allegations have already leaked to the tabloids, which have cast Ratajkowski
as a helpless victim. ‘‘Remind me why I decided to do this?’’ she texted
me after The New York Post called her childhood ‘‘sad’’ and ‘‘sexualized.’’
(Representatives for Thicke didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
The book contains many accounts of violation, sexual and otherwise. In
one essay, it is not until after the death of Ratajkowski’s fi rst boyfriend, who
she says raped her when she was 14, that she is able to whisper to herself,
‘‘Owen, no.’’ (Owen is a pseudonym.) In ‘‘Buying Myself Back,’’ Ratajkowski
is incredulous when she is sued for posting a paparazzi photo to Instagram;
horrifi ed when hackers leak her nudes on 4chan; furious when Jonathan
Leder, who she says digitally penetrated her without her consent, publishes
Polaroids of her with an allegedly forged release form. (Leder has said that
Ratajkowski’s allegations are ‘‘too tawdry and childish to respond to,’’ telling
a fact checker for New York magazine, ‘‘This is the girl that was naked in
Treats magazine and bounced around naked in the Robin Thicke video at
that time. You really want someone to believe she was a victim?’’)
But the author of ‘‘My Body’’ has no investment in herself as a victim.
If the men who hurt Ratajkowski in ‘‘My Body’’ are predators, she does
not depict them as predatory. On the contrary, they are small, insecure
people desperate to prove themselves, as pathetic as they are powerful. As
Ratajkowski is quick to note, her experiences are neither disintegrating,
even when traumatic, nor especially unique; her point is simply that they
are no one’s but her own.
Instead of focusing on her damage — she considers suing Leder, but
says he isn’t worth the trouble — Ratajkowski would rather create. ‘‘My
Body’’ is only one example of that. Last May, she cleverly auctioned off
an NFT, or nonfungible token, of a photo of herself standing next to the
Richard Prince print, coolly reappropriating Prince’s appropriation of her
image. (The NFT sold for $175,000 through Christie’s.) There was cheer-
ful wit here, and more deliberateness in her self-presentation than the
model took earlier in her career. These days, Ratajkowski is not looking
for vengeance, or even recognition, but something quieter.
For the book’s epigraph, Ratajkowski selected a lucid passage from the
late John Berger’s infl uential book ‘‘Ways of Seeing,’’ adapted from the 1972
television series of the same name. ‘‘You painted a naked woman because
you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called
the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose naked-
ness you had depicted for your own pleasure,’’ Berger wrote, addressing
an Everyman painter. ‘‘The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It
was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, fi rst and foremost,
a sight.’’ The point is clear: If Ratajkowski is complicit in being looked at,
the crime is ours for looking.When I have told female friends that I am writing about Emily Ratajkow-
ski, most have asked me some variation on the question ‘‘So how hot is
she, really?’’ We often forget that, when we speak of women’s envy for
one another, we are also speaking of the ever-present gap, hardly unique
to women, between one’s self-image and one’s refl ection in the mirror.
Indeed, it is a particular cruelty of popular feminism to have mistaken
the universally alienating experience of examining one’s refl ection for a
uniquely female one, solvable through self-love and political conscious-
ness. ‘‘I hate women who compare themselves to other women,’’ Rata-
jkowski imagines yelling at her therapist in ‘‘My Body,’’ knowing she is
talking about herself. But feminism can be just as competitive as any
beauty pageant: yet another mirror in which to examine one’s blemishes,
and yet another means — the irony is exquisite — of comparing oneself
with other women.
For what is wrong with wanting to be beautiful? Pop-feminism, for its
part, is so preoccupied with criticizing what we rotely call ‘‘conventional
beauty standards’’ that it has surprisingly little to say about beauty. It may
be tempting, given the evidence of Ratajkowski’s own career, to deny
the possibility of a beauty that would transcend male taste, at least in
this world. Of course, the imagined saturation of the beautiful by male
preference is immediately disproved by the existence of at least one
lesbian (me); but it is further refuted if we acknowledge that the envy
that heterosexual women have for one another is indeed an authentic
expression of female desire.
When Ratajkowski was 15, beauty’s name was Sadie. Tall and magnetic,
Sadie was a cool girl in the ‘‘Gone Girl’’ sense — eating burritos, getting
high, hanging with a crew of skater boys. Ratajkowski was in awe. ‘‘Sadie
seemed dangerous,’’ she remembers, ‘‘like she was built of weapons she
had yet to master.’’ That year she fell into the older girl’s gravity, catching
rides with her to the Ford modeling agency in Los Angeles (Ratajkowski
helped her friend sign) and attending drunken house parties where Sadie
would play fi ght with boys until she collapsed on the concrete.
After high school, the two fell out of touch. Sadie went off to college
in San Francisco, then to art school in Los Angeles. Ratajkowski, after a32 11.14.21
The image attached to the NFT titled ‘‘Buying Myself:
A Model for Redistribution,’’ which Ratajkowski auctioned off
through Christie’s in May. The token sold for $175,000.Emily Ratajkowski/Christie’s Images LTD 2021