When I was 17, a high school boyfriend disseminated the nude pictures I had sent him to what felt like everyone I had ever met, as well as a number of people I hadn’t.
What happened to me also happened, albeit on a much grander scale, to the famously desirable model and actor Emily Ratajkowski.
He is far from the only man to profit from Ratajkowski’s beauty: as she explains in Buying Myself Back, perhaps the best piece in her thoughtful and accessible book, the artist Richard Prince featured one of her Instagram pictures in his so-called “Instagram Paintings” series, which consists of “images of Instagram posts … printed on oversize canvas”.
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.
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”.
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”.
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”.
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.
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.