Emily Ratajkowski has spoken up about the impact of being sexualized since she was a child, revealing how a middle school teacher once snapped her bra and a casting director told her as a teenager that she looked like she ‘gets f***ked.’

Her forthcoming book, My Body, is slated to be released on October 19, 2021, and contains these disclosures in detail.

She also discusses how, even while she was under the age of 18, adults felt safe making sexual comments to her, and how it wasn’t long before she became aware of men’s interest in her.

She goes on to say that her parents were constantly hyper-aware of her perceived beauty, which is something a child shouldn’t have to think about in their daily lives. It instilled in Ratajkowski a strong belief in the importance of physical beauty from an early age, leading her to grow preoccupied with her own image.

Ratajkowski says, “I tried to gauge where my parents thought I belonged in the world of beauties. It seemed important to them both, especially to my mother, that their daughter be perceived as beautiful.” At night, she prayed that God would make her “the most beautiful.”

She explains, “Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most.”

At 14, she was approached by a modeling scout.

Her parents were ecstatic with her modeling career, and her father proudly displayed one of her marketing brochures in his classroom, complete with her measurements and portrait.

Ratajkowski went to her first audition while in middle school. She was dressed in a pair of new stretchy pants and a pair of clunky black boots. Kathy, who was in the waiting room with her, told Ratajkowski that when it was her turn to speak with the casting directors, she should flip her hair. A young man with wild hair sat a few feet away from them.

“That boy looked at you when you stood up and flipped your hair,” her mother stated as they drove back to San Diego after the audition in Los Angeles. “He was watching you.”

‘I’ll never forget the look on his face as you walked past him!’ as her mother would say ‘He stopped dead in his tracks and his mouth fell open!’

Getty Images for Rihanna’s Savag

Her wish had come true; the fact that she was attractive to males.

Her beauty drew attention: when she was 13, her outfit was judged “too sexy” by chaperones, and she was sent home from a dance. When she arrived downstairs wearing a pink lace blouse and a push-up bra, her father told her to “not dress like that, just for tonight.” She recalled feeling embarrassed and perplexed when her elder cousin rushed back into the living room after leaving Ratajkowski with a male acquaintance for a few minutes.

“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,” she writes.

But it was when an adult casting agent was going through modeling images of her with a sultry face that she was creeped out most.

‘Now this is the look,’ he said. ‘This is how we know this girl gets f**ked!’

Ratajkowski says, “My face felt hot. Was this something to be proud of?”

Despite this, she attempted to embrace the power she believed she possessed as a result of her sexuality, however she has now come to believe otherwise.

Emily Ratajkowski and her mother, Kathleen
Emily Ratajkowski says her mother, Kathleen
emrata/Instagram

‘It had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place,’ she remarked. ‘Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over.

‘Facing the reality of the dynamics at play would have meant admitting how limited my power really was — how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at.’

She originally mentioned this encounter in an Instagram post from last year.

‘I was forced to face some ugly truths about what I understood as important, what I thought love was, what I believed made me special, and to confront the reality of my relationship with my body.’