In Defense Of Emily Ratajkowski

Harrison Malkin and Naeem Inayatullah on Ratajkowski's brilliant essay

“It is unclear what rich people are for. In the most generous interpretation, the rich are here on earth for the same ineffably profound reasons that other people are: to create and aspire,” David Roth opines in Defector. 

Maybe they’re here to write? Emily Ratajkowski, the 29-year-old model, seems to agree. Her recent New York Magazine essay, “Buying Myself Back,” is engaging and powerful. It projects vulnerability and exposes her stake in modeling.

“All these men, some of whom I knew intimately and others I’d never met, were debating who owned an image of me. I was considering my options when it occurred to me that my ex, whom I’d been with for three years, had countless naked pictures of me on his phone,” Ratajkowski writes. There are hints of Joan Didion and bell hooks in her writing, and this essay (which is part of a larger collection) goes beyond exposé and self-reflection. It can also be read as a radical political critique. In July, Ratajkowski posted a short passage from Martin Hägglund’s book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom: “An actual free society is one in which we learn to recognize the common good as the condition of possibility for our own freedom.” Hägglund argues in This Life that democratic socialism relies upon secularism. 

We’d argue (and this should come as no surprise) that the critics and celebrities, who retweeted her essay, didn’t highlight this aspect of it. Meanwhile, Haley Nahman’s much-discussed critique of Ratajkowski in Maybe Baby posits the opposite claim: good writing but nothing more than neoliberal feminism. It’s easy for Nahman to call it a "brand exercise,” but what does that retort say about our ability to read and critique?

Yes, she’s a millionaire, but her writing can nevertheless touch us. Nahman seems to move much too fast in her critique—and she admits that: “I read it [Ratajkowski’s essay] in one continuous gulp on a sunny bench while drinking an iced coffee and pretending, for five blissful minutes, that it was all I cared about.” While Nahman postures as the radical theoretician, she articulates little about capitalism. Ratajkowski, with ease and subtlety, alludes to socialist themes and underscores the inner workings of capitalism.

Indeed, Nahman offers a compelling critique. It nicely juxtaposes the New York Magazine essay with Ratajkowski’s past statements. Nahman’s saying to readers: look at Ratajkowski. We’re saying: look at her writing (and the hope she presents within it). Contradictions are everywhere, so it’s best to read Ratajkowski’s contradiction (to write nonchalantly on money and carefully on the male gaze) as one worth exploring and sustaining. We can see her attitude toward money as “tone-deaf” (as Nahman claims), or we can see it as an awareness of where she stands.

We meet Jonathan Leder early in Ratajkowski’s essay. It would be apropos to ask, what makes Leder’s work valuable? His photography, yes. The makeup artist’s expertise, yes. But when we distill Leder’s work, we see its value lie in her modeling (i.e. labor). And if her modeling is central to the value of his work, we can work out how she was exploited. While working with Leder, she’s alienated and degraded, but perceptive. She gets little to no say in his creative process, though her voice and input would undoubtedly make the process more fulfilling and the art more complex. As she poses for one nude, Leder calls her “iCarly...smirking.” This leads Ratajkowski to “float outside of myself, watching as I climbed back onto the bed.”

But hey, at least she’s paid a fair day’s wage. Not quite. She’s compensated with exposure alone, a consistent capitalist refrain. Ratajkowski hauntingly describes Leder’s seeming theft: “I watched as Emily Ratajkowski sold out and was reprinted once, twice, and then three times...I tweeted about what a violation this book was, how he was using and abusing my image for profit without my consent.” It would be one thing if she owned the rights to her image, but she doesn’t. She’s a laborer, like the rest of us. 

When models and superstar athletes labor, they feel the weight of capitalism. When they make enough to let their capital "work" for them, they release that weight. So, unlike us, she has the opportunity to get out from under it. But like us, she suffers from both alienation and exploitation. The logic of capitalism incentivizes us to move from wage-labor to capital. But that does not mean that, if and when we do so, we shift our ideology to team capitalism. We cannot ask her to go against the material logic of the system. In 2017, she co-founded Inamorata, a high-end swimwear brand (partly because of exploitative and alienated encounters with sleazy photographers). We would do the same.

In her essay’s most striking moment, we learn that Leder, following the photoshoot, sexually assaulted her. In the aftermath, she writes: “My body was sore and fragile, and I kept stroking parts of myself with the back of my hand—my arms, my stomach, my hips—maybe to calm them or maybe to make sure they were still there, attached to the rest of me.” Ratajkowski consented to Leder’s photography—until the assault, of course. This vague sense of consent in the moments preceding her assault is distinct to capitalism. In response, Ratajkowski asks the right question: Why did it feel like exploitation when I was aware of what was going on?

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Naeem Inayatullah is Professor of Politics and International Studies at Ithaca College. Inayatullah’s the co-author of Savage Economics: Wealth, Poverty and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism. He serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Narrative Politics.

Editor’s note: Emily Ratajkowski tweeted in response to our piece: “The essay was certainly meant as a critique of capitalism—writing about my experience as a woman who has exploited her image to succeed and survive while still gaining very little power is the entire point. I added the specifics about money and economics so that it would be clear what I was trying to say about capitalism. I also believe that I can write this essay while simultaneously continuing to try to make a buck off of my image. We are all trying to survive and that doesn’t mean we can’t criticize the systems we operate within. Thank you for this.”