That One Issue of Squirrel Girl Where She Reads Anti Capitalist Literature to a Robber
Books of The Times
In a World That Exploits Women, Emily Ratajkowski Exploits Herself. Is That Progress?
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The effigy of the modeling agent must be upwardly there with the personal injury lawyer and the tobacco lobbyist as far as stock villain professions go. Has an honorable and kindly modeling agent always been committed to impress, film, television set or stage? Are those very words doomed to suggest a leering drawing rubbing his hands together and making "ah-ooga" noises as an underpaid model toils to funnel money into his cartoon bank account?
Emily Ratajkowski's book of essays will non change the record. It features multiple modeling agents, none of them savory. One arranges for Ratajkowski to attend the Super Basin with a random financier for $25,000. (It'south left to his client to infer that the words "go to" contain certain expectations.) Another pauses on a photo of Ratajkowski as a teenager and says, "At present this is the await. This is how we know this girl gets [expletive]." A tertiary amanuensis sends Ratajkowski, at 20 years former, to a chore in the Catskills without mentioning that it's a lingerie shoot, or that the photographer will show Ratajkowski nude photos of another woman, or that he will request that she, too, remove her wearing apparel.
The Catskills voyage turns into a horror story. After beingness sexually assaulted past the photographer, Ratajkowski, having nowhere else to go, sleeps at his business firm, only to wake and notice him posting a photo of her on Instagram. Adding injury to injury, the photographer later publishes a book of the photos taken the evening of the assail, leaving Ratajkowski "livid and frantic" every bit the book sells out, goes through reprints and sells out over again.
That essay, called "Buying Myself Back," is the strongest of the xi collected here, which are serious, personal, repetitive and myopic. "This is a book about commercialism," Ratajkowski told The New York Times in an interview. Arguably, the sleazy photographer could say the same about his book of ill-gotten pictures. Merely while he merely demonstrates the unremarkable fact that men daily exploit women's bodies for coin (and pleasure, and fame, and Oscars), what Ratajkowski describes in the essay — which was received with both applause and backlash — is the ambiguity of exploiting her own body.
That ambivalence is present in these essays, often frustratingly so. Office of the problem is that Ratajkowski's conception of herself is at odds with the reality she describes, which is a sincere only exasperating kind of celebrity dysmorphia. Evaluating her career, she concludes: "My position brought me in close proximity to wealth and power and brought me some autonomy, merely it hasn't resulted in true empowerment." Simply Ratajkowski tin can decide her sense of autonomy. Just wealth and power are more easily quantified, and it seems fair to insist that Ratajkowski — with a booming women'south clothing line, 28 million Instagram followers, a partnership with L'Oreal and a Super Bowl ad nether her chugalug — is not but in "close proximity" to either.
In an essay titled "Bc Hello Halle Drupe," Ratajkowski gets paid to go on holiday in the Maldives and grows annoyed when her husband calls her a "capitalist." That comment comes when the two of them are lounging on beach chairs, doing a bit of people-watching. "I pointed out that we weren't like the other guests at this resort," Ratajkowski writes. The other guests, she tells her husband, are real rich people.
"C'monday, infant," her husband says. "You lot're a capitalist, too, admit it."
"I'one thousand trying to succeed in a capitalist arrangement," Ratajkowski responds. "Only that doesn't mean I similar the game." This is broadly relatable; I'yard pretty sure most people who aren't Jeff Bezos feel displeased by their standing in the American economy of 2021. But merely being aware that you lot are doing something y'all consider morally shaky does non constitute resistance or absolution. In this example, the morally shaky function centers on Ratajkowski'due south instinct that women are harmed by the completeness between themselves and the filtered, Facetuned, genetically or Photoshopically gifted individuals shown to them in ads implying that only X product can help narrow that completeness. Shortly before the beach chat, Ratajkowski posts a photo of herself on Instagram to promote a bikini from her company. At breakfast she tallies upwards the likes for her husband: "Five hundred thousand in an hr. Not bad." The title of the essay stems from a quote attributed to Halle Berry: "My looks oasis't spared me one hardship." I bet that millions of unattractive people would disagree.
There are moments of mettlesome cocky-disclosure in "My Body," and passages that made me laugh, similar her clarification of a behemothic photo of Victoria's Secret models "arching their backs and holding alphabetize fingers upwards to their mouths as if flirtatiously telling me to burke." (You know the pose.) She performs a public service by excerpting the treatment for Robin Thicke'southward "Blurred Lines" video, which might be the most embarrassing PDF in the history of entertainment. (A treatment is a pitch outlining the projected tone and content of the finished video.) Scrolling through it, Ratajkowski sees phrases like "True PIMP SWAG" and "NAKED GIRLS XXX" and "THIS IS FAR FROM MASOGYNIST." [sic] She declines the job, just reconsiders afterward meeting with the director — a adult female, to Ratajkowski's surprise — and negotiating the charge per unit up.
That video is what launched Ratajkowski to fame in 2013. With its onscreen hashtags and images of Thicke murmuring "I know you desire information technology" in a model's ear, the video at present looks so dated it might as well be a Ceremonious War daguerreotype. Ratajkowski is funny and charming, dancing goofily and rolling her eyes at the idiocy unfolding around her. Just it is withal a video that features iii semi-naked females (the models) cavorting among three clothed men (the artists), demonstrating a vision — the manager'due south vision? Robin Thicke'southward vision? Both, mayhap? — that nudity is precisely the "skill" these women bring to the table.
The essay nigh "Blurred Lines" is the one that nigh conspicuously captures the perplexing nature of Ratajkowski's position. She's thoughtful and skeptical, and has been treated wretchedly over the course of her career; she grapples intently with her sense of victimization at the hands of those who would apply her body to sell their products. It seems strange, then, that her empowerment should arrive in the course of doing exactly that, albeit on her own terms and with her own products. Information technology is inarguably amend that Ratajkowski, rather than some horny bozo, receive the profits from her paradigm — but does a more equitable distribution of cash actually brand a difference to the young women who scroll through Instagram, speedily absorbing new reasons to despise themselves? That, it seems to me, is the unsolvable moral question at the heart of this book.
In a later essay, "Transactions," Ratajkowski reprises the metaphor from the Maldives. Contemplating other models and actresses she has known, Ratajkowski writes: "There was no mode to avoid the game completely: We all had to make money one way or another." And yet at that place is no binary that consists of, on one side, "Make money in a specific style and feel conflicted most it," and, on the other side, "Don't make whatever money at all and feel virtuous." To frame it in those terms creates the false impression that there is, in the end, no option — an act of self-exoneration and, more than to the point, disempowerment.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/books/review-my-body-emily-ratajkowski.html
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