Writing in White Ink: On Emily Ratajkowski's "My Body"
Emily Ratajkowski | My Body | Metropolitan Books | 2021 | 256 pages
I remember my first exposure to Emily Ratajkowski. I put on Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” music video after hearing about how "hot" it was from guys in my class. I didn’t know Ratajkowski at the time, as one of three women dancing naked to a song that would go on to be banned from college campuses for glorifying rape culture. But there she was: red-lipped, tousled hair, naked save a nude thong. Back in 2013, Ratajkowski gave interviews saying she didn’t see the video as antifeminist. I had always been skeptical of her endorsement. Playing into one’s sexuality is, sure, empowering for some—for a young Ratajkowski, she felt power in her ability to objectify her body on her own terms. But she toed a dangerously thin line: she also made herself a target. And not just to trolls online who, to this day, dismiss her entire career with her appearance in this video. Thicke also groped her while filming: drunk on set, he grabbed her bare chest from behind, then laughed it off.
Ratajkowski knows her big break may never have happened had she made a scene. In her early days as a model, she would undress without hesitation, wanting to “make it seem like there [was] no power dynamic at all.” It was her way of asserting herself as in control and unafraid of the photographer’s gaze. Her body, she always thought, was not her own. It was a tool she rented out in exchange for an income. Yet, looking back, she recognizes dissociating during her shoots. Naked in front of Jonathan Leder—who would go on to publish several books of Ratajkowki’s nudes without the model’s permission—she floated outside of herself, seeing her body through the camera’s lens. Now, she feels “one with [her] body only during sex,” where she likes to look in the mirror to see that she is real. It prevents her from “floating above.” As though even when she’s safe with her husband, being naked still reminds her of the male gaze.
Hélène Cixous’ feminist directive called upon women to use their bodily fluids and physiological processes to reclaim their feminine experience. That is, she asked them to “write in white ink.” Feminine writing, she envisioned, would reposition women as autonomous subjects as they wrote themselves back into their bodies. This notion of feminine writing ranges from the depiction of motherhood and female friendship in Elena Ferrante to Leonora Carrington’s documentation of her years spent in an insane asylum. The pages of Ratajkowski’s collection of essays, My Body, teem with Cixous’ directive: her raw and confrontational prose offers the experience of someone who built a career on their body.
In writing this book, Ratajkowski reclaims her story from the men who publicly insulted her work, or assaulted her on set, or forged her signature to sell a book of her nude photos, or felt her breasts in her sleep. It gives readers an unsettlingly honest account of the shame and pleasure she has experienced as a model and woman. She even goes so far as to say she doesn’t “ever recall liking modeling, really.” It’s not the kind of tell-all a model typically gives, but writing this book mimics how she fearlessly undresses before shoots: by baring all, she protects herself from harm. She’s “carving out control where she can find it” before anyone can relegate her to an object in another story. Only this time, her flesh speaks true.
Before Ratajkowski ever modeled, it seemed important to her parents that “their daughter be perceived as beautiful.” “Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most,” she admits. By thirteen, she firmly believed in the hierarchy of middle school, where the girls considered hot got the most attention. Just as she once tried to gauge where she “belonged in the world of beauties,” Ratajkowski later calculated her Instagram engagement to “measure her allure as objectively and brutally as possible.” Ratajkowski could not resist the mirror of comparison—she was introduced to these concepts before she had even learned to read, telling her mom at the age of three that the women who treated her poorly “were just jealous.” She had a fraught relationship with beauty going into modeling, she acknowledges. This relationship translated into a need for acceptance by older, powerful men who could open doors in the modeling industry. She felt desperate for the power they offered. In a world where everything, including women’s bodies, was ranked.
In the essay “Transactions,” Ratajkowski discusses how she went on a free trip to Coachella with some promoters she knew were creepy. She and her friends figured they could “ignore the men while taking advantage of their setup.” But she realized she didn’t feel safe in their house when one man drunkenly asked what she “wanted to change” about her body. Before this, she’d been at a club with these men, where they “snorted cocaine with their backs to the dance floor” and “grabbed [the women’s] bodies and fed [them] shots.” I know this story well: I went clubbing with friends in Hollywood, where we skipped the line and got bottle service with another group of young (and possibly underage) women, all because one of my friends knew the promoter. That night, one of the women we were with went missing. When we finally found her outside, she sobbed through a story of how she’d been raped by a man upstairs who “could have been her father.” As Ratajkowski points out, these “free” experiences tend to come with a heavy cost.
She gained true empowerment only by giving voice to her thoughts and experiences. While it once seemed “obvious” to her that “the most desirable, attractive woman was always the most powerful in any given room,” she’s developed a more poignant understanding of women’s relationship to beauty. In perhaps her most incisive moment in the book, Ratajkowski acknowledges the power dynamics at play in the modeling world:
In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over.
She elides male power by producing her narrative about the nexus between the feminine psyche and the female body. In the final essay, she details her experience giving birth to her son, releasing herself to her body’s contractions until, finally, she held the baby boy that came out of her flesh. He, too, will foster a life in his body, discovering the joy and the pain that comes with it.
Ratajkowski’s book refuses the tragedy of the muse, those women whose bodies are used and discarded time and again. She “proclaims all of [her] mistakes and contradictions for the women who cannot do so.” After spending most of her twenties denying experiences of rape, assault, and being taken advantage of, the older Ratajkowski now wishes someone had told her she owed the men in her life nothing. This book, it seems, is her way of telling us that whatever has happened, we too owe them nothing. By writing in her own white ink, Ratajkowski has turned the tenuous power of a woman’s body into a voluntary disturbance. She knows her body is hers. And that is her true power.