Dude This Profile Fucking Sucks

In a break from “The Election Sure Is Happening in a Couple of Days” news, a news cycle somehow both stuffed to the brim yet utterly devoid of any actual new news worth remarking on, let’s turn our attention to this super gross profile of Emily Ratajkowski written by married couple Valentine Faure and Thomas Chatterton Williams a couple of years ago for French Marie Claire—truly a masterclass in what not to do!

Faure and Williams devote the bulk of the profile, resurfaced by Jewish Currents editor David Klion on Twitter this morning, to their own thoughts on the supermodel, ranging in depth from whether or not the vocal feminist is really a feminist to how she was “blessed with the most perfect breasts of her generation.” If anything, the piece is more an un-self-aware look at how repressed heterosexuals deal, or don’t deal, with the existence of hot people who aren’t their spouses than it is a profile of Ratajkowski. We barely even meet the woman beyond whatever decontextualized, telephone-game version of @emrata lives rent-free in Faure and Williams’ minds.

When Ratajkowski does appear in the profile, first for a brief introduction to Williams followed by an in-person interview with him in the South of France, the piece’s male co-author clings desperately to his projections, unable to hear Ratajkowski shatter them in real-time:

We then move on to her youth. I wanted to know when she realized she was “special”: “When did people start paying attention to you?” I must add here that as she’s articulating her absolutely intelligent response, she’s wearing an extraordinarily deep neckline without a bra, all the while surely knowing, deep down, just how absurd and confusing, even downright contradictory, such an outfit looks with everything she’s saying. She smiles and asks, “What kind of attention?” “To your appearance,” I said, impressed by this level of cognitive dissonance. “I don’t know, I first felt very special in my mind, but my appearance I don’t know.”

Faure’s analysis is no less reductive, though it hinges less on the fact of Ratajkowski’s body than on how that body, the piece’s female co-author argues, would seem to undermine the model’s stated feminist leanings: “This squaring of the circle—being a sexy muse while seeking a feminist dubbing—can be resolved by the legendary line of another film by David Fincher (‘If you were the inventors of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook,’ in other words: We wouldn’t have to debate it for hours): If [Ratajkowski] were a feminist, she would be a feminist. It doesn’t matter. She’s probably nice all the same.” I have nothing more to say except I’m so unbelievably bored. Please shoot this entry-level discourse over whether hot women can be feminists back to the early 2010s where it belongs!

Ratajkowski herself weighed in on the profile on Sunday this time sans interlocution. “[I] never read this before, but I really hope this will be the last of my ‘she has breasts and claims to read’ profiles/interviews,” she tweeted. “Lots of levels of gross/embarrassing aspects to this, but the attempt at a feminist critique at the end is maybe the worst part.”

Anyway, back to the election. Sources tell me it sure is happening in a couple of days…

(Updated 3/2/22 with new details)