For Every Person Who Wrote Her Off, Emily Has Decided to Write Back (Emily Ratajkowski - My Body)

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Can’t Get It Out of My Head

It’s 2013. You’re at a beach party getting passed a Corona; you’re fingering through a rack at Forever21; you’re waiting in line at a Ralph’s. Three rhythmic bumps of bass play somewhere in the abyss and you immediately know what it is. It’s playing before you can stop it, and it will play in your head for the rest of the day. You won’t be able to get it out of your head.

It’s Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”.

But… is it? Sure, the tune is catchy, but it sure as hell isn’t 800 million views catchy. It can’t be the actual song (which is all kinds of creepy and inappropriate) that captivated the world. No, it can’t be.

What it actually is is the image of Emily Ratajkowski prancing around naked and your disbelief that this is really a music video. On YouTube! For everyone to see! While we’re no stranger to an overly racy, twerk-riddled, skin-clad music video, “Blurred Lines” is different. In one version of the music video (the “unrated version”), she’s literally topless. And you just can’t get it out of your head.

I didn’t want to add to the endless amount of Emily’s topless body on the internet. This is from the “official” version of the “Blurred Lines” music video, in which everyone is clothed. Emily is on the far-left.

“I would never do that!” I said when I first saw the notorious music video. This kind of disapproval was new to me. Not much of a prude and all for women doing whatever they wanted, I didn’t know why I was so dismayed by Emily’s appearance in the video. I normally wouldn’t have even batted an eye at a woman who wanted to “flaunt it if she’s got it.” Then I realized what it was that got me so twisted.

It wasn’t some holier-than-thou altitude that convinced me I would never do that. It was my anger that I probably could never do that.

I didn’t have her body.

Emily and Me

Like most women, I have an interesting relationship with (or opinion of) Emily Ratajkowski. It’s one made up of fascination for her chiseled-from-the-gods body, jealousy of her over-the-top luxurious life, and convoluted embarrassment. (It’s not lost on me that the first description I provide here is of her body). So, why am I embarrassed or coy to admit I like her? Well, because it feels a little bit silly to like any celebrity, let alone one of her… stature.

An influencer.

A model.

In the Kardashian-Jenner-Hadid echelon.

It feels intrinsically bad and basic.

But I tell myself it’s different with Emily. She feels the Bern! She doesn’t lie about getting plastic surgery! Her parents were teachers, and she actually did build her own career! Emily was at Black Lives Matter protests! She got arrested fighting for women’s equality!

But she was totally involved and complicit in one of our generation’s greatest scams ever.

Okay, yeah, so that was awful and complete shit. But I don’t know. She’s my celebrity vice, I suppose. I forgave her.

I can’t explain it. I just want to like her pictures and add an overpriced Inamorata thong bikini in my cart. I guess as I’ve gotten older, I’ve lowered the standards for my happiness. As my responsibilities grew and my angst ballooned, I looked and accepted anything that gave me that boost of serotonin. Sometimes, that meant liking whatever gorgeous picture she’d post. Sue me.

She just represented something easy to like, something easy on the eye, something carefree, something part of the zeitgeist I’m otherwise so eager to deny myself. I let myself “have” Emily Ratajkowski. I don’t follow most of my favorite writers or artists, but goddamnit, I just can’t get enough of @Emrata!!!

Her Most Shocking Post

When Emily shared the link to her NY Magazine’s article, “Buying Myself Back” on Instagram, I paused my mindless scroll and my heart actually dropped a little. Of all the things she’s ever posted on Instagram, this shocked me.

“Wait… Emily Ratajkowski… writes?” I thought to myself.

I didn’t exactly know how to register that.

Emily’s Instagram post announcing her NY Magazine article.

As a “writer” myself, I felt like she was encroaching on my territory (I say with 800 followers and zero published books to her 28 million followers and one NY Times Best Seller). I resented the way celebrities like her can just fast-track it to getting published, something us “regular” writers have to gruelingly work at for years. I was annoyed at how this influencer, this model, could use her clout to earn artistic respect just like that.

Naturally, the self-bargaining began. “Okay, okay, this is probably just a one-time op-ed. Many celebrities do this! Let her have this one.”

I read the essay immediately, hoping that it’d be so un-readable that my love for her would return its original state: for her looks, cute bikinis, politics, and role in one of my favorite movies, Gone Girl.

But it wasn’t un-readable. It was…good, and surprising. I read her essay in record speed, practically fucking salivating over the thing. When I finished the essay, I talked myself off the ledge again.

“Okay, so that wasn’t bad. So what? It’s not like she’ll do it again or something. She’ll stick to modeling or her bikini line!!!!”

Months later, I learned that Emily was coming out with a book.

Fuck.

I felt gutted. I mean, I always feel gutted when another celebrity just lands a book deal like it’s no big deal, but with Emily, it cut a little deeper. I felt like she was robbing the average-looking woman (AKA me) the only other thing we had left: our intelligence. Immediately, my jealousy for her went past her body and looks. It became very real.

Her Body

Emily Ratajkowski’s My Body is a collection of essays that paints the portrait of Emily’s life as one of the most beautiful and contested models working today. It’s deeply thoughtful and taut with a tension between female empowerment and objectification. And it’s fucking great.

I pre-ordered My Body, and when it came out, devoured it in about two days. One of the reasons the book is such a quick read is because of its simplicity, its lack of complex words and long-winded sentences. For someone whose body did most of the talking for her, she had to be incredibly tactful over the words she chose because this was going to be one of the first times she had an audience vs. just… spectators.

And the words she chose were simple, to the point, nothing all that impressive. Like reading your little sister’s diary.

And I believe this is an intentional stylistic choice that works in her favor.

Having listening to many of her interviews and read her work, I’m positive she has the skills and lexicon beyond what she decided to put in My Body. But you know what? She doesn’t need all those bells and whistles. She doesn’t need the clothes of Craft. She can tell her story in the simplest, barest ways. She can be naked. In fact, this is the most naked she’s ever been. She wants you to see her, finally. I think she wants to be in the room with you, naked and storytelling.

My Body is tender with emotion and innocent in its composition. No tricks or flowery prose, she simply tells you how it feels like to get sexually assaulted in the middle of the night. This juxtaposition made for some of the most honest writing I’ve seen come from a celebrity, or from most people for that matter. It’s heartbreaking at the right moments and thought-provoking in ways you might not expect.

One moment she’s gutting you, retelling the story of her sexual assault, and in another moment, she’s forcing you to make a moral judgment as she recounts the sudden death of the man who sexually assaulted her. There are so many emotional beats in My Body, you’d think it was fucking bruised.

Do I think My Body is the next Pulitzer? No.

There’s some lackadaisical moments at a sentence level, and it can definitely read like a celebrity memoir at times (this is especially true when she describes exclusive events and name drops Leonardo DiCaprio and Miley Cyrus). But her book did feel honest, and it moved me. It talked to me.

Her book also helped me finally reconcile the conflicting feelings I had about her.

Her book helped me realize I don’t need a body just like hers, but I already have a body just like her—a woman’s—and it goes through so much of the same misogynistic, heartbreaking bullshit; it protects itself in the same ways against men, finds ways to make it ours and powerful again, and move us through this scary women-hating world.

By the end of the book, I wasn’t jealous of her anymore. We were the same. We were women. And I could never hate on that. We’ve already got enough on our hands, at our throats, on our shoulders, all over Our bodies.

For every person who decided to write her off, Emily has decided to write back.

And I’m so fucking glad that she did.