Maybe there’s nobody better to critique objectification than Emily Ratajkowski. After all, the 30-year-old model has spent nearly a decade being one of the most lusted-after women in the world. In 2013, the video for Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” made her famous for showing her tits. After that, she became — as she puts it in a recent video for the New Yorker — “the poster child for choice feminism”, always ready to explain why showing her tits was the “empowering” thing to do.
And now, as the author of a new essay collection entitled My Body, she’s taken it upon herself to explain that showing your tits can in fact lead to being exploited thanks to what she calls “the cis-hetero patriarchal construct that we live in”. Predictably, perhaps, her hotness — the thing which made her valuable and gave her a feeling of power — has turned out to be something she can neither own nor control.
“I have learned that my image, my reflection, is not my own,” she wrote in a piece for New York Magazine last year called “Buying Myself Back”. This is literally true in a way that feels intuitively disturbing. Copyright law gives more weight to the person who creates a picture than it does to the person who appears in it — the essay describes her efforts to purchase her own image. Even when the law might have been on her side, enforcing it through the courts was so expensive as to be practically impossible.
And so an artist could turn a photo from Ratajkowski’s Instagram into a “painting” and resell it for tens of thousands of dollars, but when Ratajkowski posted a paparazzi shot of herself to her feed, she was threatened with a legal bill from the agency. And when — after she’d gone from working model to global superstar — a photographer she worked with early on in her career turned nude photographs of her into a series of books, Ratajkowski could do nothing to stop him.
The violation, in her telling, went deeper than image rights: she says that the photographer sexually assaulted her following the shoot (he denies this). She’s also accused Robin Thicke of groping her during the filming for “Blurred Lines”. The concept for the video — three barely-dressed women dancing around three fully-suited men — was supposed to be a satire on the song’s dirtbag celebration of the male gaze, as conceived by the female director. But when the lyrics of a song are telling a “good girl” that “you know you want it”, perhaps it’s unsurprising that not everyone involved appreciated the difference between ironic toplessness and just plain toplessness.
In 2016, Vogue published a listicle of “All the times Emily Ratajkowski fought the patriarchy”, with “being comfortable with nudity” at number two. Now we discover that the patriarchy has always been perfectly comfortable turning her nudity back against her. Essentially, Ratajkowski has had to take a public lesson in something that many women learn quietly between the ages of 20 and 30: the “empowerment” you get from being wanted by men is nothing at all like actual power.
It’s unfair to criticise Ratajkowski for that. But it’s more than reasonable to ask how she ever got a reputation for patriarchy fighting when her fame has always been grounded in her facility for defending objectification. In the summer of 2013, “Blurred Lines” became a flashpoint for the nascent conversation about sex and consent which would — eventually — tip over into #MeToo. To feminist bloggers, the song’s jovial sleaze sounded “rapey”, and the video underlined that: they didn’t hear a party anthem, they heard dangerous propaganda.
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