My Body

by Emily Ratajkowski

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. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight. —John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Whatever influence and status I’ve gained were only granted to me because I appealed to men.

Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most.

But she also believed that men’s understanding of beauty was limited and unrefined.

How had I already been introduced to the concept of competition between women before I had even learned to read? How had I understood so early that my remark would provide my mother some solace for the unkindness she experienced?

I post Instagram photos that I think of as testaments to my beauty and then obsessively check the likes to see if the internet agrees. I collect this data more than I want to admit, trying to measure my allure as objectively and brutally as possible. I want to calculate my beauty to protect myself, to understand exactly how much power and lovability I have.

There was a peacefulness to her. I imagined what it would be like to one day no longer be noticed by men.

“But everyone has a favorite fruit,” I tell her. I feel a tear run down my cheek. “Everyone prefers one over the other. That is how the world works; everything is ranked. One is always better than the other.”

In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over. Facing the reality of the dynamics at play would have meant admitting how limited my power really was—how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at.

I didn’t tell anyone what had happened that weekend with Owen. This is what you do. This is the beginning of how you forget.

I cried because I was sure that I was someone who did not deserve to be safe.

For better or worse, I’ve always been drawn to overexposure. Making myself big gives me a sense of security. Be the loudest in the room, the most opinionated, the one in the most revealing dress. Do the most. Being big also means becoming a target. But by inviting people’s gaze and attention and therefore their attacks, I have a sense of more power, less vulnerability, since I’m the one putting myself out there. Or at least that’s how it feels, some of the time.

AS IN THE spa, there are unspoken rules to being a model. On set, you learn quickly to change clothes wherever you’re told to change; finding a private place wastes time, and time is money. But the expectation that models should change in front of people is also a way for the client to exert power. It’s both a test and a reminder of your position: everyone else is doing their job, and now it’s time for you to do yours. The stylist, their assistant, the client or editor, the other models, and sometimes the photographer will stand right in front of you and wait as you strip. You understand that your body is a means for them to accomplish what they’re here to accomplish: to make an image to sell whatever it is they’re selling. They’re in charge of it now, not you.

Lines were never clear between us. The house didn’t help: it was a place with no boundaries. Children who grow up in homes like mine, just them and their parents with no separation, physically or emotionally, become experts in a very particular type of seeing. We learn to see things that are hidden, and things that aren’t there at all. We become particularly sensitive to the moods and emotions of others. We are nimble and excellent at shape-shifting. We oscillate between feeling special and feeling alone. We feel simultaneously capable of both saving and destroying those we love.

I thought of my mother’s belief that spaces hold memories, that walls take on meaning, that homes become a part of us, just as people do.

wore S’s musty, oversized T-shirts so that I could feel swallowed up by him, surrounded by him, but they only reminded me of my loneliness. S would text or call, but I didn’t want to hear about his day or what was going on with his work. I’d end our calls bitterly, immediately regretting the tension I’d created between us. It didn’t occur to me that what I wanted from S was the same thing that my mother craved from me: to have someone live in her pain with her.

The world celebrates and rewards women who are chosen by powerful men.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether those women were actually the smart ones, playing the game correctly. It was undeniable that there was no way to avoid the game completely:

Rebecca Solnit wrote about the message that comes with revenge porn: “You thought you were a mind, but you’re a body, you thought you could have a public life, but your private life is here to sabotage you, you thought you had power so let us destroy you.” I’d been destroyed.

wondered where he normally kept these Polaroids. Were they all meticulously labeled in a giant filing cabinet somewhere in his attic, the names of young women written in ink on their assigned drawers? The image of a morgue came to mind.

I wanted to say, You’re a sexist piece of shit, Berg. Pamela Anderson was an actor with a sex tape that had been stolen from her home and distributed against her will. Hollywood didn’t take her seriously. The industry had used her as a sex object and then turned her into a joke, an insult directed at other women. Pamela represented the idea that women have an expiration date on their usability. And the hep C? Was my fate so clear?

You are the problem, I thought to myself. Something is wrong with you. And if you were taken out of the equation, everything would be just fine.

Men never notice the overcalculating that women do. They think things happen “for some weird reason” while women sing songs and do backbends and dance elaborate moves to make those things happen.

I so desperately craved men’s validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect. I was those girls in that room, waiting, trading my body and measuring my self-worth in a value system that revolves around men and their desire.

I suppose this is the life cycle of a muse: get discovered, be immortalized in art for which you’re never paid, and die in obscurity.

Audrey herself wrote, “What becomes of the artists’ models? I am wondering if many of my readers have not stood before a masterpiece of lovely sculpture or a remarkable painting of a young girl, her very abandonment of draperies accentuating rather than diminishing her modesty and purity, and asked themselves the question, ‘Where is she now, this model who was so beautiful?’” I think of her and the other naked women who line the walls and fill the halls of museums, some so ancient the color has washed from their bodies and their marble heads have fallen off. It would be easy to mistake these displays for symbols of respect, for an honor. But what were their lives? And what were their names? No one remembers.

I read once that women are more likely than men to cry when they are angry. I know that women cry out of shame. We are afraid of our anger, embarrassed by the way that it transforms us. We cry to quell what we feel, even when it’s trying to tell us something, even when it has every right to exist.

I often struggle to delineate what is my gut instinct and what is my hypervigilant, superstitious mind playing tricks on me. Audre Lorde wrote, “As women we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge.”

Everything was bright. There was no color—just white light.

I FELT HIM, his body on my chest, but more acutely his presence in the room. In a daze, I held him to me. Of my flesh, I thought. The mirror was pushed to the side, but I could still see the place from where he emerged. My body.