Emily Ratajkowski knows fans think of as a sex symbol, but she insists in a new cover piece (photographed by her husband Sebastian Bear-McCloud) in GQ, that she capitalizes on her looks for “survival.”
The 28-year-old explains: “I think, for me, the way I use my image and as a model and capitalize off of it has been very much about survival, rather than a representation of who I am. Modeling was an amazing way to make money and gain stability.”
And when fame came knocking, she was cool with it: “Deep down probably every 20-year-old girl wants to be famous a little bit.”
Still, Ratajkowski gets annoyed when people pigeonhole her. “People saying, ‘You can’t do all these things.’ It taught me a lot about sexism and misogyny in the world, because the idea that a woman who looks a certain way or presents herself a certain way can’t talk about politics or read books? Ridiculous.”
And yet she admits she’s done the same thing herself. She says: “I realized I had made assumptions about Demi Moore too. I definitely wrote her off a little bit, as an actress, because she was so sexy, because she had that body. And I’m Em Rata, so that’s seriously ironic. It just goes to show how deeply internalized misogyny is.”