My Body

by Emily Ratajkowski

desperately wanted to ask my parents about it. I wanted to know if that

I could hear my parents’ thoughts even when the house was silent.

I understood that even before I was born my existence was the essential glue of their relationship.

I’d listen, performing my role dutifully, feeling a queasiness that would stay with me for days.

“I don’t want to be your only reason to live,”

I’m no builder. The house got messy instead. I stopped cleaning the coffee grounds off the counter, stopped removing dead flowers from their vases. If I spilled something, I left it there to stain. Ants took over various surfaces in the house. There was no care left in me.

Marge Piercy, “My Mother’s Body.”

I am determined to take care of myself. I am determined to make this new house my own.

my worst fear, owe him something

I’d prided myself on being free of obligation.

Despite being a little scared of him, I felt a strange sense of loss. Powerful men have always had that effect on me; they make me want to be noticed but also to disappear.

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

especially one I had posted on Instagram, which up until then had felt like the only place where I could control how I present myself to the world, a shrine to my autonomy. If I wanted to see that picture every day, I could just look at my own grid.

All these men, some of whom I knew intimately and others I’d never met, were debating who owned an image of me.

I thought about all the other young models who must have come to this bus station in the Catskills and sat in this car.

now that another adult was there, a woman.

“You girls and your Instagram. You’re obsessed! I don’t get it,” he said, shaking his head and drying a plate with a dish towel.

“When the economy crashed and I started to get more opportunities to work, it just made sense that I’d pursue this while I could,” I said. I was used to defining myself with this explanation, to men especially. “I’m not dumb; I know modeling has its expiration date. I just want to save a lot of money and then go back to school or start making art or whatever.”

I was dumbfounded by his easy dismissal of my life’s plan, and began to panic. What if he was right? What if at the end of this I really would have nothing?

I assumed he meant to be respectful, showing that he knew I could handle these kinds of situations on my own, which I’d always thought I appreciated. In that moment, though, watching S, all relaxed yet assertive, telling this guy to back the fuck off, I thought, Wow, well, this is nice.

On a good day, I’d call people sexist who condemned a woman for capitalizing on her body. On a bad day, I’d hate myself and my body, and every decision I’d made in my life seemed like a glaring mistake.

I wanted to say, You don’t know me at all, you’ve never tried to know me, and the fact that you think my fame and status as a desirable woman are all I have to offer says more about you than it does about me.

I hated myself for trying to look beautiful. But more than anything, I resented S for making me need him.

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.

What is the power of my body? Is it ever my power?

I so desperately craved men’s validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect.

You’re right, I did get a lot of attention from well-known, powerful men. That was how I got opportunities to work, to make money and also build a career.

“I can’t stop watching you.” How odd, I thought. I’m right here in front of you.

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.

But things hadn’t really changed much. I was still a young woman who placed her self-worth in the hands of men like you.

I hated that I’d used the things I loved to win your attention.

I hate that you point to me as an example and say, Look at what you could have if you know how to catch my eye.

The truth was that I had no interest in you, only in the way you had made me feel, in the way you’d looked at me.

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

I will proclaim all of my mistakes and contradictions, for all the women who cannot do so, for all the women we’ve called muses without learning their names, whose silence we mistook for consent. I stood on their shoulders to get here.

No one likes an angry woman. She is the worst kind of villain: a witch, obnoxious and ugly and full of spite and bitterness. Shrill.

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 would rather hurt myself—metaphorically stab myself—than let anyone else hold the knife. I struggle to come into my body and simply be. I do not trust my own body to take the reins. And now someone is asking me, urging me, to let my body release anger. I am doomed to fail.

skill. I couldn’t learn to trust my instincts enough to relax and find pleasure in the activity.

now about the size of a fig.