Review of The Body by Emily Ratajkowski (Quercus, 2021)

 

Emily Ratajkowski’s My Body comprises a collection of essays, largely personal reflections of a model’s experiences and observations. The book raises questions about the value of external beauty in western culture; power and control, but disappointingly, there is no wider discussion of these issues that tend to affect all our lives. And while the book feels more like a draft rather than a completed work, it does offer an interesting read. 

According to Ratajkowski, body and beauty were accorded high value by her parents particularly her mother, early on in her life. ‘My mother always told me to take pleasure in the way I looked.’ (p.2) Sadly, the model needs to feel beautiful to be validated. ‘’I’ve never prayed much, but … as a young girl I prayed for beauty (p.13) ‘Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most.’ (p.17)

Emily used her body and external beauty to earn a lucrative living, becoming a model and securing some acting roles. She knew her body was an asset, a commodity that the world valued, was proud to build a career and life off her body, trading it for money fame and relevance. (Kara Swisher, Emily Ratajkowski Isn’t Quite Ready to Quit Profiting Off the Male Gaze, podcast SWAY, The New York Times, November 29, 2021) However, this seemingly primary value accorded by Emily’s parents has damaged herself – esteem and been the epicenter of her life. She reflects, ‘I’m nothing special unless I’m naked,’ (p.213) even though wants to be taken seriously for her ideas and politics. 

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Ratajkowski’s low self - esteem surfaces in her revelation of intimacy with her husband: ‘I’m one with my body only during sex. When my husband and I fuck I like to look into the mirror so I can see that I’m real.’ (p.102) She is evidently insecure about her own beauty when her husband says to her: ‘There are so many beautiful women in the world’ (p. 26) and responds, ‘I freeze when he says this. I feel a familiar twist in my gut … tension in my body… it hurts to hear you say that… Why do I suddenly feel as if he doesn’t love me enough?’ (p. 26)

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Ratajkowski assumes the role of a victim in sharing some of her experiences where she feels men took advantage of her, yet seems confident in handling herself at others. She also describes herself as a ‘savvy hustler’ (p.5) evident in the following example. Writing about a man around fifty when she was nineteen, ‘I read you in an instant. I knew what I needed to do. I’ve had to impress men like you my entire life and be grateful for any scrap of attention. I was still a teenager, but knowing how to get noticed by people in your position was already second nature. I approached you, played it cool.’ (p. 203) 

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Looking back into her past, Ratajkowski has gained some insight into how she feels about her body and work and conflicted feelings surface. While she admits to loving the money earned in her work, the model also discovered shame in using her body as a tool to impress men calling the shots, even though Ratajkowski thought she could ‘disassociate’ when her body was observed, not recognizing it as hers. ‘I was ashamed of the fun I’d had dancing around naked ’(p.46) she shares, about appearing in the Blurred Lines video. Ratajkowski however also says ‘I don’t regret doing the video. I don’t regret anything.’ (Kara Swisher, Emily Ratajkowski Isn’t Quite Ready to Quit Profiting Off the Male Gaze, podcast SWAY, The New York Times, November 29, 2021)

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A deeper sharing of her shame would have been welcomed here rather than the one - liners. In those moments of reflection, it would have been insightful to see what Ratajkowski thinks of the larger structures and how men assert their power, an issue she discusses a little more with American journalist Kara Swisher in her SWAY podcast, that’s absent in My Body. (Kara Swisher, Emily Ratajkowski Isn’t Quite Ready to Quit Profiting Off the Male Gaze, podcast SWAY, The New York Times, November 29, 2021) 

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In My Body she focuses on the male gaze, alluding to its power. ‘I traded my body and measured my self-worth in a value system that revolves around men and their desires’ (p. 208). I would have liked to see a deeper discussion of the female and self-gaze that also permeates our culture and explore why this is so. This analysis is missing in My Body, for example, why do women judge each other’s looks and their own? Is it just because we are influenced by what men think is beautiful and it is culturally prescribed or is there more to it? Her inclusion of artist and writer, Hannah Black’s audio, ‘My body’ lacks any significant meaning in Ratajkowski’s mention. She merely discloses that black singers are singing ‘My Body, but offers no explanation of what this audio piece is about. And the work is relevant in the theme of power that Ratajkowski skims over in her book. In her video, Black is political, exploring who has a body and who does not in our society in her visual of white corpulent men posing with female African American women singing ‘My Body.’ (Eva Folks, An interview with Hannah Black, 26 June 2014, aqnb.com 2014/06/26-an-interview-with-hannah-black) She is asking who is deemed significant in our society.

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In the second half of her video, Black asks a poignant question, if reincarnated, ‘would you choose to have the same body or not? ‘Would you choose to have the same body of a woman again or a woman of color? The body is always a vector of domination: having a body is a signal of your vulnerability to the world.‘  (Eva Folks, An interview with Hannah Black, 26 June 2014, aqnb.com 2014/06/26-an-interview-with-hannah-black)  

In My Body Ratajkowski admits to posting images ‘that encouraged the world to see my body as my primary value,’ (p.89) and for some time ‘felt that Instagram was the only place where I could control how I present myself to the world,’ (p.156) but she omits to discuss any possibilities of using social media to transform ideas about beauty beyond the physical aesthetic. Nor does she consider the ramifications of her images and how they may affect young impressionable girls that follow her on it and what they might do to try to achieve her image. That is what I would worry about especially when she has 28.6 million followers.

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Kara Swisher asked the model about her impact on Instagram: ‘what are people seeing – you or do you want them to see you but not look at you?’
(Kara Swisher, Emily Ratajkowski Isn’t Quite Ready to Quit Profiting Off the Male Gaze, podcast SWAY, The New York Times, November 29, 2021) Ratajkowski responded that she wanted people to see her, but read her essays or book. Swisher gave her the answer I wanted to give too: ‘If people stop looking at you, they may pay more attention to you.’ (Kara Swisher, Emily Ratajkowski Isn’t Quite Ready to Quit Profiting Off the Male Gaze, podcast SWAY, The New York Times, November 29, 2021) 
 
I recommend a read of this book bearing these omissions in mind and urge the reader to think about the issues she touches on. And suggest readers take a look at my forthcoming book Reframing Beauty (due for release, November 2022 by Shawline publishing) that looks at beauty in a very different positive way.