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Emily Ratajkowski and Lisa Taddeo Talk Sex, Rage, and Britney
Ratajkowski’s raw book of essays, My Body, will change the way you see the supermodel. And, just maybe, yourself.
By Véronique Hyland
Nov 3, 2021
emily ratajkowski's book my body
Collage artwork by Monique Baumann; Photo: Steve Shaw/treats! Magazine.
“I want to get to the bottom of things,” says Emily Ratajkowski.
“It’s been the blessing and curse of my life.” That scrupulous
excavation is evident in My Body, her scalpel-sharp essay collection
examining everything from sexual assault to childbirth to
objectification. If Ratajkowski had a kindred literary spirit, it would
be Lisa Taddeo, whose nonfiction account of women’s sex lives, Three
Women, and raw novel Animal cover many of the same themes. Here, the two
sit down for a no-holds-barred dialogue.
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Lisa Taddeo: You write about your mom rating women’s beauty. My
mom used to do stuff like that, too. There were beautiful women and then
there were hot women and all those micro-rating systems within [that].
If you hear that at a young age, it fucks you up.
Emily Ratajkowski: I had to work backward in even figuring that
out. [With] ex-boyfriends in high school, I would think more about their
ex-girlfriends than I would them sometimes. I would look up their
Facebooks and never look at my ex-boyfriends’. I wanted to see who was
getting ahead or who was last. And I started thinking about how I had
gotten there. I think that my mom learned that being beautiful could
secure her safety in her relationships and day-to-day interactions.
Understanding where she fell in this ranking system was vital to her
survival in some ways. There was this internalized male gaze that she
was helping me learn without even maybe realizing it. A lot of growing
up and therapy [have] made me realize, Holy shit, I don’t need to do
this. There’s no winning or losing. But it’s something that I think all
young women have to unlearn, or maybe just women in general.
My Body
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LT: And the idea of women who are beautiful to women versus
women who are hot to men—the ranking of that shifts based on what world
you’re entering into. Is it a movie that guys are going to watch? Or is
it a fashion show where women are looking at the clothes? There’s this
moving ideal of beauty that you can’t really even hold on to, and that
drives you insane.
ER: You can never win, really. It’s exhausting to compare
yourself. It certainly doesn’t lead to any kind of happiness. But there
isn’t a woman I know who hasn’t fallen victim to it. I know people who
are obsessed with comparing themselves to celebrities, or who still
think about that one girl in high school all the time. Even elementary
school. We learn this stuff so young.
LT: Men don’t do that. They get jealous in other ways, but I
cannot imagine any of my exes or my husband looking up [an ex]... Last
night I was talking to my husband about this guy that I went on a weird
blind date with when I was living in the city. And I was like, “He was
really hot.” The second you say that, guys are like, “What do you mean,
‘He was really hot’?” I found myself telling the story and being really
excited that he was feeling like, “Was that guy better-looking than me?”
I’m 41 years old; I have a child. As my daughter was videoing herself
doing something with the dog, I know she’s videoing my voice in the
background, and I’m like, “Holy shit, it does not end. When will it
end?”
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ER: You write a lot about this—that feeling of “I want to get
even.” It’s funny, one of my first interviews [promoting the book] was
with a man, and he said something about how you have to have an ice pick
in your heart to be a writer. I was like, I guess that’s part of it. I
just think that telling the truth of these stories doesn’t take away
from the way you feel in your life today. You still want to get a jab in
or you still want to win in different ways.
emily ratajkowski author photo
Ratajkowski today.
Katherine Mendenhall
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LT: It’s not revenge, so much, but taking the power back was so
brilliant. Something that men do a lot, because society permits them to,
is talk about an experience they had with you after you’ve become
something else in a way that is a complete distortion of the reality. I
saw that in your [writing] and I was just maddened by it.
ER: That was what inspired me to write about these
things—there’s one perspective that I’m really familiar with, which is
the male perspective. Which is, whether you want to say willingly or
subconsciously, dismissive of the female reality? I don’t know, that’s a
really complicated question and what I’m interested in. But certainly,
there’s just no consideration for how these experiences go down for
women in those dynamics with men who maybe are not always older, but
have a power imbalance. And they’re so unaware of it. I think there is
this feeling of, ‘Well, women are so beautiful, they have this power,
they have the right to say yes or no to sex.’ It’s so much more
complicated than that. I was interested in capturing the nuance that
comes with wanting male validation, which you’ve written about so well,
especially in Three Women. Where, I don’t know if complicit is the right
word, but certainly you want something from them that is potentially
extremely harmful. In many of the instances in the book, I’m either
modeling or trying to work my way into winning some guy’s attention. I
look back and realize the complexity of those situations. I think it’s
not about individual men, it’s all men. Because it’s the system; it’s
the way our culture works. Women buy into it because that’s how we
learn. Even the way we look at other women—that’s because we want power
and love and security.
LT: One of the things I always find the hardest to swallow, and
the saddest, is that we understand that about each other and about the
way we’ve been socialized and sexualized. I’ve always been pragmatic in
my working life. I saw something on [Netflix’s] Glow, where she’s like,
Don’t ruin it for all of us. Just let the guy think you’re going to
sleep with him. I’ve let so many guys think I was going to sleep with
them. Would I do things differently now? Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. But
what I know is what I did then I did for my survival, in a sense. I have
a daughter now. What will I teach her?
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“It’s important as women to realize that we’re pissed off.
There is a feeling of, I want to burn this motherfucker to the ground. I
think [it’s about] finding the balance.”
—Emily Ratajkowski
ER: I don’t want to tell any young girl that she shouldn’t model
or try to capitalize on her image or body. But as I say in the book,
I’ve wondered if people would even be reading my book had I not done
that. So there is an undeniable power—forget the financial success and
fame and all that—but there is just power. People pay attention to you
when you get to a certain level. So I was really careful to never say
that. But what you see in media, and my own Instagram, is one side,
which is beautiful vacations, millions of likes, fancy clothes. And
that’s not the complete story. It was so important to write this book
and say, Here’s the reality of the whole situation. Here’s the nuance,
here are the complicated parts. I start with a John Berger quote: “You
painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a
mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity.” Women do it a
lot, maybe even more than men. Where they’re like, “Look at her, she’s
trying to build on this.” And it’s like, “Well, yeah, of course she is.”
The shame that we carry around that is partly why we don’t talk about
it more. Because there is so much black-and-white thinking of, “Believe
women,” and it’s very easy to slip into this feeling of “All men are
predators” and “The world is a scary place for women and how do we
protect each other?” And I don’t think it’s that simple. It would be
nice to think that way, but it’s not. So I hope that there’s the nuance
and also that we [get past] our shame so we can talk about these things.
LT: [With your book], it’s going to be mainstreamed in a way
that this conversation isn’t. It’s so heavily nuanced. And we usually,
as a country, shy away from nuance. It should be required reading,
especially for 16-year-old girls. I think that it’s so important because
it’s coming from you. You’d be hard-pressed to find somebody who knows
about it more. Like you said, you wouldn’t necessarily tell a young girl
not to model. You would say, “If you model, here is what I’ve learned.”
Not, “Don’t do this, because I’ve gotten a lot of things from this.”
And I think that holding those two things at once is just so vital.
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emily ratajkowski
Ratajkowski at about age 10.
Courtesy of the subject.
ER: It’s hard now, starting to do press and seeing how things
get turned into black and white: “It’s a condemnation” or “She’s
complaining about her life.” But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t
share these stories. I write about Britney and what it was like to grow
up in the early aughts. I was watching these women as they were getting
physically more and more destroyed. Watching these covers of [magazines
saying] they look like crap. I still thought that they were on top of
the world and that they were winning. Now we’ve come to understand that
these women were tortured and continue to be, but [then] it was: “Oh
God, they’re messy.” Which comes from this incredibly misogynistic
standpoint. But I think that it’s so important to reveal the
complexities, because it’s not just famous women, it’s all women.
Obviously white women have a very particular position in the world, but
it’s all on a scale of what we experience and the ways that we try to
work the system and fail at working it. Now we live in a world where
everything is about empowerment. That word gets thrown around so easily.
But I think we’ve almost lost perspective.
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ELLE: Do you think women have more power [on sets] than they did
even 5 or 10 years ago, or that there’s just an illusion of power?
LT: We’re staffing Three Women for Showtime, and it is so far
[about] 95 percent women—all female directors, all female EPs. But
within that, there are still a lot of questions that crop up. I think we
have more power now than we did five years ago. But it’s still a male
gaze at the end of the day. And it’s still women who are operating under
the male gaze. It’s going to take a long time for us to get out of
that.
ER: I can’t really speak to the last 5 or 10 years because my
position has changed. I’m no longer an anonymous model. It’s not
something that when you’re 22, you can necessarily be aware of in the
same way that you can when you get older. I do think some things have
changed. But I don’t know that it’s for the right reasons. We live in a
culture where people are acting out of fear of consequences, rather than
learned respect. You don’t teach a child to not hit their brother
because they’re going to get a time-out, but because it’s not a nice
thing to do. Everyone is worried about the time-out rather than actually
understanding empathy. That’s why I think writing is so important,
because it’s not the Twittersphere and the really quick cancellation. I
think storytelling brings out people’s empathy in a different way. So
I’m hoping that a lot of men read this book. I don’t know if that’s
going to happen, but I would love for that to happen. It shouldn’t just
be that once a man becomes a father to a daughter, he starts to
understand these things.
LT: That’s brilliantly put, the fear of the time-out. We are just like toddlers at the end of the day.
ER: I have a son now, and I’m starting to think about what our
instincts are. Forget even boy/girl, but just, What are human beings’
instincts? How do you encourage a person to feel confident, to like who
they are, while also teaching them about what’s nice and what’s not
nice? It’s like with voting: “You have to vote. It’s your job.” Well,
maybe we need to make sure that the candidates are better and the
political system feels like it’s earned our trust. Again, it’s this lack
of nuance. It’s amazing how much I’ve learned about Afghanistan in the
last two weeks just from being on social media. But they’re quick,
one-sentence things or really shocking images. There’s not a deep
understanding. There’s a peripheral level of how we consume media now
that’s dangerous.
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“It’s exhausting to compare yourself [with other women]. It
certainly doesn’t lead to any kind of happiness. But there isn’t a woman
I know who hasn’t fallen victim to it.”
—Emily Ratajkowski
LT: When it comes to the people you’ve named [in your book], it
feels relentlessly brave. It feels like you wrote this book in a vacuum,
which is the way that I think books should be written, without fear.
Was it a scary decision? Because I admire the hell out of every part of
that.
ER: Yes, I’m still absolutely terrified. The essay with Jonathan
[Leder] was published, and that’s an essay about a lot of things. And,
of course, the headlines were like, “Emily Ratajkowski accuses blah,
blah, blah.” It was really hard to see that: “Wait, this is a 7,000-word
essay that I poured my guts into and now it’s just a clickbait
headline.” [Editor’s note: Ratajkowski accused photographer Jonathan
Leder of sexual assault in a New York magazine essay; Leder’s
representative told USA Today that he “completely denies her outrageous
libelous allegations of being ‘assaulted.’”] I also met Jonathan’s
children and was thinking about them having to face my reality of how I
experienced their father. I feel the same way about other men in the
book. In my dream world, what would happen is not that people are
canceled, because what does that even mean? Ultimately, people go on
living their lives. The people who are close to them love them. They
have a right to exist and to live a wonderful life. That being said, I
think that there is this canceling thing that happens. My dream would be
that we’d live in a world where rather than blaming this individual and
saying, “We’re casting you out of society; that will make things
better,” we take a larger look at what allowed this kind of behavior. If
I were a different person, if I were not well-known in other ways, I
would not have mentioned specific names, but for these stories to feel
real and for people to understand the full situation, I had to give
names. It was the difference of, somebody could Google them or not.
There are other moments in the book where I don’t name people, where I
feel like it’s not important who it was. But I think in [some]
instances, it’s pretty important for the reader to understand. I have a
hard time with the power that the world gives you when you tell your
story. Instead of learning the lesson, there’s this black-and-white
thinking again, where it’s like, Well, that person is just done. I
really don’t want that for anyone because I also, again, believe it’s
not all men and it’s also all men. I think everybody’s father, brother,
whatever, has at one moment or another—it’s, again, on a scale—but they
have unknowingly, or maybe just because it was convenient, taken
advantage of their position in the world. That doesn’t mean that
everybody is bad and needs to be cancelled. It just means that we need
to be more aware.
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LT: Any thinking person will be able to read it as an
exploration rather than a condemnation. Humans make mistakes, and that’s
how you framed it. Obviously, people will do clickbait-y stuff. But I
think you did a perfect job of not doing that, or not creating an
environment for that, but doing the exact, necessary opposite.
ER: I worked really hard to take out any punishing in the
writing. It’s not always the people who you would think are the
quote-unquote bad guys. It’s people who are close to you and you’re
like, “This sentence doesn’t need to exist here. Why am I punishing this
person?” I don’t want to say that there isn’t an instinct—like your
experience with your husband and trying to make him jealous. I think it
is important as women to realize that we’re pissed off. There is a
feeling of, I want to burn this motherfucker to the ground. I think
[it’s about] finding the balance. Because I don’t want to punish, I want
to tell the truth. That’s it.
versace special event milan fashion week spring summer 2022
Ratajowski walking the runway for Fendi by Versace in September.
Daniele VenturelliGetty Images
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ELLE: You write about seeing a therapist to learn to physically express anger. Did writing help you channel that anger?
ER: No. I’d be lying to you [if I said that]. But that was one
of the hard things about writing the last essay. There is a tendency
with books to tie everything up in a bow and go off into the sunset. And
that’s just not how I feel. But what was important to me was finding
these moments of release, or moments where I’m connecting to my body
through anger, which can be really powerful if it’s not used to punish
someone. I’m breaking something against a wall, not breaking somebody.
The reason I set out to write was to deal with my shit, absolutely. With
the essay that was published in New York magazine, I was so nervous.
The week before, I couldn’t sleep. I was sobbing. I was an absolute
mess: “Why did I do this? Remind me why I wrote this and why I’m
deciding to publish it?” And then when it went out into the world, it
was cathartic. Because all of a sudden, it was people recognizing my
reality. It’s so validating. I didn’t have that for a big part of my
twenties, whether in these small interactions that I write about or on a
global scale. To be able to say, “This is my story,” it’s very healing.
LT: All the books I like are written by women who don’t give a
fuck. I always think it’s interesting whenever people talk about female
main characters being likable or not. I don’t need to be friends with
someone in a novel. I want to understand more about myself from a novel.
I think if you just say everything honestly, it sounds like anger. But
we also add that little coda of rage to a woman just expressing herself.
It’s rage if she’s not going along with the status quo. We have been
tamed into doing the status quo at any cost, or we are out of line. I
found a voice early on that felt like a voice that didn’t give a fuck.
Obviously, I’ve gotten some shit for that, and it’s fine. But I didn’t
want to write a book that I didn’t want to read.
“I think there is this feeling of, ‘Well, women are so
beautiful, they have this power, they have the right to say yes or no to
sex.’ It’s so much more complicated than that. I was interested in
capturing the nuance that comes with wanting male validation.”
—Emily Ratajkowski
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ER: I loved your essay in the Guardian about female rage.
Because I do think there’s this fear that we have of turning into this
ugly, angry witch. And I’m totally scared of that. Not enough people
have read the book yet—but I could imagine people saying, “She’s so
angry.”
LT: It doesn’t come off as angry. There are moments of anger,
but it all felt clearheaded. I think it’s so phenomenally calibrated.
ER: [The fact] that I’m even so afraid of it is interesting to
me. What’s wrong with being angry? I think some anger is
justifiable—more than justifiable. I don’t think that women should be
afraid of that.
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ELLE: There’s a running theme in both of your work about women
struggling to understand their desires, and the difference between
seeing yourself as an object of desire and actually desiring. What have
you learned about that question through exploring it in your work?
LT: I will say that I have a really hard time with it. If I
don’t feel attractive, I’m going to have a hard time being excited to
have sex. I admire so much women who do not. It’s something I strive to
feel. Right now, I’m probably at the worst I’ve ever been in terms of
how I feel about myself. It’s been really difficult for me because I was
raised on ’80s movies, and it was all about the way a woman looked, and
I have internalized that.
ER: I’m somebody who’s expertly internalized the male gaze, and
then turned it on myself enough to make a living off it. In the last
essay, I had the piece about breaking stuff—and then birth. I couldn’t
figure out a moment where I’ve been in my body and not self-aware on
some level. It took me weeks. It was the hardest chunk of the book to
write. And it’s just a bike ride with my husband and my best friend.
Because it hit me: I was using my body. I wasn’t floating above myself,
thinking about how I looked. I was just in the moment with people I love
and who love me. That’s the goal: to have more of those moments,
sexually or otherwise. I don’t think it’s going to come easily to any
woman in our culture. But I think that it can happen, through figuring
out who you are, and then sharing it with people you love. Then
intimacy, physical or otherwise, becomes less self-aware.
LT: For me, it’s also been physical activities like that. Going
into the ocean—in those moments, I’m like, Oh, wow. So this is what it’s
like to have no shit [laughs].
“It’s still a male gaze at the end of the day. And it’s
still women who are operating under the male gaze. It’s going to take a
long time for us to get out of that.”
—Lisa Taddeo
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ELLE: The book ends with a completely different function of the
body: childbirth. How has motherhood shaped your outlook? Did it change
your relationship to your body?
ER: I was unsure if I wanted to end the book with motherhood,
because I hate the idea that you become a mother and everything changes.
It’s something I talk about in the book: You go from child to sex
object to mother. But it was one of the most powerful physical
experiences. Being in a room and trusting my body—even though there are
people around me who say that they know it better than me or that they
have a right to it in some way—was hugely impactful. It wasn’t until I
was rereading the whole book that I realized that at the beginning,
there’s an essay about not being able to say no. And then in the
hospital, I say no, my body responds to me saying no, and I give birth
to my son. Writing these essays allowed me to get to a place to be in
that room and be connected enough to my body to be able to say, “No, we
are not going to use the vacuum.” Then my body’s like, “She just said
no. We’re going to deliver this baby.”
LT: I feel the same way. The idea of, you’re a little girl, then
you’re sexualized, then you’re a mom, then you’re dead. Whereas men get
to have their full cycle, and it’s biologically unfair. Motherhood
changed me in all the ways that it does, and then in a lot of ways it
didn’t. My daughter is six, and I sometimes see the way that men look at
her. She’s blonde, she’s got giant blue eyes, and I’m so hyper-aware of
it, because of having experienced my own stuff in the past. I’m always
staring at my daughter, looking to see where the danger might be coming
from. That is such a frightening thing, that I’ve now put the male gaze
on my own daughter. It haunts me.
ER: I wanted a daughter initially, but when I found out I was
having a son, I was so relieved. Because I think that it would bring
up—I want more children, so it might be something I deal with
later—being sexualized way before puberty and being aware of it. I have a
memory: I did a sexy move down the wall of my parents’ kitchen. I was
probably in first grade and my parents were like, “Where did you learn
that?” I was like, “I fricking learned it. That’s what women do.”
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
This article appears in the December/January 2022 issue of ELLE.
Véronique Hyland Véronique Hyland is ELLE’s fashion features director and the author of the upcoming book Dress Code.
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