CN: I reference accounts of eating disorders and sexual assault.

Last fall, a set of documents known as The Facebook Papers were being set upon by journalists and the media public. In an episode of the Wall Street Journal podcast series exploring a range of topics related to the “revelations,” the subject of Facebook’s (now Meta’s) knowledge of the specific harms of Instagram use for teen girls was discussed in conversation with a young woman named Anastasia Vlasova. Prompted by the publication of Facebook’s internal research acknowledging that using Instagram frequently leads individuals to feel worse about their bodies, Vlasova shares her story of being diagnosed with an eating disorder and describes how she believes that her relationship with the photo-sharing service instigated her struggles with mental health. Happily, Vlasova now reports feeling much healthier and happier, the result of therapy, and… quitting Instagram. In photographs accompanying the publication of an article on the same subject in the Wall Street Journal, Vlasova is pictured in a double exposure portrait—one image of her face looks directly at the viewer, shadowed by a second version of herself looking down and to her right, perhaps at a phone. Though undoubtedly cheesy, this irreconcilable portrait has the effect of denaturalizing the oft-used phrase: body image issues. The portrait, and the the ongoing discussions around Instagram’s harms, had me thinking about the “images” that are invoked in discussions around social media and “body issues.”

Other young women are pictured throughout the article, including images of teens Destinee Ramos and Isabel Yoblonski who conducted a survey of their peer group on the subject of social media use and mental health. The teens are pictured playfully taking selfies and looking at a phone together. Also included is an image of the phone itself, pictured with a sweetly beaded bracelet attached to the phone—signaling the object's status as both an extended appendage and a child’s toy. It seemed almost perverse to picture these young women here, rather than say, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg or Instagram head Adam Mosseri. And while the article opened with a brief mention from Vlasova about the impact of fitness influencers and “chiseled bodies” on her perception of self, both the article and Instagram’s internal research (as well as the response to the public circulation of that research) represent the problem as one that could be remedied by platform design and individual “control” rather than an acknowledgment of diet culture, misogyny, or any number of other variants of structural violence. The visual culture of women’s “body image issues” perpetuates the understanding of mental illness as something that occurs at the level of individual psychology, an aberrance that could be remedied by a reorientation of one’s relationship to a phone or a platform.

The widespread discussion of Instagram’s harms and the circulation of the company’s internal research on the topic coincided with the publication of model, influencer, actor, and now writer, Emily Ratajkowski’s book My Body, marketed as an “exploration of what it means to be a woman and a commodity at the same time.” The author’s essays about her own image are braided together with accounts of violent trespasses on her physical body, describing a series of sexual assaults (often committed by men tasked with “taking” her image).  Throughout, self and image are almost indivisible. These men will run out of ways to capitalize on her image, she writes, “but I will remain as the real Emily; the Emily who owns the high-art Emily, and the one who wrote this essay, too. She will continue to carve out control where she can find it.” Sentences like these are at the heart of Ratjakowski’s analysis, representing a set of ideas that parallel those characterizing discussions around social harm and visual platforms like Instagram: the “real” Emily is distinguished from what is, presumably, the “fake” Emily, featured in the ever-proliferating images of Ratajkowski online and off; control of her image is understood as a property relation; and “self-awareness” is positioned as an antidote to harm.

“I wanted to believe,” writes Ratajkowski, “that I was the living testament of a woman empowered through commodifying her image and body.” In the chapter “Buying Myself Back” (previously excerpted for The Cut), Ratajkowski tracks the surreptitious movement of her image, collapsing photograph and self in her account of a series of (often traumatic) experiences. Recalling one such event, she recounts attending an exhibition of the artist Richard Prince’s New Portraits series, which features blown-up screenshots of other people’s Instagram posts (including one of Ratajkowski) with emoji-laden comments by Prince printed on canvases.  Ratjkowski recounts how her boyfriend wanted to “buy” her back, and how they later jointly acquired the work. There is an ambiguity in how Ratjakowski describes the incident, careful to note her appreciation and knowledge of art, the history of appropriation in photography, and the tension inherent in craving control of her image while at the same time pursuing a career as a model and as an Instagram influencer—as with all jobs, these occupations involve agreeing to an exchange of value (an image in exchange for money or goods). In the most recent episode in this drama (not noted in the essay), Ratajkowski elected to turn an image of herself standing in front of Prince’s work into an NFT, which was auctioned at Christie’s in May, selling for 175,000 dollars. Ratajkowski titled the work “Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution.” As the lot essay for the work would have us believe, Ratjakowski’s “Buying Myself Back” weds a feminist art historical lineage with the “revolutionary” technology of the blockchain to “reinstate[…] Ratajkowski’s agency over her own image by allowing her access to its monetary and symbolic value, both of which she and other women in similar professions have too often been deprived.” Throughout the book, property and capital stand in for self-sovereignty. 

Aware of the vicissitudes of the historical representation of women, Ratajkowski includes a quote from the late British broadcaster and writer John Berger’s classic Ways of Seeing as the epigraph to her book. Now harnessed to explaining the mobility of Ratjakowski’s image in the digital age, Berger writes,

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.

Originally published in 1972 and based on Berger’s BBC television program of the same name, Ways of Seeing explores the history of European painting, considering not so much the paintings themselves but “the way we now see them.” The opening sequence of the first episode of the program shows Berger cutting out a square of canvas around Venus’ head from (a reproduction of ) a Botticelli painting. This shot transitions into an image of a printing press in motion featuring a dense sheet of reproduced paintings, hinting at the proliferation of technologies of reproduction that reproduce the naked female form. If the title wasn’t a giveaway, Berger's argument across the series is that thinking about the “ways” we see paintings, rather than simply what we see in them, might help us “discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living.” 

As the titular pronoun would indicate, My Body takes the individual as its primary subject, wavering between memoir and analysis. The title is borrowed from Ratajkowski’s “favorite” work of art, a video by Hannah Black. Embedded within a larger story of her paid visit to a luxury resort in exchange for posting photographs of her vacation, Ratajkowski describes her fascination with Black’s video (though she refers to it as an audio piece), recasting the artist’s compendium of mainly Black women repeating the words “my body” in service of her own (white) body liberation. This transposition is made more perverse by the landscape in which it is set, for Ratajkowski uses the resort vacation (located vaguely in the Indian ocean on an island reportedly owned by a Qatari billionaire) to ever so slightly reflect on her complicity in capitalism—showing her boyfriend a screenshot on her phone that reads“‘Fuck capitalism, but until it’s fucked, keep getting that bag.’” In the midst of her reflections on her efforts to “game the system” and Black’s video, she also includes a flowery description of a group of women on the beach in full clothing and headscarves—fodder to offset her description of her own bikini-clad body. While not described in the chapter, the soundtrack to Black’s video that Ratajkowski recalls is also accompanied by a stream of generic images of white besuited men resulting from a google image for CEO, “encouraging us to consider which bodies get to be visible, and have agency.”

There has been a lot written about Ratjakowski’s book, a discursive process she anticipates throughout the book by suggesting that critics might argue that her profession and her reflections upon her life are incongruous and somehow inauthentic. I think, though, that the points throughout the book where this ambivalence is foregrounded are some of the most honest and interesting parts of Ratajkowski’s enterprise: “I wanted to be able to have my Instagram hustle, selling bikinis and whatever else, while also being respected for my ideas and politics and well, everything besides my body.” Ratjakowski’s attempts to reconcile commerciality and authenticity in her life and work brings us back to Berger’s suggestion that we separate “what” we see from “how” we see it. We’re increasingly being conditioned to think of digital visual culture as a force acting upon us, outside of our own engagement in and production of it; something like the memeification of the phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” iterating towards “there is no ethical social media use under capitalism.”  

The more I reflect on it, the more I think that the story of Ratjakowski’s image—and to a limited extent every social media user's—is a simultaneous story of exploitation and speculation: a gamble for value, with the risk of loss under conditions not of our own making. I learned recently that the modern English usage of speculation has its etymological roots in the Latin words for both mirror (speculo) and that for watchtower (specula), reflection and surveillance tied at the root. Tellingly, throughout the book, mirrors are Ratjakowski’s symbolic object of choice, describing how she aims  “to examine the various mirrors in which I’ve seen myself: men’s eyes, other women I’ve compared myself to, and the countless images that have been taken of me.” But a mirror is a false cognate for photography (never a simple reflection of self or world), and, I would hope too, that the mirror is a poor metaphor for social relationships. 

Reading: One of the most savagely brilliant novels I’ve read in a long time. 

Asking: “Why the fuck were all these people tweeting? What were they thinking? What were they hoping to accomplish?”

Listening: Getting all my music recommendations from here these days.

Staring off into the distance: “What if the angel never opened their eyes? What if the confusion never set in?”