The torturous blurred lines of the beauty myth

CULTURE Emily Ratajkowski’s debut book, My Body, is furious, conflicted and frustrating, finds Phoebe Luckhurst

- Phoebe Luckhurst

WHO would be as beautiful as Emily Ratajkowski? My Body, the model’s first essay collection, is a quietly furious disquisition on flesh and capitalism — and the queasy commodification of women’s bodies — by a woman whose perfectly proportioned one has won her fame, acclaim, piles of money and, in turn, a fragmented, dissociative relationship with it. Extraordinarily perhaps, it is (often) sympathetic, (fairly) self-aware and, in an age of simplistic outrage, (quite) nuanced.

Ratajkowski’s reputation precedes her, of course: the cartoonishly beautiful Californian model who, as she notes, went from jobbing catalogue clothes horse to fetishised icon after starring in the Blurred Lines music video — a now-cancelled song which treats consent as merely an obstacle to be sidestepped (‘you know you want it’). They were different times, the early 2010s. In it, Ratajkowski danced in very little. Eight years later, she has 28.5 million Instagram followers, her own bikini range, a contract with L’Oréal and now a book deal.