Uncomfortable honesty from the model and actor in an examination of what it means to be paid for your beauty and the boundaries of power
One afternoon, Emily Ratajkowski’s therapist took her up to the roof and presented her with a bowl of water balloons. Ratajkowski had awoken from a dream where she had been fighting, in a terrible rage, but when she tried to hit out it was “like being a ghost,” she explained, “something without a body”. Her therapist had suggested she throw things to access her anger, but the balloons were too colourful. They popped too gently. So her therapist handed her a jar and told her to think of someone she wanted to punish. It flew from her hand and shattered noisily against the wall. The essays she went on to write, now published in a collection titled My Body, read as those shards of glass, landing with purpose.
A couple of times I was reading her book in public, and acquaintances made variations on a snort at the idea of a collection of feminist essays by a person such as Ratajkowski, a model and actor who became famous dancing in a thong in Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines video, whose Instagram glitters with nudes and shots advertising her bikini collection. There was a similar noise internationally in 2020 when New York Magazine published one of these essays, Buying Myself Back, about the many ways in which she does not own her image, from attempting to buy a piece of art that is a screenshot of her face to the sexual assault by a photographer who later sold three separate books of Polaroids he’d taken of her that night. After people read it, the noise quieted. Rather than simply a story written from a place of great power and privilege, it was a story about that power and about that privilege. About the boundaries of a power that lies solely in beauty. Hers, readers found, was an extreme version of a reality familiar to many women who had also been forced to consider where their image ended and their self began.
Continue reading...source https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/14/my-body-by-emily-ratajkowski-review-revelatory-essays
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