We consult the restaurant’s menu, which boasts many items. Ratajkowski, a model who first became famous for appearing naked in a music video, orders something.
The book’s marquee essay, “Buying Myself Back,” which describes how Ratajkowski ended up purchasing a print of her own Instagram post from the appropriation artist Richard Prince, was published to great notice in New York magazine last fall.
Several times, Ratajkowski characterizes writing as a means of “organizing” her own thoughts — not as an act of branding but out of what strikes me as the genuine curiosity of a woman whom constant exposure has deprived of the possibility of self-knowledge.
Indeed, the author has spent her career dodging the backhanded compliment that she is the “thinking man’s naked woman.” Failure will be met with schadenfreude; success, with smug surprise.
It’s just another picture.” Sixteen years in the modeling industry — over half her lifetime — have left Ratajkowski burned out and grasping for narrative.
Some essays recount the author’s hustle as a young model who often found herself in troubling situations with powerful men; another is written as a long, venomous reply to an email from a photographer who has bragged of discovering her.
This is a modest goal, and equally profound, especially for someone who is looked at for a living — to regard oneself, without preconception or judgment.
To cope, Ratajkowski has internalized the gaze; walking a red carpet, she hears the clicking of photographers and knows, as if by echolocation, what each photo will look like — and that none will capture the real her.
“For better or worse, I’ve always been drawn to overexposure,” Ratajkowski writes in “My Body,” describing the thrill she still gets when uploading a photo of herself to Instagram.
Could we help each other out, one woman to another? In this context, the idea of equality would be a fantasy; we cannot step outside our roles and histories and meet, as it were, in the wild.
The house where she grew up, which her father built himself, was filled with eccentric details: mismatched doorknobs, exposed beams and walls that stopped short of the roof.
Early in “My Body,” Ratajkowski describes a diptych of herself and her mother as young girls; when guests see the photos in her parents’ living room, they ask who is who.
In her freshman year at San Dieguito Academy, where her father taught painting, word spread that “Rata’s daughter models.” After graduating from high school, Ratajkowski studied art for a year at U.C.L.A.
The Treats pictorial caught the eye of the recording artist Robin Thicke, who recommended Ratajkowski for the music video for his 2013 single “Blurred Lines.” The unrated version of the video, which YouTube censors removed within a week of its posting, featured Ratajkowski and two other models flouncing around in nude thongs next to Thicke and his collaborators T.I.
She knows that her fashion-week invitations, brand ambassadorships and short-lived film career , to say nothing of her massive Instagram platform where she hawks bikinis and endorsed Bernie Sanders — this is all the fruit of male attention.
Caught in the wrong video at the wrong time, Ratajkowski became an effigy for the exhaustion of a pop-feminist framework; if the author of “My Body” cannot decide whether her success has been empowering or not, that’s because this is a trick question.
It is by transforming one’s body into an object that one can sell it; it is by selling it that one may gain food, housing, status, influence and, yes, “power.” This is as true for the poorest sex worker as it is for the most celebrated actress; it is also true, by the way, for Amazon workers, short-order cooks and magazine writers.
When Ratajkowski arrived on the set of “Blurred Lines,” she was pleased to find that the director Diane Martel had stacked the crew with women; for many hours, Thicke and the song’s other co-writers weren’t even present.
But the blurred lines between one woman and the next, unacceptable to misogynists and many feminists, too, will most likely disappear next to Ratajkowski’s allegations that a drunk Robin Thicke cupped her bare breasts during the shoot.
As Ratajkowski is quick to note, her experiences are neither disintegrating, even when traumatic, nor especially unique; her point is simply that they are no one’s but her own.
Last May, she cleverly auctioned off an NFT, or nonfungible token, of a photo of herself standing next to the Richard Prince print, coolly reappropriating Prince’s appropriation of her image.
“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure,” Berger wrote, addressing an Everyman painter.
When I have told female friends that I am writing about Emily Ratajkowski, most have asked me some variation on the question “So how hot is she, really?” We often forget that, when we speak of women’s envy for one another, we are also speaking of the ever-present gap, hardly unique to women, between one’s self-image and one’s reflection in the mirror.
Of course, the imagined saturation of the beautiful by male preference is immediately disproved by the existence of at least one lesbian ; but it is further refuted if we acknowledge that the envy that heterosexual women have for one another is indeed an authentic expression of female desire.
“Sadie seemed dangerous,” she remembers, “like she was built of weapons she had yet to master.” That year she fell into the older girl’s gravity, catching rides with her to the Ford modeling agency in Los Angeles and attending drunken house parties where Sadie would play fight with boys until she collapsed on the concrete.
Waiting at the studio, Ratajkowski spotted a large poster for “Blow-Up,” the 1966 film about a fashion photographer by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, his first English-language work.
When he enlarges the photos, Thomas is startled to notice a gunman hiding in the bushes, as well as what might be a dead body.
But does the male gaze really have any more control over what it sees than Thomas does in the park? All photographs are clues in search of a mystery; they tell us something happened, but they do not say what.
“I don’t know if it was true homoeroticism because I do think it was about male desire,” she answers, recalling how much the boys at school liked seeing the two of them together.
And as for Mike? If the author’s teenage attraction to her friend indirectly expressed the lust of skater boys and male photographers — that is, if Ratajkowski liked Sadie because boys liked Sadie — then it is equally plausible that Mike’s fumbling betrayed the intuition that his girlfriend’s relationship with Ratajkowski had, at root, nothing to do with him.
My point is that heterosexual male desire — that vaunted juggernaut of psychic space — is just as often a convenient vehicle for women, gay or straight, to reach one another.
“There’s this very clear power thing where the women are both aware of how men look at them, and specifically one man,” she says, “and yet they also have their own relationship.” Then she asks me for my reading.
In the dressing room, I take a seat in front of a vanity lined with glowing light bulbs and exchange a few halting words with Ratajkowski’s publicist and stylist.
“For you it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.” Shortly after the book was published in 1980, Barthes himself died after being hit by a laundry van in Paris.
We retire to the greenroom upstairs with a vintage Polaroid camera provided by a crew member.
With childlike solemnity, we place our undeveloped Polaroids facedown on a small bench in the room’s odd glassed-in corner, which looks out onto the studio like a private box at a stadium.
The first thing I notice is that the vanity she chose has caught the glass window across the room, producing a ghostly series of mirrored lights.
We forgot that the vintage camera didn’t have a flash; without the luminescence of a mirror, these Polaroids are dark and ethereal.
Does that make them any more real than the thousands of other Emilys that Ratajkowski describes in “My Body,” dispatched into the world with the click of a shutter? “Everybody is going to write about me in terms of what I represent in the zeitgeist,” she says wistfully as I end our final interview.
Her book “Females,” about a lost play by the woman who shot Andy Warhol, was a finalist for a 2020 Lambda Literary Award.