In her book, she articulates the pressures she’s felt to defer to men, from dancing in a nude thong for Thicke and Pharrell, to dating a boy who forced himself on her in high school (“I wish someone had explained to me that I owed him nothing”), to playing the “model wife” at a party for Bear-McClard in Hollywood, where she was grabbed and insulted by his “boys’ club” colleagues.
But “one takeaway I hope people know about this book is that it isn’t just, Oh, I’ve been so hurt, and another #MeToo story,” she said. “This is a book about capitalism. I just have an asset that I traded on that was specific, and I think most women do. Even if it’s in your marriage.”
She doesn’t plan to quit modeling, because she likes it, and because “I want to continue making money.” Besides, even if she did quit, she said, “I’m still going to be connected to celebrity, because we all are.”
Ratajkowski knows she is in the minority of models — and authors — who have the means to control the narrative as she does: to mint a self-portrait as an NFT and sell it at auction for $175,000, which she did in May; to forgo child care “because I like doing it”; to trademark her own brand. And yet, sending a book out into the world also requires letting go.
“It’s scary that somebody is just going to pull a quote and be like, this is what she said about this juicy bit of gossip,” Ratajkowski said, correctly predicting a Times of London headline that ran just weeks later: “Blurred Lines singer Robin Thicke assaulted me on set, says Emily Ratajkowski.” (Representatives for Thicke didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
Thicke is one plot point of many in a narrative that will inevitably be mined for clickbait. “This is not a book where I’m trying to cancel the men I’ve known in my life,” she said. “I’m trying to defy expectations and also talk about nuance — in my identity, but also just in life, and in political beliefs. And this is not a nuanced time.”