SHE’S made a fortune out of her enviable body, but now Emily Ratajkowski is “tired” of being a sex symbol.
The American model and mum-of-one claims she’s been “too sexy” since the age of 13, when she was leered at by casting agents and sent home from a school dance for dressing “provocatively”.
In her new book, My Body, which is a collection of “feminist essays”, the 30-year-old lifts the lid on what it’s like being one of the most beautiful women in the world – and it’s not always pretty.
Emily says her parents were “focussed” on her looks from a young age and keen for her to capitalise on them.
“I’ve never prayed much,” she says. “But I do remember that as a young girl I prayed for beauty.
“Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most… It seemed important to them both, especially to my mother, that their daughter be perceived as beautiful.”
Emily started modelling at 12 and recalls the first time she received male attention – something that did not “escape” the attention of her mother, Kathleen – who herself has been likened to beauty Elizabeth Taylor.
“I was a child,” she recalls in her book. “But somehow already an expert in detecting male desire, even if I didn’t completely understand what to make of it.”
She recalls an incident while she was still at secondary school, where a male casting agent made an “inappropriate comment” towards her.
Emily claims he said: “Now this is the look,” while flicking through her modelling portfolio, adding: “This is how we know this girl gets f****d.”
She was embarrassed, but reassured by her female agent who nodded approvingly at the comment as if it was a “good thing”.
In that moment, Emily knew she was “the sexy one”. At 13 she was sent home from a formal dance because the chaperones deemed she was “too sexy”.
She cried to her mum after, who had always encouraged her to defy school rules and show off her figure and told her: “Those people can go f*** themselves, you don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”
Emily became an overnight “sensation” at 21 after appearing naked in Robin Thicke’s racy Blurred Lines music video in 2013, but claims in her book he groped her on set.
“Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt the coolness and foreignness of a stranger’s hands cupping my bare breasts from behind,” she writes.
I got sent home from a school dance aged 13 for being too sexy
Emily Ratajkowski
“I instinctively moved away, looking back at Robin Thicke. He smiled a goofy grin and stumbled backward, his eyes concealed by sunglasses.”
Despite feeling embarrassed and “shocked”, Emily admits she didn’t complain fearing it could ruin her career.
She writes: “I didn’t have any real power as the naked girl dancing around in his music video. I was nothing more than a hired mannequin.”
The music video has been viewed over 721million times on YouTube and is one of the best-selling songs of all time.
But her fame came at a price as she claims she lost “control” of her image – and her body.
“I built a platform by sharing images of myself and my body online,” she writes in her deeply personal book.
“But in other, less overt ways, I’ve felt objectified and limited by my position in the world as a so-called sex symbol.”
Emily remembers feeling “confused” by her beauty and how she should use it.
When she was 13 her father quietly asked her to get changed before a family dinner after she donned a pink, lacy top and a push-up bra.
“My mother always told me to take pleasure in the way I looked,” she reflects. “And this particular ensemble brought me validation attention from both adult men in the streets and my peers at school.”
Her obsession with her image started at a young age.
She remembers lying in bed with her first boyfriend after having sex and feeling jealous when he started talking about other girls he’d been with and describing their bodies.
“I hated that he might have found another girl more attractive than me,” she confesses, and admits she spent “hours” looking up the girls and comparing herself to them.
Heartbreakingly, she recalls a traumatic incident where a 16-year-old boy she trusted in school “forced” himself on her when she was 15.
“Why did my 15-year-old self not scream at the top of my lungs?” she writes. “Why did I moan and whimper softly? Who taught me not to scream? I hated myself.”
Despite her model looks, Emily insists she’s actually very insecure.
“I post pictures which I think are a testament of my beauty,” she writes.
“And then obsessively check the likes to see if the Internet agrees.”
In the book, Emily tells how she was paid a “s*** ton” to share photos of her sponsored holiday with her husband, actor and producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, at a £300million resort in the Maldives.
I’ve felt objectified and limited by my position in the world as a so-called sex symbol
Emily Ratajkowski
She tells how she got a headache after a day spent on the beach checking Instagram, where a photo of her bum notched up over a million likes.
Emily admits she still struggles to understand her sexuality and has written the book to try to help her come to terms with it.
She also takes aim at people who accuse her of being anti-feminist because she’s made a career out of taking her clothes off.
“To me, girls sexualising themselves wasn’t the issue as feminists and anti-feminists would have you believe,” she argues.
“But shaming them was. Why were we the ones being asked to adjust? To cover up and apologise for our bodies?
“I was feeling tired of apologising for the way I presented myself.”
Emily Ratajkowski‘s book My Body, £12.59, is available now on Amazon.
