emrata's body & mine
"i want to be the one in control of my body, even if that means denying it."
i am ashamed to say that when i think of emrata (emily ratajkowski), i think of her body. it’s with a twinge of ugly recognition, low in my stomach, because this brand of internalized misogyny goes down the same, no matter how you swallow it. like the people she describes in her debut essay collection, my body, i’ve built the basis of my initial opinion of her on it.
but this isn’t about my relationship with emrata’s body. it’s easy—boringly, frighteningly easy—to assign blame to her for the way women view themselves. david fincher describes her character in gone girl as someone men want and women hate; but the hate he refers to is a hard-candied pill, offering nothing of substance but the momentarily sweet-relief taste when it’s on our lips.
almost every women i know has some sort of feeling on emrata. ironically, almost none of it has actually anything to do with her, but rather the parasitic way we’re taught to know our own bodies. be less, bite your tongue, get smaller. for this reason, i was curious about her book since she published an excerpt in new york magazine.
in all the years since she’s skyrocketed to fame, few people (myself included) have thought to ask what her own relationship to her body is. her answer, laid out in the 200-something pages of her book, is complicated and at times, contradictory. it’s ugly, raw, and not entirely sympathetic because women aren’t taught how to be kind to ourselves. i liked it a lot.
i read once that women are more likely than men to cry when they are angry. i know that women cry out of shame. we are afraid of our anger, embarrassed by the way that it transforms us. we cry to quell what we feel, even when it’s trying to tell us something, even when it has every right to exist.
i think of all the dozens of ways that we (me, you, almost every women that you pass on the street) compromise ourselves in order to glean some semblance of power. the ways that we sell ourselves to be digestible. i read somewhere that womanhood is a performance that never ends; i imagine all of us watching ourselves, in the audience, behind the curtains, outside of the very thing that sustains us.
like emrata, i have not always been kind to my body. i resent it way it hungers, how it stores cruelty, flinches from intimacy, and yet yearns to be touched. even on the best of days, it feels as though my body is warring with what i want from it versus what it needs. not all of it has to do with appearance. most of it has to do with memory. all of it has to do with the inescapable fact that i am stuck with this body until the end, no matter what’s been done to it.
in rehab, i struggled to express my relationship with this. i remember telling a therapist that i didn’t want to be me, inside myself, this body-prison-house with its broken windows and stained wallpaper. all these empty, abandoned rooms inside me that didn’t know how to love, didn’t know how to let in anyone else, and might not ever see the light. no matter the view from the outside, my body was always going to remember how it couldn’t protect me.
i want to be the one in control of my body, even if that means denying it.
women’s relationships with our bodies are almost always grotesque (a reason why i adore ottessa moshfegh’s writing). it’s the antithesis of the way that men often portray it: sterile, hollow, scrubbed of all ownership. and when women want to punish ourselves, it’s almost always through the body. these are the stories i am interested in and why so much of my recent work is centered around themes of consumption, food, and the self.
i listened to a few episodes of emrata’s podcast, high low, before i read the book and something that has stuck with me was when she said people don’t take her seriously with her valley girl accent. and, this, too, is relatable: how she has to constantly prove over and over again that she is intelligent, informed, and a mind as well as a body. i enjoy her politics and i am annoyed that men and women alike hold her to an unattainable degree of authority. she’s not an academic scholar, nor does she pretend to be, but so much of the criticism against her seems to land in the camp of ‘but she’s not [insert evaluation here] enough.’
as if we haven’t heard that about ourselves a thousand times over, about this and that and another thing. as if we do not inflict that very wound onto others as we know it on ourselves.
“in real life, where does your anger go? how do you release it?”
“i don’t,” i say plainly.
her commentary about capitalism (both a victim and enabler of it), consent or lack of, and the lies we tell ourselves about what’s empowering or not all hit a nerve. reading it felt like taking off a tight bra at the end of the day, inspecting the red lines it left behind, and the sense of relief of knowing you’re not alone in this particular discomfort.
i thought about my own body a lot while reading it, much more than i thought about emrata’s. if you decide to pick it up (either through libby or bookshop), i’d love to know what you think. you can find my other reads on goodreads as i try to read 100 books this year.
talk soon,
sara