I’m obsessed with Emily Ratajkowski’s divorce era

Emily Ratajkowski is not-so-quietly entering her hot, unbothered divorcée era. The model and best-selling author has yet to formally announce the dissolution of her four-year marriage to Sebastian Bear-McClard: the Uncut Gems film producer and alleged “serial cheater” with whom she shares a one-year-old son. And neither has commented on the news yet. According to celebrity divorce lawyer Laura Wasser, high-profile couples often opt to negotiate their divorce settlements in private before filing anything with the court.

But in a plethora of subtler ways—cleverly selected accessories, pointed Twitter likes, increased TikTok activity—EmRata has been letting the public know exactly how she feels about the situation. Not since Nicole Kidman’s triumphant exit from her lawyer’s office after finalising her divorce from Tom Cruise in 2001 has a woman appeared more palpably relieved to be single again.

Take, for instance, a TikTok Duet Ratajkowski shared over the weekend that read: “When he thinks he’s a 10 because he pulled you but you like ugly men.” In the comments, she quickly added: “For legal reasons this is a joke.” But jokes aside, fans knew who she was probably talking about.

“Emily this is a god tier breakup behavior,” user @madeleinecwhite replied.

Since she first shimmied onto our screens in Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” music video, EmRata has continued to prove herself very capable of controlling her narrative. Last month, as rumours of a burgeoning romance with Brad Pitt began to circulate, Ratajkowski conspicuously posted a TikTok calling her 90-pound pup Columbo, a husky and German Shepherd mix, “the only man” she wants in her bed.

And this week, in the run-up to releasing a paperback edition of her book, My Body, Ratajkowski has been peppering social media with a flurry of observations about gender and sexuality, pleasure and power, attention and perception.

“Under a patriarchy, there’s this premise of men getting women, pulling them, like they’re something to possess,” the model said on Monday in a stitched clip about cis straight couples and gender performance. “Which I feel, as a recently single person who’s thinking about dating and stuff, I’ve really seen with my friends and with conversations kind of around it. It’s like, well, who’s gonna get her? Rather than, you know, this is a reciprocal mutual relationship where two people could potentially foster love. So yeah, basically, that’s why we don’t have a lot of love in cis-hetero relationships.”

It would be easy to interpret Ratajkowski’s recent missives as purely promotional. But they double as sharp criticisms of the media narratives encircling her romantic life. In July, Rolling Stone called her divorce “the Super Bowl for Confident Straight Men,” citing Drake, Trevor Noah, and John Mayer as hopeful suitors in addition to Pitt: the man she might be secretly dating if unconfirmed reports from Ok! Magazine can be trusted.

“I’m seeing a lot of comments of people being like, “I didn’t know EmRata was this deep.’ Like, blah, blah, blah. I wrote a book. It’s coming out in paperback…. We know what I do on Instagram. Like, thank you for that career boost, world. But like, TikTok—this is so fun for me. I’m finally wilding out.”