My Body is well written, introspective, and deep. It offers an interesting lens through which to view a toxic industry, although Ratajkowski does not hesitate to admit her role in accepting the bad behavior. She excels in pushing the reader to open their eyes to a complicated balance between recognizing sexist treatment and using it to one’s advantage. I found Ratajkowski’s unpacking of her complex relationship with her body really interesting, and she brought up points I never would have considered if not for this book.
What an impossible task Emily Ratajkowski gave herself—it’s admirable, really, her efforts to better understand the arcane, patriarchal, racist, capitalistic measurements of physical beauty that have allowed her to be famous and successful and rich ... Honestly, the whole book is pretty depressing, a constant push-pull between Ratajkowski’s self-awareness and the greater forces that commodified her ... Ratajkowski’s clean, clear writing does what you want it to do; it wrestles with what it means to be conventionally attractive ... Where Ratajkowski fails is in thinking more critically about her place in the world, in the continuum of women feeling bad about their bodies, being discriminated against for their bodies, being abused and assaulted for their bodies. There seems to be almost no recognition in her writing that her body is held up as a standard — not necessarily by her, but by other people intent on maintaining the beauty status quo — used to shame people who don’t look like her ... The thing that she’s trying to understand in a more holistic, intersectional way is the very thing that has given her a good, comfortable life. I don’t begrudge her those moments of low self-esteem or the individuals in her life who seem to think she’s nothing but a body, but when taken in the larger context of fat-shaming and body discrimination, hers is an unfulfilling tale ... My Body doesn’t give us any way to move forward, any idea what to do with our punishing self-hatred or the way men profit from women’s beauty ... People are entitled to look however they want, Ratajkowski included, even if her body sometimes makes me feel bad about my own. That’s not her fault, per se — but she is an active participant in a system that raises her up and makes me hate jean shopping. That dichotomy is missing from her reflections ... My Body doesn’t cut as deep as I want, but it cuts all the same
'Buying Myself Back'...is the strongest of the 11 collected here, which are serious, personal, repetitive and myopic ... ambiguity is present in these essays, often frustratingly so. Part of the problem is that Ratajkowski’s conception of herself is at odds with the reality she describes, which is a sincere but exasperating kind of celebrity dysmorphia ...There are moments of courageous self-disclosure in My Body, and passages that made me laugh ... The essay about 'Blurred Lines' is the one that most clearly captures the perplexing nature of Ratajkowski’s position. She’s thoughtful and skeptical, and has been treated wretchedly over the course of her career; she grapples intently with her sense of victimization at the hands of those who would use her body to sell their products. It seems strange, then, that her empowerment should arrive in the form of doing exactly that, albeit on her own terms and with her own products ... That, it seems to me, is the unsolvable moral question at the heart of this book.
My Body is meant to signal a shift in Ratajkowski’s public persona, and to a certain extent, it does. She no longer seems quite as interested in convincing the world that there is political virtue in being sexy online ... Yet her gaze is provincial, rarely extending past the confines of her own skin even when she is critiquing systemic issues ... confessionals can come across as opportunistic and hollow. At their worst, Ratajkowski’s essays belong in this genre. She supplies details that seem designed to evoke sympathy, but read as rather strange and tone-deaf ... Ratajkowski has lived an extraordinary life, and some of these stories demand to be told ... But an extraordinary life does not necessarily birth extraordinary insights, and banality is what My Body ultimately suffers from ... The mere ability to recognize the rottenness of patriarchy and capitalism also does not exempt you from perpetuating these constructs. Ratajkowski’s is a reassuring system of logic because it ultimately asks nothing of her beyond her comprehension.
Ratajkowski has spent decades receiving the world’s lecherous gaze, metabolizing it, inviting it, rejecting it, capitalizing on it, and agonizing over it. In her new essay collection, aptly titled My Body after her foremost preoccupation, Ratajkowski attempts to reckon with how her appearance has shaped her personal relationships, her career, and her psyche. If there is a thesis statement to be drawn from Ratajkowski’s somewhat muddled, overly lyrical début, it’s that physical beauty—in particular, a near-perfect, if outdated, sort of beauty—is a heavy cross to bear ... The central, and perhaps most exasperating, contradiction of My Body is Ratajkowski’s warring descriptions of her career path—one moment, being on display is an act of pure empowerment that makes her feel 'badass,' 'special,' 'in control.' The next, her career is a hideous double bind that she pursues strictly in the name of financial security, or because people won’t take anything but her looks seriously ... ['Buying Myself Back'] is a compelling examination of intellectual-property-rights issues in the fashion and modelling business. (It also makes one shudder to think of just how powerless the models who don’t have Ratajkowski’s platform are. Ratajkowski seldom seems to consider these women.) ... Not all of the other essays in My Body are quite as effective as 'Buying Myself Back.' The collection whipsaws between childhood, early adulthood, and present day, trying to forge connections between concrete memories and ambient sensations—all adding up to a pervasive sense of internal conflict that Ratajkowski experiences over commodifying her own physicality ... The broad concept of 'the body' is applied quite liberally, and the reader can lose the thread ... She struggles to draw out any insights or observations between these hazy experiences, and often defaults to blanket justifications ... As much as she alludes to being in control, Ratajkowski seems incapable of making a decision that doesn’t actively reinforce the things that make her feel bad. She confesses to still being 'addicted' to the sensation of being loved on Instagram. Of course, all of these contradictions are valid, and the questions she poses are meaningful ones, but Ratajkowski often fails to cut through them with insight.
It’s a formidable project that mines old questions, not so much to provide answers as to suggest that the questions are still relevant. Does profiting from the male gaze come at a cost, or is the male gaze a source of genuine power for some? Yes, Ratajkowski writes, and yes ... Ratajkowski guides us through the scenes where popular images of her were initially captured so she can reorient us; we’re in her point of view now. Her prose is direct, almost journalistic. We access the interiority of a woman who left school during the recession to make money and who’s blunt about that objective ... Most of the essays oscillate between pride and disenchantment with her own beauty, especially as a means of making money and attaining a restricted kind of social capital. This sort of power, Ratajkowski feels, is contingent, transient, addictive, and also what gave her the opportunity to publish a book. My Body’s smartest and most moving moments sit with these warring feelings, allowing several to coexist ... In ['Bc Hello Halle Berry'], though, the collection’s weaknesses are most apparent: the thin or absent analyses of the artists, writers and thinkers who’ve preceded her; the few signs of awareness that the power structures she critiques have farther-reaching effects than her own discomfort on a beach vacation ... In the collection’s weakest essay, 'Men Like You,' a righteous letter to her former manager, she writes that she supports, and works in concert with, other women. It’s a curious claim within Ratajkowski’s book, a book that neglects to mention its subject’s context or long history, a savvy but myopic collection about its author’s individual body: the crimes enacted against it; the life afforded by it; and its limitations, too.
Throughout the 12 essays in My Body, Ratajkowski hovers over questions of beauty, abuse, and power, trying to reclaim her image through narratives of self-discovery and feminist evolution ... With the publication of My Body, it’s clear that Ratajkowski is working with a more self-interested line of questioning — one that proves not to be in conversation with the questions Black’s work invokes regarding race, gender, class, and the corporeal. Turning inward rather than outward, the memoir sets aside the question of bodies and situates an individual body at its center ... Ratajkowski’s sentences are clear cut, reflective, and declarative; external and internal dialogues sit next to one another without apology. In subject matter, Ratajkowski is archival, looking back in the hopes of moving forward. Where the come-up story of an always-beautiful woman could risk alienating readers or further the flattening of Ratajkowski’s public persona, her stories about her childhood, early years as a full-time model, and musings on motherhood and marriage rescue the project from that fate. Her writing shines brightest in anecdotes where she allows the narrative to breathe without elaborate explanation ... She may want to situate her experiences within a broader western feminist discourse, but she is in conversation, first and foremost, with herself ... But what of the women whose shoulders she stands on? The flip side to refusing indebtedness is that the collection ends up suffering from an aversion to citation. As she retraces her feminist evolution through pop culture and personal experience, Ratajkowski avoids thorough consideration of the writers and thinkers who facilitated her journey. Even her reference to Black’s work, which seemed to inspire the book’s title, is given only a few lines ... My Body mostly omits the wider dialogues on desirability politics, media, labor, and power that make the book feel timely, carving out a vision of becoming that prizes the singularity of the author ... Though at times its small scope causes the pulse of the collection to grow faint, My Body finds its heartbeat again when Ratajkowski describes feelings of exhaustion ... My Body relies on these bursts of energy and intrigue.
... essays that shock and illuminate as they walk around the central themes of what it means to be a woman and a commodity, poking at them with a variety of sharpened tools ... At times the reader is a popcorn-eating audience; at other times her therapist ... It’s thrilling, often, to sit with Ratajkowski in the roiling surf of her life, in elegant stories written with uncomfortable honesty. It’s revelatory, too, to explore digital life and body politics through the eyes of a person whose body shapes a discourse, and unexpectedly moving to see the bruises left behind. The only problem with this being a smart and glittering collection of essays, rather than simply the glamorous celebrity memoir Ratajkowski could have sold, is that its quality reveals its limits ... Read as memoir, it’s extraordinary; read as activism, it’s unsatisfying. Her commentary on the industry she’s chosen is passionate and chilling, and yet at times rings hollow, in part because of her reluctance to subvert the male gaze she critiques. She returns to the concept that her power lies in her body, without interrogating the idea that her body could also walk away ... It’s fair, of course, for her to criticise the system she works within, but it’s unclear whether she cares enough to change it. To do so would mean (among other things) leaving social media, where images remain commodities to be exploited and crushed, often taking women’s identities down with them. Just because she can see the problems (capitalism, beauty standards, misogyny) are structural doesn’t mean she is not implicated in them. Or, indeed, is not perpetuating them daily ... But perhaps this project is a beginning. Perhaps it’s not Ratajkowski’s responsibility to overthrow the patriarchy, or redefine beauty, or destabilise capitalism. Perhaps it is enough for her to simply write a dazzling book considering the contradictions of living in a body like hers. To hold her stories up to the light, shards of glass, and see which ones draw blood.
Ratajkowski...is well placed to write about the fetishisation of girls and female beauty. She is candid about her own compromises, her desire to make money out of her looks and the reality of desperately craving male validation ... There are oddities to her story...but you feel she is genuinely trying to make sense of why she was driven to 'hustle' her way to the top ... Emrata’s voice presumably carries huge weight and one can only hope that her critique of 'a value system that revolves around men and their desire' has some impact on the minds of her young Insta fan base.
Throughout her writing has a sweetness and even an innocence. Ratajkowski leaves readers sure that she remains in awe of her body and excited about all that the future holds.
Ratajkowski, now 30, writes intimately and her essays are lucid, often self-indulgent and at times remarkably candid and raw: not only in revealing less-than-complimentary truths about her small, close family but about how inseparable her beauty has become from her sense of self ... This is a personal exploration that declares no intention to speak for anybody else, and by its own admission, is inconclusive – the collection closes with a sort of triumphant and too-neat claim over her own body and its true purpose as she gives birth to her son ... Yet it is still hard to escape the obvious fact that while Ratajkowksi is indeed a victim of a culture that values women’s beauty above all else – all women are victims of this – she still sits at the very top of the pile ... It is no great feminist breakthrough that one of the most famously beautiful women in the world should, now that she presumably no longer needs to save the money, feel conflicted about capitalising on her looks – or that she should feel frustrated that her intelligence is perceived as being secondary to her beauty, or that she should feel powerless. She at least enjoys the spoils: where does that leave the rest of us?
My Body captures Emily Ratajkowski’s evolving understanding of herself, and others’ perceptions and expectations, while trying to dissect the patriarchal, capitalist, and often predatory backbone to the industry that defines her beauty as the standard by which others should aspire ... Her self-awareness dives deeper than the surface to offer thought-provoking and impactful moments – some raw and awful, others heart warming – and a genuine attempt to ask bigger questions of how the industry operates and influences while acknowledging her privilege, though it doesn’t always provide answers, and here’s the gap. This essay collection aims big, and gets much of the way there – My Body is an observant, honest, thoughtful, and fascinating read, welcoming readers behind the curtain of an industry often shrouded in glamour, but also into the world of Emily.
... sits in this liminal space between reappraisal and self-defense. It’s a fascinating work: insightful, maddening, frank, strikingly solipsistic. Ratajkowski admits in her introduction that her awakening is still a half-finished one ... She senses, maybe, that she’s caught in an age-old quagmire, but not that she’s become, by virtue of her fame and self-presentation, potentially complicit in the things she critiques. Writing, for Ratajkowski, seems to let her assert the fullness of her personhood and interiority, a rejection of the world’s determination to make her an object. But the narrowness of her focus—her physical self, essentially, and everything it’s meant for her—is limiting. Even her title, My Body, suggests conflicting things: ownership and depersonalization. What do you do when the subject you know best, the topic upon which you are the ultimate authority, is the same trap you’re trying to write your way out of? ... Ratajkowski doesn’t say much in the book about how women and girls might respond to images of her. That myopia is frustrating, because she’s so astute on the subject of how her body is interpreted by men ... burning down a house that you are still very much inside is hard, which is maybe why so much of the rest of My Body feels impotent. It’s less a rallying cry for structural change than a dispassionate series of observations by someone who still sees themselves primarily as a commodity. Its tone is measured and numb ... The issue that kept sticking with me as I read was that Ratajkowski so clearly wants to have it all: ultimate control over the sale of her image; power; money, yes; but also kudos for being more than an object, for being able to lucidly communicate how much she’s suffered because of a toxic system—and is still suffering because of her ongoing participation. It is, as they say, a lot to ask ... To her credit, Ratajkowski seems to occasionally sense the innate hypocrisy of her desires ... Writing a book that’s effectively a literary portrait of your own physical self, though, is to risk reinforcing all the preconceptions anyone has ever had about you. Ratajkowski is a graceful and thoughtful writer, and as I read her book I longed for her to turn her gaze outward, to write an essay about marriage plots or coffee or landscape architecture or Scooby-Doo. Or, beyond that, I wanted her to risk fully indicting modeling as a paradigm—to not merely note that her career took off after she lost 10 pounds from stomach flu and kept the weight off, but to probe what looking at images of so many skinny bodies all day does to girls as delicate and unformed as her own teenage self. To wonder not just how the inherently flawed bargain of modeling has damaged her, but how it damages everyone. To risk letting herself feel or uncover something that might be a catalyst for not just observation, but transformation.
... thoughtful and accessible ... what is striking about My Body is not how different a renowned supermodel’s experiences are from those of an everywoman, but rather how continuous. At first, I suspected this made the book boring. My Body is more of a non-linear memoir than a compendium of essays – though Ratajkowski’s musings are nominally organised into discrete sections, they seem to bleed into a more general autobiographical jumble ... As I rifled through accounts of inappropriate advances and catcalls, I wondered why Ratajkowski chose to devote so much space to relatively common degradations, rather than focusing on the more exotic indignities that she endured as she became famous...But as I read on, I realised that the depressing familiarity of the abuses that Ratajkowski chronicles is precisely the point. The anecdotes in My Body dramatise what is always true, if often implicit: that women can neither fully escape nor fully inhabit bodies that men are bent on appropriating ... Still, for all her self-awareness, Ratajkowski stops short of exploring the full implications of her alienation ... What My Body neglects to explore is Ratajkowski’s elaborate stylisation and its social foundations ... in a book about female desirability and injustice, it is worth emphasising that beauty requires time, skill, money and effort.
Intimate and accomplished ... Enriched by Ratajkowski’s insider perspective on the modeling industry and her willingness to wrestle with the power of the male gaze rather than outright rejecting it, this is an astute and rewarding mix of the personal and the political.
Nuanced ... Surprisingly engaging ... This short book includes the juicy tidbits that avid celebrity-memoir readers seek ... The charm of this book lies in the author’s largely relatable writing, which shows the complex emotions and confusion of a young woman experiencing her sexual development and maturation into a capable adult ... A refreshingly candid, fearless look into a model’s body of work and its impact on her identity and politics.
