Haley Nahman

haleynahman.substack.com

#24: The Emily Ratajkowski

effect

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Did you read Emily Ratajkowski’s viral essay? This
week I delve into my perhaps controversial
reaction to it, and my thoughts on her general
figurehood, which I’ve been wanting to write about
for a while.

Hi!
 #24: THE EMILY RATAJKOWSKI EFFECT

felt good about that at all. Nor do I want to be one

of those people. But I do think she represents a
very particular type of cultural figure, one worth
examining and even criticizing as an exercise in
understanding the role a person’s stated ideals
play in the pursuit of progress (especially as they
contrast with action).

In reading the piece, my foremost emotion was

disgust at the men who used her and a desire to
protect her and women like her. I also enjoyed her
prose and found the piece useful on the level of
exposing a threatening side of celebrity most
people would never think about. But close behind,
by way of a few details that jumped out, was a
(photo by Tina Tyrell for New York Magazine via The
suspicion of another agenda. There was the way
Cut)
she spoke about money: “I was 23,” she writes, “I
A very personal essay hadn’t made enough money to comfortably spend
$80,000 on art.” (So she splits the cost with her
Last Tuesday, Emily Ratajkowski published a story
boyfriend.) She later mentions she hadn’t made as
in The Cut called “Buying Myself Back: When does
much money as she’d hoped, and towards the end,
a model own her own image?” In it she details the
that she couldn’t afford to engage in a legal battle
nefarious ways in which her image and personhood
unless she were to sell a prized possession. These
have been exploited throughout her modeling
little comments are telling inclusions that hint at
career—by photographers, by artists, and by
an awareness of class, but with a tone-deaf
various men in her life. The story is well-written
insistence on situating herself as an underdog
and at times heart-wrenching, and after reading it,
within its context. Then there’s the gratuitous
I had a suspicion about how it would be publicly
inclusion of how much weight she lost during a
received, so I checked Twitter to see if I was right.
particularly anxious period (“ten pounds in five
Within seconds: a barrage of blue checks praising
days”)—a detail that, given the flavor of “thinspo”
her as a brilliant and honest writer, implicating
she regularly doles out, functions more effectively
themselves as underestimating her because she’s
as a whistle for a vulnerable type of girl than
hot, and invoking the piece as if it were a powerful
genuine exposition.
political statement.
These are small gripes, and I don’t think they
In my vindication I felt unusually apathetic. My
would necessarily be prohibitive to the soundness
response to the piece was different, but I didn’t
of her point (we all want to be the underdog; we’ve
hate it. I read it in one continuous gulp on a sunny
all been poisoned by diet culture), except for the
bench while drinking an iced coffee and
fact that, by the time I reached her conclusion, I
pretending, for five blissful minutes, that it was all
got the sense that this piece wasn’t so much
I cared about. I’d do it again! Had I then logged on
about criticizing a system as it was a brand
to find a deluge of people shit-talking Emrata for
exercise for Emily Ratajkowski. Not necessarily by
not staying in her lane or whatever, I wouldn’t have

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intention, but by impact. There is no broadening of
her point to include people other than herself;
there is no genuine analysis of the complexity of
modeling (a profession that is literally defined by
selling one’s image) and female agency. There is no
mention of actual copyright law, or the
photographers and makeup artists and producers
who helped create the image that she posted on
her Instagram, who were also exploited by Richard
Prince. The most interesting parts, where she
paints herself as complicit in some way, are never
further unpacked, and so seem included for extra
honesty credit. It’s not that I think she elided
meaningful criticism in bad faith, or on purpose—I
think she did so compulsively, as an expression of
her (and many people’s) general approach to
systemic change, which is to assume that by
simply calling out a problem, or exploiting it in her
favor, she takes away its power.
She ends the piece on a high note: “Eventually,
Jonathan will run out of ‘unseen’ crusty Polaroids,
but I will remain as the real Emily; the Emily who
owns the high-art Emily, and the one who wrote
this essay, too. She will continue to carve out
control where she can find it.” It’s curiously
optimistic given the horrors she’s just described,
and unsettlingly detached. Maybe it’s meant to
transmit female resilience, but to me it registered
as the same benign argumentation you might see
on her Instagram, whereby she supposedly
subverts the toxicity of misogyny by embracing it
herself. They feel like different contingents of the
same choice-feminist doctrine that says any
choice a woman makes is inherently feminist, and
any criticism of those choices is therefore anti-
feminist. As we’ve witnessed with the fall of the
girlboss, it’s not a belief system that scales.
Backing up
I’ll admit I went into reading Ratajkowski’s essay
with some cynicism. I’ve never found her defensive
posture about what is and isn’t feminist to be
compelling or particularly salient. But I do think
it’s important to account for evolution, so let’s go
back a little: After the “Blurred Lines” music video
put her on the map in 2013 and she became
known for posing semi-naked on Instagram,
Ratajkowski started narrating her comfort with
nudity in interviews. “Mom was topless on the
beach every summer in Majorca,” she told the New
York Times. And in response to the idea that
American women are more shy: “Go to Europe.
Travel,” she told The Cut. “If you spend any time
there you notice it right away—their comfort level
is different.” The implication, I think, was that her
propensity for being naked in public wasn’t about
shock value, self-exploitation, or attention-seeking;
she was simply comfortable in her body. Of course,
the photos she shared never showed her naked in
a casual way, say, hunched over at a table, or
cooking, but rather taut, tan, posed, cropped, and
filtered, betraying a different motive. “I hope that
with my modeling and with the things that I do,”
she told Maxim in 2015, “I’m able to walk that line
and show young women who are developing and
becoming sexual that they don’t have anything to
be embarrassed about, and instead of being
exploited, it’s something they embrace and feel
empowered by.”
In 2016, she took up this position more seriously,
claiming that this kind of self-empowerment was a
radical act. In “Baby Woman,” an essay she wrote
for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter, she said, “To me,
‘sexy’ is a kind of beauty, a kind of self-expression,
one that is to be celebrated, one that is
wonderfully female. Why does the implication have
to be that sex is a thing men get to take from
women and women give up?” A month later, she
posed topless with Kim Kardashian on Instagram,
their stomachs flexed and middle fingers up, with
the caption: “We are more than just our bodies,
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but that doesn't mean we have to be shamed for
them or our sexuality. #liberated.”
This has been the basis of her outspoken political
views ever since. “My response to people saying I
post oversexualized images is that it’s my choice
and there’s an ownership and empowerment
through them,” she told Women’s Wear Daily. She
explains that, yes, the beauty standards that made
her rich and famous are the result of sexist
oppression, but she doesn’t have to act outside of
those forces to resist them. “I may wear makeup
that enhances my features [and] that plays into
the standard of beauty that has been set up by a
patriarchal society, but I’m living within it,” she
said, rather conveniently. “I’m not wearing the
makeup to please men, I’m wearing it to please
myself.” A couple months later, she told Harpers
Bazaar that taking and posting a selfie was a way
to reclaim the male gaze. This I agree with:
nothing about her photos subverts the male gaze;
they simply reveal it as her gaze, too.
I do think that there are multiple valid ways to
resist someone taking your power away—you can
separate yourself from the oppressor, you can
redefine what you think is powerful, you can beat
them to it by oppressing yourself first. If Emily
Ratajkowski grew up feeling like she was never
thin enough, as she alluded in her Cut essay—I
suspect as a result of seeing supermodels in
magazines—and posting photos where she looks
extremely thin makes her feel better about herself,
that is her personal right. The cycle continues. She
is working within a system instead of against it—
something many people have no choice but to do.
What I struggle with is the fervent line of
argument that such a path is equally effective in
the pursuit of progress. Or that something that is
personally empowering is necessarily progressive.
Given how sophisticated the online left has gotten
at parsing the limits of lean-in feminism, it feels
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redundant for me to even point this out, but the
opportunities persist.
In her followup interview on The Cut’s podcast,
Ratajkowski implicates her former self by saying,
“There’s sort of a wave of feminism that’s like,
‘Listen, we live in a patriarchy, the way to get
powerful and get money is [to] commodify yourself,
and, you know, learn to capitalize on your sex
appeal and your image. And there’s some truth to
that—I own a home, I live a life that I wouldn’t
have lived had I gone to UCLA for art. But the truth
is that, ultimately, there’s only so much control
that you can have.” But when host Avery Trufelman
asks what the lesson is in all this, instead of
disavowing choice feminism, Ratajkowski doubles
down on it. “I think that writing this essay is the
best way I can reclaim power.”
Is that it? If you scroll through Emily Ratajkowski’s
Instagram, aside from the occasional
#hotgirlsforBernie post, it doesn’t look so different
from, say, Kim Kardashian’s—a person famous (and
often celebrated) for capitalizing off the worst
parts of modern culture. You will find photos of
tiny waists, flexed abs, the pursed lips and
darkened skin of Instagram face. You will find
promotion for clothing collaborations, sponsored
ads for beauty products. Their impact, in other
words, is quite similar. So what, really, is the
difference between the two? Emily writes
thoughtful essays about power and consent; Kim is
decidedly less interested in feminist theory. Emily
defends her choices as radical; Kim doesn’t (not
really). They have both been deemed feminist
icons.
I’m not that interested in debating what is and
isn’t feminist at this point. It feels irrelevant and
also boring. But what bothered me about the
reception of Ratajkowski’s essay—which, of course,
she could not control—was that broadly deeming
her piece politically expedient revealed something
 #24: THE EMILY RATAJKOWSKI EFFECT
about how we currently define activism. If the
piece feels a little empty when viewed through that
lens, it may be because Emily Ratajkowski has
accumulated mass wealth by riding the very
currents she is indirectly criticizing—the male
gaze, female objectification, self-commodification.
And by writing this piece she did not compromise
that wealth or general position; if anything, she
likely increased both and will continue to do so. It
goes without saying that how she was treated was
unspeakably horrible and not deserved, but what is
she actually aiming to change?
Extrapolating
What does it mean to participate and benefit from
a culture you also want to denounce? Is
denouncement enough? It’s a question that’s
dominated another arena of online discourse over
the last year: literary criticism. There was Lauren
Oyler’s viral criticism of Jia Tolentino’s popular
book Trick Mirror, where she accused Tolentino of
pointing out problems in culture as a means to an
end, as if she had no option to actually resist
them through behavior. “Tolentino’s elective self-
confinement,” Oyler wrote, “is supposed to make
her seem like a martyr, but what she sells is not
herself; it’s a shoddy mode of thinking that says
everything a person does… remains a matter of
‘survival’ rather than a demonstration of priorities
and desires.” You’ll find a similar line of thinking
among those who defend ‘selling out’ with the idea
that it’s everyone’s right to “get their bag,” no
matter how much doing so compromises their
stated moral framework.
Last month, in a piece for The New Yorker called
“Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?,”
Katy Waldman made a similar point to Oyler, but
about novelists instead of essayists. “These self-
conscious times have furnished us with a new
fallacy,” Waldman writes. “Call it the reflexivity
trap. This is the implicit, and sometimes explicit,
idea that professing awareness of a fault absolves
you of that fault—that lip service equals
resistance.” Obviously this issue was at the center
of the media reckoning this past June—that many
brands and online personalities had stated values
they didn’t actually uphold through action, as if
making the statement had been enough.
In a recent piece for The White Review about
Natasha Stagg’s popular book, Sleeveless, Amber
Husain referenced this same ideology but gave it a
different name: “Such writers [as Anna Wiener and
Jia Tolentino] have rightly been criticized for
attempting to justify what are, of course, choices,
via a manoeuvre a friend of mine now casually
refers to as ‘informed exceptionalism’—the effort
to write oneself out of corrupted alignments by
conscientiously demonstrating an ability to
comprehend them.” (Emphasis mine.) Husain used
this as a means of comparison against Natasha
Stagg’s response to our far-gone culture: which is
not to imply that her awareness makes her
virtuous, like Tolentino, but to instead embrace
that she herself is toxic, and that resisting the
toxic forces would only sap her life of pleasure.
I could be implicated in both lines of argument. In
fact, what initially drew me to Jia Tolentino’s
writing was that she was seemingly able to
critique a culture while also enjoying its spoils,
integrity intact. It was a duality I recognized, or at
least strove for, in my own writing—gently
criticizing fashion and capitalism while working for
a fashion site and pushing product on my own
Instagram. Obviously I began to see these things
as incompatible, which led to my discomfort and
eventual departure from my role at that fashion
site and as a paid-for influencer (although I still
enjoy Tolentino’s writing for other reasons). But
that doesn’t mean I always have the willpower to
resist the things I find ethically dubious—like
Stagg, my tastes and desires continue to be
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molded by the very culture I aim to critique. The
question, then, is how should I define those
departures (not as radical or inevitable, I’d wager),
and how do we possibly address a deep-seated
value system that inspires us all to act, over and
over, against our own interest?
#Liberation
This is the question that critics of mainstream
Democratic thought, a.k.a. neoliberalism, want us
to consider. The primary tenet of neoliberalism as
it’s currently employed is the idea that societal
problems can be solved through individual action.
But we know by now that these issues are
systemic and will persist even if the majority of us
learn to behave. So what does liberation actually
look like? If it’s not simply personal choices—
whether as a means to reclaim one’s power, as
Ratajkowski might argue, or as a means of
survival, like Tolentino might argue, or in one’s own
disinterested pursuit of pleasure, like Stagg might
argue—then perhaps it’s something much bigger
and disruptive. Something that would challenge our
beliefs, and completely revolutionize our desires,
rather than simply justify or recontextualize them
until we can live with ourselves.
At the end of her piece about Natasha Stagg,
Husain put it this way: “[If] political agents, rather
than exposing venality only to bemoan it as a
given, [were] to commit themselves to more
emancipatory forms of (ideally collective) action,
then it seems reasonable enough to believe that
the contours of a desirable career and covetable
‘lifestyle’ might eventually look different from what
Stagg as a writer and we, as readers, are currently
able to envisage.” I think she means that instead
of focusing on “putting the ladder down” so that
we may help more people escape the toxic runoff
of a toxic culture, we move the ladder to safer
ground. Or perhaps get rid of it altogether.
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Imagine, for instance, that instead of fighting for
everyone to have a seat at the corporate table, we
dealt with the harm of an exploitive upper class?
What if, instead of fighting for all bodies to be
exploited for likes on Instagram, we simply
redefined the contours of aspiration? What if,
instead of celebrating having a Black woman
candidate for vice president who has a dubious and
racist record, we fought for policies that actually
helped Black women? Marx would call this “a
revolution of values.” He was concerned with
valuing one’s time—and thus, one’s freedom—over
one’s money, power, or status. It’s hard to locate a
single enduring strain of mainstream culture that
currently embodies this idea, and it’s just as hard
to locate a single issue plaguing modern America
that doesn’t ultimately trace back to the blind
pursuit of wealth.
Emily Ratajkowski’s solution is different. It’s
personal, and applies only to women who look and
live like she does, and that’s fine. But the idea that
her approach is broadly liberatory, I think, is
complacent at best, inhibitive at worst. There are
plenty of reasons for her to tell the story she told
last week that go beyond simple catharsis (which
has personal value), or the right anyone has to tell
their story (an important cultural tradition),
especially a victim of assault—but I wonder
whether she can possibly lay claim to them when
her own political point of view amounts to a
justification to continue profiting off of the very
system she criticizes. Did anyone praising the
piece on Twitter as politically powerful walk away
from reading it with a sense of what needed to
change, or how it possibly could within the
constraints of the value system Ratajkowski so
baldly proliferates? If not, or even if so, I wonder
what it says about our collective liberatory
prospects that no one seemed to care.
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1. This week’s Small Good Things is, of all things,
Kitten, my friend Catherine’s low-stakes Instagram
zine in which artists of different disciplines
respond to a one-word brief. The first brief was
romance, and the responses are a perfect mish-
mash.
2. Countless tweets about the passing of Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who led an inspiring career
and whose death should not compromise an entire
country’s democracy, although it might. I’ve also
been
thinking about this prescient essay from 2018—
“What the Cult of Ruth Bader Ginsberg Got Wrong”
—by Stephanie Mencimer for Mother Jones and
what it means to worship political figures.
3. This series of waterfalls talking to each other by
comedian Julio Torres’ that truly could only have
come out of his brain.
4. A new (used) bike, which I’ve been riding all over
town like a kid with a new toy.
5. The most recent season of Search Party, a show
I love very much made by people I love very much,
especially John Early. I’m also not sure I’ve ever
been as involuntarily compelled by someone’s face
as I am by Alia Shawkat’s?
6. The unflattering realization that unless I’m in a
very particular mood, I need my meal preparation
to take less than two minutes flat.
7. Various clips from the Fast Times at Ridgemont
High table read for charity, which honestly brought
me more joy than I’m comfortable admitting…
8. Rick Owens’ interview for The Cut’s series on
the state of fashion, which I didn’t expect to enjoy
as much as I did. “All the designers you’re talking
about, we were a departure from the generation
before us. At this point, we are the generation that
somebody needs to reject. That’s just who we are.
We’ve established ourselves. And somebody needs
to violently reject us. And they will. I’m waiting.” I
love him? 
9. Two definitions:
mammonism, meaning the greedy pursuit of
wealth, used by Rei Kawakubo in her interview
with The Cut (a great/quick read)
ineluctable, meaning inescapable, seen twice in
three hours, most memorably used by Ben Schott
in his incredible, readable takedown of the “bland
brand” phenomenon for Bloomberg.
10. This precious cartoon about Maybe Baby by a
reader, which I forgot to share when I first saw it:
11. “If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything,” a life-
changing essay by James Wood for the New Yorker
that I sought out after several people suggested I
look into Martin Hägglund’s ideas on death,
secularism, and socialism. I’ve been thinking about
it ever since.
12. Too many frozen Ghirardelli milk chocolate
chips, eaten plain.
13. This video of what “Semi-Charmed Kind of Life”
would sound like if it had been written by
Blink-182. The niche pop punk content I live for.
14. The beginnings of a new Fall 2020 playlist,
which will not feature any pop punk and which I’ll
eventually share here. In the meantime, my
@halemur playlist, which I still regularly add to, is
necessarily autumnal since that’s basically my
entire musical taste. (Join its 3,500 followers!)
15. The comments section of my last newsletter,
which is full of highly relatable takes on this
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strange and alienating time. Thank you for weighing thoughts as I do. Tune in on Tuesday if you’re
in. Related: a reader’s genius term for “the fear of interested—we’ll also address comments!
missing out on something you don’t even really
Thanks so much for reading,
care about”: fauxmo.
Haley
Finally, thank you for all the extremely nice DMs
about my podcast episode with Danny last week!
This month a portion of subscriber proceeds will
They made me really happy. This week I’m bringing
be donated to The Bail Project, a non-profit
on my friend and former editor Mallory Rice, as
combatting mass incarceration by disrupting the
she’s the first person I texted when the Emrata
cash bail system.
piece came out and she has just as many