Emily Ratajkowski has revealed a male casting agent made a vile comment about her modelling photos when she was still in secondary school.
Writing in her new book, My Body, Emily, 30, claims the unnamed man said: ‘Now this is the look… This is how we know this girl gets f****d,’ while browsing her portfolio.
Emily, who began working aged 12, also writes that she was branded ‘too sexy’ when she was aged just 13 and wrote: ‘I was a child… But somehow already an expert in detecting male desire, even if I didn’t completely understand what to make of it.’
Emily said she’s ‘tired’ of being a sex symbol after 17 years of objectification by male colleagues in the fashion industry.
Fed up: Emily Ratajkowski has revealed in her new book My Body that she’s ‘tired’ of being a sex symbol after 17 years of objectification by male colleagues in the fashion industry
In the collection of feminist essays, Emily detailed how her parents ‘focused’ on her appearance and were keen capitalise on it.
She wrote of her youth: ‘I’ve never prayed much…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 also told of an incident where she was sent home from a school dance aged 13 for being dressed ‘too sexy’ – much to the anger of her mother.
Emily recalled how she had cried while her mother told her: ‘“Those people can go f*** themselves, you don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”’
She explained of her career: ‘I built a platform by sharing images of myself and my body online. But in other, less overt ways, I’ve felt objectified and limited by my position in the world as a so-called sex symbol.’
The model was told by a casting agent when she was 13: ‘Now this is the look…This is how we know this girl gets f****d,’ while he was browsing her portfolio
When she was in middle school, an agent approached her about modeling.
Her parents were quite proud of her modeling career, with her father hanging one of her marketing materials with her measurements and photo in his classroom.
It seems that around that time, a lot of adults were taking note of her good looks — and she says a middle-school teacher even snapped her bra on one occasion.
Emily might have missed some of the attention of others had her mother not proudly pointed it out. At her first modeling audition, her mother noted that a young man had been checking her out.
Upcoming: She opens up about her experiences in her book, My Body, out in November
‘That boy looked at you when you stood up and flipped your hair,’ she said, according to Emily. ‘He was watching you.’
It comes after Emily claimed last month that Robin Thicke groped her on the set of his music video Blurred Lines, which shot her to stardom overnight with 721 million views on YouTube.
She wrote in her book: ‘Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt the coolness and foreignness of a stranger’s hands cupping my bare breasts from behind,
‘I instinctively moved away, looking back at Robin Thicke. He smiled a goofy grin and stumbled backward, his eyes concealed by sunglasses.
‘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.’
She told the Millennial Love podcast of the incident: ‘I think that if I had actually flipped out on set and like, I’m done shooting, or whatever, called my agent, I was really an insignificant, unknown model at that point.
‘I don’t think anything would have happened except that I would have not had the career I did, which is just a harsh reality. But that’s the truth.’
Speaking about the alleged incident on the podcast Emily said: ‘It was a very embarrassing, humiliating moment for me, but I really never thought about it and brushed it off as insignificant.
‘I think some part of myself, which I didn’t even write about really, also felt like, ‘well of course that happened, he was that guy. He was drunk on set.’
She continued: ‘And why I point out the embarrassment that it shows about me, not him, I felt like it was very embarrassing for me, which I do write about because it then was so clear that I was just sort of this hired model whose body was being used, really like however these men wanted to use it.’
‘Those people can go f*** themselves’: Emily also told of an incident where she was sent home from a school dance aged-13 for being dressed ‘too sexy’ – much to the anger of her mother
‘I had this weird feeling always when people would talk to me about the video and Robin Thicke and I thought ‘oh it’s just because it’s like when somebody writes a one-hit wonder or their first big breakout song and they get tired of talking about the thing that they’re known for’ and it wasn’t until five years after the video that I allowed myself to have this memory and acknowledged it as real.’
She mused: ‘There’s a part of me that feels embarrassed even talking about it because you don’t want to be the type of person – and I’m using this language.
‘I don’t think it’s correct but it’s how I feel – which is you don’t want to be the type of person who can be a ‘victim’, who can be hurt or that there’s any type of power being used over you or that you don’t have agency over your body.
‘It made me feel weak. I wasn’t thinking about what it said about him.’
Elsewhere in her book, Emily has revealed the traumatic moment a 16-year-old boy at her school ‘forced’ himself on her when she was 16.
‘Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt the coolness and foreignness of a stranger’s hands cupping my bare breasts’ It comes after Emily claimed last month that Robin Thicke groped her on the set of his music video Blurred Lines (pictured in the video in 2013)
She questioned: ‘Why did my 15-year-old self not scream at the top of my lungs? Why did I moan and whimper softly? Who taught me not to scream? I hated myself.’
Admitting she is deeply insecure about her looks and seeks validation online, the model added: ‘I post pictures which I think are a testament of my beauty. And then obsessively check the likes to see if the Internet agrees.’
Emily also responded to criticism that she was anti-feminist because she has made money from her figure.
She hit back: ‘To me, girls sexualising themselves wasn’t the issue as feminists and anti-feminists would have you believe…
‘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.’
‘Why were we the ones being asked to adjust?’: She made the comments in her book My Body