My Body

by Emily Ratajkowski

All women are objectified and sexualized to some degree, I figured, so I might as well do it on my own terms. I thought that there was power in my ability to choose to do so.

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.

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?

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.

Now I realize I wasn’t being a typical teenager. I just didn’t want to be looked at by my mother, because I knew that when she watched me she was often calculating: examining and comparing.

“I guess it’s just the way it goes.” She shrugged. There was a peacefulness to her. I imagined what it would be like to one day no longer be noticed by men. “Perhaps it’s somehow freeing?” I asked. “Maybe,” she said finally.

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.

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.

“Your father and I have said if anything ever happened to you, we’d kill ourselves.” She spoke matter-of-factly. “That would be it for us, there would be no reason to live.” She lifted her glass and took a sip. “I don’t want to be your only reason to live,” I said, haltingly, stumbling over my words. I tried again; “I don’t want to hear that.”

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

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.

(How funny that men view the life cycles of women so simply! From sex object to mother to what? Invisibility?)

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.