![]() “I instinctively moved away, looking back at Robin Thicke. “Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt the coolness and foreignness of a stranger’s hands cupping my bare breasts from behind,” she writes. Delivery charges may apply.Emily in the music video for Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines. ![]() To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at. My Body by Emily Ratajkowski is published by Quercus (£13.04). The rub is that many of us still cannot afford to. Models or not, we have no choice but to see ourselves through the prism of our bodies we are all forced to endure the conflation of self with appearance and we are all at pains, in one way or another, to buy ourselves back. For many women, it feels compulsory, and for most of us, it is unremunerated. In other words, being beautiful takes work. My point is not to shame her – on the contrary, I admire and envy her artistry, to say nothing of her patience – but rather to note that, in a book about female desirability and injustice, it is worth emphasising that beauty requires time, skill, money and effort. ![]() In other words, she wears more makeup to dinner with her friends than I have worn in my entire life. As she explains in a mesmerising tutorial video posted on Vogue’s YouTube channel (but fails to discuss in her book), her everyday makeup routine involves 15 steps and the application of 11 products. What My Body neglects to explore is Ratajkowski’s elaborate stylisation and its social foundations. ![]() As the former model turned sociologist Ashley Mears writes in her incisive ethnography of the fashion industry, Pricing Beauty, a model’s “work – and the work of her agents, clients, their assistants, and their whole social world – gets juggled out of sight.” At one point, she remarks offhandedly that she booked more shootings after contracting the flu and losing 10 pounds in one week later, she notes in passing that she “started smoking cigarettes and skipping meals to maintain a tiny waist”. For one thing, she has dieted, a fact she mentions only sporadically throughout My Body. “I haven’t done anything to earn my beauty,” she concludes.īut of course, like all models, she has done a great deal. Ratajkowski’s appearance is just that – a product – yet she writes, for the most part, as if it were a natural endowment, a gift that has been “passed down” to her by her mother like a “piece of bequeathed jewelry”. The very phrase “buying myself back” presupposes women’s bodies are products designed to entice male buyers. Still, for all her self-awareness, Ratajkowski stops short of exploring the full implications of her alienation. When she strips for a shoot, she “disassociates”: “I don’t even really recognize my body as me.” Women can neither fully escape nor fully inhabit bodies that men are bent on appropriating Her body is valuable only insofar as it functions as a commodity, “a tool I use to make a living as a model”. Though Ratajkowski grasps that her allure is a form of power, she also understands that “whatever influence and status I’ve gained were only granted to me because I appealed to men”. ![]() The anecdotes in My Body dramatise what is always true, if often implicit: that women can neither fully escape nor fully inhabit bodies that men are bent on appropriating. As I rifled through accounts of inappropriate advances and catcalls, I wondered why Ratajkowski chose to devote so much space to relatively common degradations, rather than focusing on the more exotic indignities that she endured as she became famous.īut as I read on, I realised that the depressing familiarity of the abuses that Ratajkowski chronicles is precisely the point. She recalls her fixation on Britney Spears, her childhood home in San Diego, and, above all, her relentless objectification at the hands of various romantic interests and employers. My Body is more of a non-linear memoir than a compendium of essays – though Ratajkowski’s musings are nominally organised into discrete sections, they seem to bleed into a more general autobiographical jumble – and many of Ratajkowski’s reminiscences date back to her adolescence. At first, I suspected this made the book boring. Few women are this prominent, and even fewer turn out to be unwilling fodder for celebrated artists – but on the whole, what is striking about My Body is not how different a renowned supermodel’s experiences are from those of an everywoman, but rather how continuous. ![]()
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