attention.
Perhaps. The language of objectifi cation has followed Ratajkowski like
a hungry dog for her whole career, waiting for her to let down her guard.
Her reputation as thoughtful and well read, coupled with her support of
socialist policies, has only heightened for her the growing expectation that
famously beautiful women be able to justify, politically, the act of being
famously beautiful. Caught in the wrong video at the wrong time, Rataj-
kowski became an effi gy for the exhaustion of a pop-feminist framework;
if the author of ‘‘My Body’’ cannot decide whether her success has been
empowering or not, that’s because this is a trick question.It is by transforming one’s body into an object that one can sell it; it is by
selling it that one may gain food, housing, status, infl uence and, yes, ‘‘power.’’
This is as true for the poorest sex worker as it is for the most celebrated
actress; it is also true, by the way, for Amazon workers, short-order cooks
and (my neck hurts as I write this) magazine writers. I am not mocking
our diff erences; I am saying that the experience of becoming an object for
pay is so general as to be trivial. That the tiny sliver of this experience to
do with female sexuality should be singled out by feminists for censure
refl ects, certainly in Ratajkowski’s case, a gratuitous infl ation of male pow-
er’s scope and reach.
Accordingly, the best parts of ‘‘My Body’’ are when Ratajkowski realizes
that the best way to stop thinking about the male gaze is to think about
something else instead. ‘‘I’m very obsessed with women,’’ she tells me.
When Ratajkowski arrived on the set of ‘‘Blurred Lines,’’ she was pleased
to fi nd that the director Diane Martel had stacked the crew with women;
for many hours, Thicke and the song’s other co-writers weren’t even pres-
ent. Ratajkowski remembers wiggling around in her platform sneakers
‘‘ridiculously, loosely, the way I would to entertain my girlfriends.’’ The
‘‘Blurred Lines’’ video, viewed today, is clearly self-parodic. If anything,
with its mismatched props, barnyard animals and fl at beige cyclorama,
it depicts a group of attractive people amusingly failing to make a music
video. ‘‘There’s something risky and sexy about relationships with other
women when you’re aware of the gaze, but the gaze isn’t there physically,’’
Ratajkowski observes.
But the blurred lines between one woman and the next, unacceptable
to misogynists and many feminists, too, will most likely disappear next
to Ratajkowski’s allegations that a drunk Robin Thicke cupped her bare
breasts during the shoot. ‘‘I felt naked for the fi rst time that day,’’ she writes,
Photograph by Caitlin Ochs/Reuters ashamed that it would take her years to call it sexual harassment. The
The New York Times Magazine 29Opening pages: Emily Ratajkowski in October in New York.
Above: Ratajkowski at New York Fashion Week in September.