This is how we know this girl gets .” A third agent sends Ratajkowski, at 20 years old, to a job 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 clothes.
Adding injury to injury, the photographer later publishes a book of the photos taken the evening of the assault, leaving Ratajkowski “livid and frantic” as the book sells out, goes through reprints and sells out again.
But while he merely demonstrates the unremarkable fact that men daily exploit women’s bodies for money , what Ratajkowski describes in the essay — which was received with both applause and backlash — is the ambiguity of exploiting her own body.
But wealth and power are more easily quantified, and it seems fair to insist that Ratajkowski — with a booming women’s wear line, 28 million Instagram followers, a partnership with L’Oreal and a Super Bowl ad under her belt — is not merely in “close proximity” to either.
In an essay titled “Bc Hello Halle Berry,” Ratajkowski gets paid to go on vacation 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.
In this case, the morally shaky part centers on Ratajkowski’s instinct that women are harmed by the abyss 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 abyss.
But it is still a video that features three semi-naked females , demonstrating a vision — the director’s vision? Robin Thicke’s vision? Both, maybe? — that nudity is precisely the “skill” these women bring to the table.
It is inarguably better that Ratajkowski, rather than some horny bozo, receive the profits from her image — but does a more equitable distribution of cash really make a difference to the young women who scroll through Instagram, rapidly 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.