It Figures is Yahoo Life’s physique picture collection, delving into the journeys of influential and galvanizing figures as they discover what physique confidence, physique neutrality and self-love imply to them.
Emily Ratajkowski used her physique to stake her declare to fame. Now, she’s prepared for folks to get to know the actual her.
The 31-year-old mannequin and actress, greatest identified for rising onto the scene after her breakout look within the music video for Robin Thicke’s 2013 hit “Blurred Lines,” has spent the previous 12 months on a journey of reintroducing herself. More importantly, she’s been relearning who she really is, beginning along with her Oct. 2021 ebook, My Body.
“I started writing the book, not because I was like, ‘This is what I’ve learned.’ It was because I really wanted to kind of investigate the experience I’ve had and even just how my politics had been formed, and honestly to kind of figure out what I’ve done wrong and why I felt the way I did about so many things,” Ratajkowski tells Yahoo Life of the gathering of essays that she wrote exploring the notion of herself because it pertained to ideas just like the male gaze and feminine empowerment. “It was kind of an attempt to punish myself, I want to say, when I first started writing.”
Ratajkowski’s ebook was met with rave evaluations and nuanced conversations as she revealed her distinctive perspective on her profession, the facility she’s yielded via her magnificence and the way it’s seemingly outlined her place on the earth.
“I think a lot of women in your early 20s — because it’s sort of like, you’re sexualized, and you’re coming into your sexual being, you’re an adult, you know, but you’re still really young – have a really kind of sick relationship with your body in that period. Mine especially was that way because I was commodifying my body and it was my living and also like, how I became famous, and it became my career and my whole identity,” she says.
To the shock of many, she additionally revealed the way it dissents from who she is aware of herself to be.
“I didn’t want to just be a body, I never had. And [the book] was really, I think, just kind of born out of a depression, essentially. And being like, ‘Wait, this has not made me happy,'” she continues. “I wanted to give this one dimensional kind of caricature of myself that had been out in the world a voice. And it felt super important.”
While a bit of her exploration was for herself, there was so much she felt different girls may achieve via her divulging the truth of her state of affairs.
“Once I started writing the book, I really stopped thinking about kind of what people wanted me to be, or how I could continue to profit off of this image, this EmRata personality, and just really embracing who I actually am and the things I’m thinking about and my identity personally, but also as a public figure,” she says. “So much of the messaging that young girls get is like, ‘If you’re the hottest, and if you’re the most perfect, then your life will be great.’ I realized that that was how a lot of people regarded this persona, not even me, but this persona and what I represented in the world, and I felt an obligation to correct that. And explain like, ‘No, no, there’s no winning.’ And also just this will never bring you happiness and joy, that’s something you have to do internally.”
She finally hopes to have performed her half to demystify the toxicity that surrounds magnificence beliefs and the best way that ladies in every single place attempt to suit into them.
“You have this idea, this goal of being a type of woman, being beautiful. You know, like my living was based on the way I look and my identity in the world, and just how much that infiltrates so much of how women think of themselves. And now everyone is putting out an image of themselves. We all have Instagrams, we all have social media. Even just how we get dressed,” she says of the stress that ladies particularly face relating to presenting themselves a sure manner. “I think that I realized that my experience was maybe more relatable than I even realized.”
She continues, “Being objectified and sexualizing yourself and letting others sexualize you won’t bring you power, and it won’t bring you joy. Or I’ll say this, it will bring you a certain amount of power.”
With the facility and platform that she’s been given via her profession so far, Ratajkowski is selecting to lend her voice to what she believes are necessary conversations about politics, philosophy, feminism, intercourse and popular culture via her new podcast High Low with EmRata produced by Sony Music Entertainment and Somethin’ Else. And whereas years of being a reasonably face with a bombshell physique have put her in precarious conditions and uncovered her to degradation and even assault, the mannequin says that talking up is proving to be fairly the problem.
“I’m just so much more fulfilled and so much happier because I feel I like myself more. I feel respected and heard and all the things that we know human beings need in a way that I just didn’t when I was an object, basically. It’s complicated because I do have impostor syndrome and I do have internalized misogyny and it’s scary,” she says. “It’s scarier than just being able to like, you know, be a body, but it also makes me so much happier. So it’s high risk, high reward, I would say.”
In the meantime, she acknowledges that these milestones in her profession aren’t locations, however moderately part of the journey.
“I never wrote the book from a perspective of like, I have all the answers, I’m sitting on a mountaintop, like, you know, enlightenment zone. I still am very much kind of trying to figure out what these things are. And I’m hoping the podcast will also be investigative in that way and more food for thought and more about getting people to think about these things than providing a very specific perspective that then is like, ‘This is how we should be thinking about it.’ Like I want it to be an ongoing dialogue,” she says, very like she views her personal life and her relationship along with her physique. “It’s an ongoing process that still continues for me to have perspective on the things that I wrote about and my own experience, in a way that kind of shocks me to be honest.”
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