The Audacity Of Emily Ratajkowski

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETROS; STYLING BY AURELIA DONALDSON

'Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.’

Gloria Steinem

From the outside, Emily Ratajkowski may seem like a jumble of paradoxes – a Versace runway walker and The New York Times best-selling author, a viral TikToker and budding member of the US literati, a sexy swimwear model and vocal women’s rights activist. But the 31-year-old San Diego native is refreshingly happy to occupy the grey areas.

In the 12 months since the release of her debut book My Body, a moving collection of essays mixing personal memoir and critical analysis of the objectification of women, she’s continued to push against – and stick a middle finger up to – the limitations of other people’s ideas of what it means to be a woman, a mother or even a feminist.

Now, straight off the back of fashion month – where she walked for JW Anderson, Versace and Miu Miu – Ratajkowski, bare-faced and with her hair in curlers, sits in her sun-dappled New York apartment. She is joined by author, chronicler of the real lives of women and now her close friend Lisa Taddeo over Zoom. We listened in on a frank discussion on radical empathy, leaning into rage, and the complications of raising a child today.

Lisa: Did you do that [to your hair] yourself?

Emily: I’m on my period, so I’ve been psychotically cleaning my entire apartment this morning. It’s the one good thing about it. I’m a really messy person so it’s important that it happens. Everything gets organised and it looks beautiful afterwards. Anyway, I had finished and had an extra 30 minutes before our call so I was like, ‘I’m going try these damn rollers.’

Lisa: So, Emily, I don’t remember the first time we met met. I was obviously aware of you as the public persona and thought you seemed super cool, but then when I read the book I grew to care for you. I felt, This is a writer who I want to read for the rest of my life. I literally have not stopped thinking about you since reading it. We think about life very similarly. It made me feel less alone in the world.

Emily: Thank you, Lisa, for the really nice compliments. The more writing I read of yours, the more parallels I find we have in what we write and talk about. I was so nervous around the press of the book, because it’s one thing to write it but it’s another to have to talk about these very personal traumas. I had obviously read Three Women, so when I was doing book press we reached out to you for an interview and you said yes. To have you be like, ‘Yes, bitch’, was just so validating. I had this moment of, well, if everyone hates it, at least I’ve made these connections – with Lisa and with a couple of other female writers. That’s literally all I could ask for.

Emily: It makes me feel so safe to know that there’s this army of like-minded women out there who get it. There’s a lot of stuff that we still can’t say as women. My obsession lately has been with the way that women are still taking each other down.

Lisa: It sounds like we’re both obsessed with the same thing. I’m in a place where, from my life experiences, what feels affirming and makes sense is really believing and forgiving women. I remember, in the #MeToo movement, there was this ‘Believe Women’ slogan and it was really controversial. But that’s where I am. It’s driven me to a place of deep forgiveness and empathy with other women.

Lisa: That sounds very radical. It’s hard to forgive. The idea of radical empathy is so beautiful. It’s the only way forward.

Emily: There’s an amazing Gloria Steinem quote that says something like, ‘When a woman tries to be multifaceted, the world will come for her. And that will be the moment she needs her sisters the most.’ I’m butchering the quote, but I’m watching pop culture through that lens. And in the past year with Amber Heard and Olivia Wilde and the craziness of putting them in this box as if they’re monsters or witches… There’s nuance to it, but when you see the way that the whole world reacts to women, it’s really hard not to want to go to an extreme side of it. I feel very protective.

Lisa: For you to be this thinker and writer and then to also walk down runways in these amazing clothes, that we’ve grown up as girls wanting to be in, it’s the ultimate aspiration. It’s exciting for me that you check all these boxes.

Emily: That’s so nice. It’s an industry and I came up in the gutters of [fashion] basically doing e-commerce, but now I’ve got to a place where I am able to work with creatives and artists in fashion. This season, every designer I worked with apart from JW Anderson was a woman. Powerful women like Miss Prada and Donatella Versace. And although I’m there because I’m modelling and basically for the way I look, I also feel a kinship with them. That was new, it felt good.

Lisa: And when the writing and the beautiful parts of your job intersect, how is that?

Emily: Nobody actually wants that. I don’t know when that moment actually happens.

Lisa: They don’t want that! They want you to either show up and not be as beautiful as they thought. Or, fine, she can be beautiful, she can be hot. But if she says something a little too intelligent, that’s going to explode everything.

Emily: It’s funny that I’m sat here in curlers. Because for most of my life, much of my job was presenting myself as beautiful and that’s how I made money. And then, as I wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, it was kind of the opposite. I would cover myself up or not put on make-up, because I’d want writers to think of me as somebody who didn’t care about those things. God, women can’t win. I bump against that every day. Even my mum: working in academia as a beautiful woman, it was something she talked a lot about, how she wanted to be perceived in the world. But, right now, I’m in a place where I do not care! I will wear whatever the hell I want, as much make-up as I want, and make myself feel good, which sometimes means being sexy and sometimes doesn’t. I can feel how uncomfortable it makes people. I made a TikTok where I was like, ‘I’m in my b*tch era,’ and I really mean it. We should all be in our b*tch era. I’m so tired of adjusting. Maybe this is coming out of Covid, being 31, or being recently single… We’ll see. Maybe I will regret it.

Lisa: I’ll join the b*tch crew anytime you want. I’m absolutely full of rage, 100% of the time. I was thinking about how now you have this beautiful son, Sly. And that’s another judgement zone for women, right? It’s like, alright, so she’s beautiful and smart, fine. But maybe she’s f*cking up as a mum in some wonderful way that we can explode. I think a lot about the ‘bad mum’ trope. How is writing post his birth? Besides it being 10,000 times harder to find the time…

Emily: If you have any tips on that, please tell me. Part of it is that the space you need to have around actual productive writing time feels totally indulgent. And I am really struggling with it. Especially being essentially self-employed. It feels like I should always be choosing him over anything I do, but if I want to make money, I have to take jobs. Especially now, as a single mum, where I’m the breadwinner. But I feel pulled in many directions. You sacrifice so much of your identity when you become a mother. And I feel like my life is just beginning. My twenties felt like how people describe their teenage years, where you’re like, ‘God, that was awkward and painful.’ And as much as I did things that I love, I’m also just like, ‘Goodbye!’ Now, for the first time, I am enjoying the world more. And yet now I have this incredible responsibility of raising a child. But one thing I have decided is how I want Sly to think about women. I want him to have an example of a mum who is happy. Which serves a selfish thing, but actually a happy parent is a better parent. So, if I spend a little less time with him because I’m working – like on this new podcast I’m doing – and it brings me joy… These aren’t questions that men ask themselves in the same way. They go to work, and it’s work. There are so many expectations around what kind of mums we are.

Lisa: Once again, everything you’ve just said is a carbon copy of how I feel. The only way I can justify being apart from my daughter, who is now seven, is to have it be a job that I’m immediately paid for. Anything else – and I’m not saying I don’t do it – I do at the cost of feeling that I’m a bad mum. And, with writing, I’m constantly like, ‘This is indulgent.’ But I grew up in a wealthy town, and I was one of the people with the least money in it, and I was constantly looking at things and wanting. So part of my drive is I don’t want her to want. But you just said the idea of a happy mum and it’s turned on this light in my brain. My mum was with me every single day. She was a homemaker, so she was in the house when I came home from school. She was there, all the time. She was also depressed as fuck.

Emily: I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes somebody secure. I love the fact I have a couple of close friends who are with Sly a lot and they can calm him in the same way I can. He will go to them and hold them. You have to remove your ego. Sometimes we build attachments with our children that are actually beneficial for us. To be needed and loved that way. When women don’t get that kind of emotional support from men, which a lot of us don’t, it can feel good to have that love from your child. I had to let that go, so when he does come to me it feels organic and natural.

Lisa: That’s beautiful to have – we know it is meant to be ‘the village’. But this is the first I’m hearing about your podcast. Please tell me about it…

Emily: Oh my god, I’m so excited. I really want there to be a space where women can come on and be interviewed and feel comfortable and safe. There’s no female Howard Stern Show; I want this to be it. It’s basically in between making a TikTok and writing an essay. I’ve been recording and it’s bringing me so much joy. Writing is so solitary. You have days where you think you’re so f*cking smart and you have days where you think you’re such a mess. My whole life, I wanted to work with other people in a creative way. When I was a young actress, I thought maybe I’d be a director. But Hollywood is so triggering that I can’t touch it. This is better. Every week I get to choose a thought and expand on it. I’m really a very curious person and I like talking to people. It’s scary, though. With the book, I could finely hone every word. On a podcast, it’s much quicker. Everything I say gets turned into clickbait and people form opinions on me. There was a moment after I did book press where I was like, ‘I’m going to be one of those people who just never says anything publicly,’ but that didn’t make me happy. I felt muzzled and kind of dead. So now I’m leaning all the way in, and it feels good. It’s like everything in my life was leading up to this moment.

Lisa: That makes so much sense. We need this podcast!

Emily: We are definitely going to do a podcast episode together – but, first, we are going to just drink soon.

Lisa: [Laughs] Yes. Yes, we will.

This article appears in the December/January issue of ELLE which is on sale from November 10.

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