Emily Ratajkowski’s new essay collection ‘My Body’ raises vital questions about sexuality and consent, but can selling your body ever be empowering?

Emily Ratajkowski recently released a collection of essays, entitled My Body, that are equally shocking and enlightening in their exploration of what it means to be a woman and to be objectified for your body. They touch on our culture’s obsession with female beauty and sexuality, the often perverse dynamics of the modelling industry and, most strikingly, the grey area between consent and abuse.

In the essay ‘Blurred Lines’, Emily details the viral music video by Robin Thicke, which was partly responsible for her rise to fame, claiming that the musician touched her breasts without her consent on the set, while in another non-consensual incident, in the essay ‘Buying Myself Back’, Emily alleges being sexually assaulted after an unpaid shoot by photographer Jonathan Leder.

The book was marketed as a “profoundly personal exploration of feminism, sexuality and power, of men’s treatment of women and women’s rationalisations for accepting that treatment.” While Emily was widely praised for the book, it also raised eyebrows – many criticised the model for supposedly producing a feminist essay collection that condemns the patriarchy, all while greatly benefiting from it by continuing to sell her image.

There were tonnes of think pieces dedicated to laying out the supposed contradiction at play, pointing out Emily’s Instagram account, which shows many unclothed photos of her, and it threw up the age-old question that has long been up for debate: can selling your body ever be empowering? Can you denounce a culture that you benefit from, and does embracing the toxicity of misogyny serve to subvert it?

It’s complicated. Very. And there is a lot of nuance involved that is often context-dependent, so I don’t think it’s possible to state a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’. But, as a someone who continues to explore feminism and my definition of it – alongside learning about the patriarchal world that we live in and aiming to empower women online – through my Instagram account, I decided to explore my thoughts and feelings on this broad and difficult topic.

Let’s get into it. First things first: I believe that women can and should be able to do what they want with their bodies (as long as it’s not harming someone else). It’s not our fault that our bodies are objectified and it’s not our fault that we live in a patriarchal society; the oppressed are not responsible for taking down the oppressor. 

So, if someone wants to post naked or half-naked pictures of themselves online, or be a sex worker, or profit from selling their body in any other way, that’s their decision and their’s only – it’s not up to anyone else to make judgements on it.

Whether or not that decision empowers that person or objectifies them is, I believe, only something that they can determine: if the woman chooses to sell their body, then that choice might be empowering. If they feel forced to sell their body by someone else or because of poverty, that’s quite literally the antithesis of empowerment. I believe that empowerment lies in the choice, not in the act that is being chosen. If Emily says that selling her body feels empowering, then it is.

Personal choice aside, can Emily claim feminism if she is a cog in the patriarchal machine? Her body earns her both money and power – does this not serve to reinforce standards by which pretty much every other woman falls short?