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socappuccino 's review for:
My Body
by Emily Ratajkowski
Reading My Body felt like walking into a hall of mirrors- each reflection revealing a layer of Emily Ratajkowski shaped by visibility, objectification, and the struggle to reclaim herself.
She begins her story with a confession that resonates from the very first page: "Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents' love for me the most." (17)
She lays bare how her worth was first tethered to how others looked at her- beauty not as an asset but as a fragile tether to validation. That early weight of visibility becomes a theme she revisits throughout the book. Later, she writes: "In my early twenties [...] women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to men whose desire granted them that power [...] how limited any woman's power is when she survives [...] as a thing to be looked at." (47)
This realization -of power so dependant on the gaze- is seismic. It reconfigures her rise in the "Blurred Lines" video as both career-making and control-relinquishing. She acknowledges that what was perceived as empowerment was more often a trade: beauty in exchange for agency.
Ratajkowski's self-description of her body as an object is both poetic and haunting: "My body [...] is an ornament used for decorating." (103) She explains how overexposure and dissociation became survival tactics: "Dissociating makes everything easier [...] strip yourself naked so it seems like no one else can strip you down." (103)
Reading those lines felt like staring at an emotional armature- the realization that overexposure was less freedom and more protective mimicry.
The arc of her memoir reaches something like catharsis when she says: "I have grown past shame and fear and into anger [...] I stood on their shoulders to here." (219-220) It is not a triumphant declaration as much as an unvarnished acceptance: anger as agency, discomfort as growth. This refusal to apologize for ambition, for visibility, and for contradictions is both fierce and grounded.
What struck me most was the texture of her truth. These aren't solitary recollections- they feel communal, especially when she writes of unnamed women. "I stood on their shoulders..." is an admission of inherited silences and collective reclamation.
That said, the book doesn't offer manifestos or prescriptive feminism. Rather, it is a testament to complexity- a memoir written as a series of mirrors, shards, contradictions. At times it treads close to celebrity self-inquiry; yet in its raw honesty, it becomes an act of political storytelling.
My Body unsettled me, in the same way an uncomfortable truth eventually makes you breathe differently. It is not always comfortable- but beauty, the power it brings, and the pain it inflicts, rarely offers ease.
Ultimately, the memoir insists: visibility can be both prison and portal. And reclaiming ownership of one's body- its presence, its scars, its gaze- is always a quiet revolution worth reading closely.
She begins her story with a confession that resonates from the very first page: "Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents' love for me the most." (17)
She lays bare how her worth was first tethered to how others looked at her- beauty not as an asset but as a fragile tether to validation. That early weight of visibility becomes a theme she revisits throughout the book. Later, she writes: "In my early twenties [...] women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to men whose desire granted them that power [...] how limited any woman's power is when she survives [...] as a thing to be looked at." (47)
This realization -of power so dependant on the gaze- is seismic. It reconfigures her rise in the "Blurred Lines" video as both career-making and control-relinquishing. She acknowledges that what was perceived as empowerment was more often a trade: beauty in exchange for agency.
Ratajkowski's self-description of her body as an object is both poetic and haunting: "My body [...] is an ornament used for decorating." (103) She explains how overexposure and dissociation became survival tactics: "Dissociating makes everything easier [...] strip yourself naked so it seems like no one else can strip you down." (103)
Reading those lines felt like staring at an emotional armature- the realization that overexposure was less freedom and more protective mimicry.
The arc of her memoir reaches something like catharsis when she says: "I have grown past shame and fear and into anger [...] I stood on their shoulders to here." (219-220) It is not a triumphant declaration as much as an unvarnished acceptance: anger as agency, discomfort as growth. This refusal to apologize for ambition, for visibility, and for contradictions is both fierce and grounded.
What struck me most was the texture of her truth. These aren't solitary recollections- they feel communal, especially when she writes of unnamed women. "I stood on their shoulders..." is an admission of inherited silences and collective reclamation.
That said, the book doesn't offer manifestos or prescriptive feminism. Rather, it is a testament to complexity- a memoir written as a series of mirrors, shards, contradictions. At times it treads close to celebrity self-inquiry; yet in its raw honesty, it becomes an act of political storytelling.
My Body unsettled me, in the same way an uncomfortable truth eventually makes you breathe differently. It is not always comfortable- but beauty, the power it brings, and the pain it inflicts, rarely offers ease.
Ultimately, the memoir insists: visibility can be both prison and portal. And reclaiming ownership of one's body- its presence, its scars, its gaze- is always a quiet revolution worth reading closely.