The latest viral photos of Emily Ratajkowski in costume relaunches the debate on her media feminism: between hypersexualized aesthetics and political claims, her image remains trapped in the male gaze.
Each image of Emily Ratajkowski is a media event. The last, published on Instagram, portrays her with a micro swimsuit, cut to enhance any curve with surgical intention. The post collected thousands of likes and comments in a few hours, confirming – if there has ever been needed – the visual and commercial power of Emily’s body. But behind that gesture, only apparently frivolous, one of the most emblematic dichotomies of contemporary culture is hidden: that between the desire for self -determination and dependence on a look still deeply male.
Emily Ratajkowski has never denied using her body as a means of work, communication, affirmation. Since the time of the video Blurred Lineswho catapulted it into the heart of the mainstream, played on the border between seduction and provocation, aware of the power that the image exerts on desire and on the market. Over time, however, that body has stopped being only an aesthetic object: it has turned into the field of political, cultural, feminist reflection.
Yet the fracture opens here. Because the image of Emily, although guided by an autonomous will, continues to inscribe itself in the codes of bad gazethe male gaze that has dominated the visual imagination for centuries. Hyperminimal bikini, studied laying, maniacal control of detail: each element seems to be designed to adhere perfectly to a specific aesthetic ideal, fueling a system that rewards the woman-object, even when she impose herself as a subject. In one of the most lucid steps of his book My Bodythe author itself recognizes the limits of that apparent power: “I had no real power like the naked girl who danced around”, he writes in the homonymous essay dedicated to Blurred Lines. “I was nothing more than a model hired, a rental mannequin.”
Emily Ratajkowski has often called herself feminist, a label that has also claimed with strength also in her editorial path, denouncing the exploitation of the body and contradictions of the image industry. But its aesthetic, hyper-curato and strongly sexualized, continues to arouse questions: can a political claim with a visual strategy that remains bound to the rules of Patriarchate can really coexist?
