Three days after Emily Ratajkowski’s book of essays (“My Body”) was published,in November 2021, Britney Spears was released from her conservatorship. As thesubject of “Toxic,” one of Ratajkowski’s most pointed pieces about growing upas an object of lust and scrutiny, Spears has long been a preoccupation forthe 31-year-old model, author and mother. Almost a year later, Ratajkowski isthinking about the world’s many reactions to how a newly freed Spears hasexpressed herself — especially in her ongoing Instagram series of cheeky,defiant nudes, a genre Ratajkowski knows well.
“She’s gone through things that affect you for the rest of your life,”Ratajkowski says, “and she has this public stage where we will continue towatch her. It just makes me sad. And the way people are like, ‘Come on, you’rea mother!’ has really fascinated me. It’s Britney Spears! I’m sure she has avery complicated relationship to being sexualized. But she’s now doing it onher own terms. So why are we ripping her apart for that and bringing into theconversation that she’s a mother?” She pauses, then adds with a sigh, “I don’tknow why we hate women so much. It still shocks me all the time.”
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Whether talking about Spears, the reaction to Adam Levine’s alleged cheatingor the perils of social media putting Amber Heard on “witch trial,”Ratajkowski is an engaged conversationalist. This is even more impressivegiven that she takes this interview while also wrangling her luggage andrestless son during a rare window between Fashion Week commitments, which haveher traveling from the West Village to Milan, London and Paris, with a quickstop in her beloved Majorca in between.
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This ability to balance listening and logistics should prove useful when — as_variety_ can exclusively reveal — her new podcast, “High Low With EmRata,”drops Nov. 1. Having grown up on a steady diet of NPR (“Ira Glass was myhero”), Ratajkowski describes the podcast as “’Call Her Daddy’ meets ‘FreshAir,’” and will take cues from co-hosts as disparate as Kara Swisher(“Brilliant”), Howard Stern (“an honesty and frankness…that just resonateswith people”) and even Joe Rogan. “Obviously I don’t agree with his politics,”she says as a caveat, “but there’s something there that really works. Ifyou’re listening to somebody talk and the interviewer feels like they aren’tfollowing the conversation in the way that a listener is, then it’s just notinteresting — and Joe Rogan does listen. He has a perspective and he asksquestions that are aligned with that perspective, and it’s entertaining.”
Episodes of “High Low” will roll out twice a week (plus a bonus episode forsubscribers). One episode will feature a guest interview; the other, ascripted monologue that she’s approaching much like she did her essays.Unsurprisingly, given her book’s themes of taking back control from anindustry determined to define her, she says she’s most excited about producingthe show “in my way.”
For the 1.5 million people who follow her on Twitter, the 1.8 million whofollow her on TikTok and the 29.5 million who follow her on Instagram,Ratajkowski’s candor and insight into the corrosive sexism at the heart of theentertainment industry has made her an unusual, and unusually compelling,figure. Once derided as brainless arm candy after starring in the infamousmusic video for “Blurred Lines,” she has since built a name for herself as thecelebrity feminist who’s willing to question the limits of feminist discourse,the constant commodification of women’s bodies and her own place in all of theabove.
For example, when the internet recently became engulfed in gleeful memes aboutAdam Levine allegedly cheating on his wife with an Instagram model, Ratajowskiwas disturbed to see many people laying the blame at the model’s feet insteadof the man twice her age who slid into her DMs in the first place.
“I’m very familiar with those kinds of power dynamics between men and women,”she says, “and I saw another moment where we were choosing to attack a youngwoman instead of the powerful man, which I didn’t love.” In response, sheposted a pair of TikToks explaining her perspective, which have since rackedup 4 million views.
“It wasn’t honest about Adam Levine,” Ratajkowski insists. “I just respondedto this woman talking about how women need to change and adjust as preparationfor men’s behavior, which is something I’ve been talking and writing about fora long time. Like, this ‘Boys will be boys’ attitude that women have? We haveto do better.”
In recent months, especially in the wake of her split from producer SebastianBear-McClard, Ratajkowski has acquired a new fondness for TikTok as a socialmedia platform that truly lets her be herself. As a model and founder of theswimwear line Inamorata, Ratajkowski often sees Meta-owned Instagram as anunavoidable part of her job, while Twitter’s traditionally been a site of“weird, corny men saying weird, scary things.” On TikTok, though, she can justhave fun. She can dance with her son and post enticing snippets of events. Shecan answer an “if you identify as bisexual, do you own a green velvet couch?”prompt by showing off her own green velvet couch, and all that implies, with acasual smirk that says she knows exactly what people might make of it.
“I have a complicated generally relationship to the internet as a celebrity,”she admits. It’s still strange for her to be the subject of rabid tabloidculture that follows her every move, as she’s recently been amid breathlessreports that she might, maybe?, be dating Brad Pitt — a subject she expertlysidesteps when it arises. “One of the things I write about in the last essayof the book is about control and kind of understanding that one of the bestways to actually be happy and have some semblance of control is letting go,”she says. “I’m newly single for basically the first time in my life ever, andI just feel like I’m kind of enjoying the freedom of not being super worriedabout how I’m being perceived.”
As for letting looser on TikTok, Ratajkowski explains that there’s a curiousfreedom in being more “unfiltered” than she felt able to on other social mediaplatforms. All you have to strive for is to be as honest and as upfront as youcan, and make it feel like people are just in your iPhone camera roll.” Inthat respect, she says, “I enjoy vulnerability and radical honesty, so TikTokis a perfect medium for that.”
Case in point: In late August, she posted a six-second TikTok that paired acaption reading, “It’s 2022 and it’s getting even SCARIER to be a woman,” witha list of things she’s afraid of: “Roe v. Wade getting overturned,” “Harvey[Weinstein] getting an appeal,” “Shia [LaBeouf]’s redemption tour” and “Theway y’all dragged Amber [Heard] and the precedent that court case set.” Fiveyears after #MeToo exploded into the zeitgeist, Ratajkowski isn’t sure howmuch it’s changed anything at all.
“#MeToo happened, and the majority of the conversation was still, ‘You betterbe careful out there!’” she says, sighing. “I guess there’s someaccountability now, but I don’t think there’s a lot of empathy or deepunderstanding of women’s positions in the world.” If anything, she says wryly,“it feels like men are in their comeback season.”
So when she posted a video in which she insists that powerful men like Levineshould take sole responsibility for their mistakes, she wasn’t surprised thatmany commentators were there to disagree with her. “Women seeking attention isalways the classic misogyny hot topic. It’s really what gets people going, toaccuse a woman of seeking attention. Personally, I know that really well,” shesays. “So, yeah, I get a lot of hate. But as they say on TikTok: ‘The girlswho get it, get it.’ That’s my motto these days.”
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