Even her title, My Body, suggests conflicting things: ownership and depersonalization. But the narrowness of her focus-her physical self, essentially, and everything it’s meant for her-is limiting. 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. Ratajkowski admits in her introduction that her awakening is still a half-finished one, and that the purpose of the book wasn’t “to arrive at answers” about the contradictions of selling her own image as a model, actor, and Instagram influencer with 28.5 million followers, but rather to “examine the various mirrors in which I’ve seen myself.” She senses, maybe, that she’s caught in an age-old quagmire (what the academic Sandra Bartky called “the disciplinary project of femininity”), but not that she’s become, by virtue of her fame and self-presentation, potentially complicit in the things she critiques. It’s a fascinating work: insightful, maddening, frank, strikingly solipsistic. My Body sits in this liminal space between reappraisal and self-defense. I thought that there was power in my ability to choose to do so.” Now? She’s not so sure, but nor has she entirely changed her mind. She writes: “All women are objectified and sexualized to some degree, I figured, so I might as well do it on my own terms. Commodifying it as a model at first brought her satisfaction. Starting in middle school, Ratajkowski writes, she received mixed messages about her body-whether it provoked offense or pleasure, was too big or too small, made her strong or vulnerable. This experience is, she knows, particularly fraught for women and girls. This book is Ratajkowski’s attempt to come to terms with her existence as a person who is, in the words of Derek Zoolander, really, really ridiculously good-looking. In My Body, a collection of essays in which Ratajkowski scrutinizes the blessing and the curse of her physical self, she writes that Thicke groped her during filming that day, and that she said nothing the incident was, in her eyes, a reminder of “how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at.” (Thicke has not publicly responded to the allegations.) Their sexuality seems to exist somehow outside the range of the camera’s gaze, outside the atmosphere of mortal men.
They’re so casual in their nudity, so composed, so unperturbed by the antics of the men objectifying them. “They were the talent we were more like props,” Ratajkowski writes of the men in her new book, My Body, and yet the women are the ones viewers can’t look away from. She commands the video in both the PG-13 and unrated versions like a supernova, a vortex of pulchritude and screen presence and sticky red lip gloss. “Blurred Lines” instantly made Ratajkowski a star. This is the raw power of the female body, and yet what kind of power is it, really? At one point, Thicke seems to push the model Emily Ratajkowski against a wall, hollering into her ear while she gazes away from him, a picture of barely suppressed disdain. But what most surprises me now is how pitiable the men seem, pulling at the models’ hair and playing air guitar for attention, less musical superstars than jejune dads who don’t exactly know what to do with the women they’ve paid to be naked. dance, goofy and fully clothed, around them.Īs an artifact of its time, it’s a remarkably deadened and nonsensical thing. (“I know you want it,” Thicke croons presumptively over and over, even though honestly, no, I do not want it at all.) In the video, directed by the veteran Diane Martel, three models dressed in transparent thongs peacock and pose with a baffling array of props (a lamb, a banjo, a bicycle, a four-foot-long replica of a syringe) while Thicke, the producer and one of the co-writers Pharrell Williams, and the rapper T.I.
In 2013, when it was released, the song spawned a new microeconomy of commentary denouncing it as a distillation of rape culture, or fretting over whether enjoying its jaunty hook was defensible. Rewatching the music video for “Blurred Lines,” the totemic Robin Thicke song, is an interesting project.
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