Galaxy print, spray-on skinny jeans, and sneaker wedges are just some of the 2010s trends most women have been happy to leave behind. But there’s one trend whose demise they should embrace the most enthusiastically of all: 2010s feminism.
This particular strain of women’s empowerment flooded popular culture throughout the decade and thrived in the age of social media hashtags. It dominated consumer culture too, with the now-cringeworthy phrase “Girl Boss” plastered on t-shirts and necklaces. Singers like Beyoncé publicly embraced the feminist label, while actresses persistently called out sexism in media interviews. A striking example from 2016 resurfaced recently, in which Blake Lively, during an exchange with the journalist Kjersti Flaa, demanded to know whether Flaa would have asked “the men about the clothes.” Bear in mind, this was a press interview for Café Society, a 1930s costume drama. The second-hand embarrassment persists.
2010s feminists proclaimed that women should have the right to express their sexuality however they choose. This included defending the choice to pose provocatively without incurring “misogynistic” criticism, as well as the now hackneyed claims that “‘sex work’ is real work” and pornography is merely a form of benign self-expression.
Model Emily Ratajkowski was an emblem of this sex-positive “choice feminism.” A modern sex symbol, she rose to fame in 2013 when she appeared in the controversial music video for Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” Ratajkowski, along with two other models, appeared red-lipped and topless, dancing around the three male singers, who were fully clothed. She defended the one-sided nudity by citing her self-identification as a “feminist” and declared that she’d “never apologise for her sexuality.”
To her credit, Ratajkowski did reexamine some of her views years later. In her 2021 memoir, My Body, she confessed that cultivating a hyper-sexualized image has entailed objectification and mistreatment. On the set of Blurred Lines, for example, an inebriated Thicke groped her, leading the director to pause filming and censure him. Other troubling experiences included a proposition by a photographer who was decades her senior and another alleged sexual assault. Ratajkowski also details how her complicated self-image began earlier in life, shaped by her childhood beauty, the primacy her parents and peers placed on her looks, and early non-consensual sexual encounters. Cumulatively, this left her feeling numb and detached from her body.
Unfortunately, after conceding that profiting from her sexuality hasn’t led to true empowerment, no further evolution in Ratajkowski’s thinking seems to have followed. In her memoir and in subsequent interviews, she stops short of asking whether male and female approaches to sex and dating might naturally differ in ways that cannot be solved through consciousness-raising alone. Similarly, she fails to reckon with the reality that men who grow up knowing that they can take advantage of women for personal gain are unlikely to be deterred by feminist lecturing.
Instead, Ratajkowski continues to commodify herself, while arguing that women should not be shamed or discouraged from doing so, especially when real financial and status incentives exist within a system she describes as “patriarchal” and “capitalist.” This perspective shifts responsibility away from individual participation onto social structures. More importantly, despite acknowledging the immense costs of sexual liberation, it continues to encourage women to pursue this path, prioritizing the short-term rewards of money and sexual autonomy over its long-term repercussions. In doing so, it fails to account for the extent to which women themselves participate in, and help sustain, the very sexual norms they condemn as exploitative. It is precisely this attitude that has allowed sex positivity to persist in our culture.
Now, Ratajkowski is back: this time, with a viral article sharing her sexual exploits after the birth of her child and the dissolution of her marriage. While it’s hard not to sympathize with her experiences of painful childbirth, marital collapse, and divorce, the truly remarkable thing about the essay is how thoroughly it exposes the contradictions and limitations that always lay at the heart of sex-positive feminism.
A Former “Good Girl”
Ratajkowski’s latest essay for The Cut, titled “Motherf*cker,” offers one of the clearest indictments yet of sex positivity’s lingering influence. In explicit detail, Ratajkowski describes navigating the New York dating scene as a thirty-one-year-old soon-to-be divorcée raising a toddler. After the disintegration of her marriage to Sebastian Bear-McClard, who is rumoured to have been serially unfaithful, she felt “unwanted” and determined to find out what kind of woman she wanted to be by having no-strings-attached sex. Feeling envious of the sexual conquests that her former lovers hadn’t had to deny themselves, Ratajkowski sets out to break a few hearts and destroy “the special girl I’d worked so hard to be.”
Up until then, Ratajkowski writes, she had always been a “good girl.” She consciously kept her “body count low” (to use that dreadful term, reminiscent of Ted Bundy’s rap sheet), as “boys didn’t fall in love with, want forever with, raise babies with, or take care of sluts.” This is curious. After all, hasn’t Ratajkowski always been in favor of women not having to hide their sexuality to be taken seriously? Her career trajectory, posing for magazines such as Esquire, Maxim, and Sports Illustrated, as well as her personal Instagram account, which has about 28 million followers, would certainly support this notion. It would seem reasonable to infer that her public stances and professional work would translate into libertine behavior in real life. Yet Ratajkowski appears to have held fast to a “look, don’t touch” policy.
Like many celebrities, Ratajkowski has spent much of her career promoting liberal values while living out a relatively traditional lifestyle. Ratajkowski got married at 26 and became pregnant at 29, bucking modern trends of delayed marriage and childbearing. Again, Ratajkowski is far from the only public figure whose private life doesn’t match her stated ideals. Still, there is an element of insincerity in speaking like a Cosmo girl and behaving like a Jackie girl (the 1970s British teenage girls’ magazine, whose agony aunt advised women to keep their premarital partners to a minimum, so as not to harm their marriage prospects).
Ratajkowski writes that, growing up, she was aware it was “crucial to avoid becoming a single mother,” as this represented a life of “baggage and no security.” It’s interesting that such a high-profile proponent of “choice feminism” should be so cognizant of these risks, given that the movement defends solo parenting as a legitimate lifestyle choice, whether borne of divorce, IVF, or surrogacy. Of course, Ratajkowski is referring to single motherhood inflicted on blameless women by desertion. But how exactly do the men—the fathers of these women’s children—escape the consequences of their actions so easily? Well, by capitalizing on the sexual mores that sex-positive feminists have helped normalize.
Unfortunately, for most women, single motherhood is not cushioned by Ratajkowski’s level of fame and fortune. They don’t feel “bohemian” or like “Erin Brockovich of Canal Street.” Rather, in the US, single mothers are nearly five times as likely to endure poverty compared to married mothers, not to mention the additional burdens, stress, and occasional stigma that still surround single motherhood. Perhaps that’s part of why the photoshoot accompanying the essay has drawn backlash. It depicts Ratajkowski in a trendy New York loft, with sultry eye make-up and a revealing leather jacket, while breastfeeding a baby doll. This underscores the unrelatability of Ratajkowski’s escapades. Most mothers, single or otherwise, do not emerge from late-night parties in a “miniskirt and eyeliner” to nurse their infants.
A Failed Experiment
So how does Ratajkowski’s Sex and the City-esque, have-sex-like-a-man experiment go?
Ratajkowski meets “uniquely disturbed characters,” including a self-proclaimed fan of “incest porn,” one man who thought he had chlamydia, and another who wouldn’t stop sending her nudes. One of these dates develops into a three-week fling with a man she nicknames “Elder Millennial,” a hipster-type who shows her a photograph of his ex-girlfriend two weeks in, which she admits made her feel uncomfortable. Predictably, he has all the hallmarks of the Male Feminist—yet another 2010s online trope of the weaselly man who uses his progressive credentials as a license to mistreat women.
Elder Millennial campaigned for Obama twice, rhapsodizes about single mothers, and talks about his “Animal Brain” (which takes over in the bedroom, overriding the nice, rational, feminist part of his mind, conveniently allowing him to be as violent and degrading as he pleases). Ratajkowski astutely notes that “by that logic… you could use it to excuse anything.” It wasn’t long before she wanted to break up with him. Still, wanting to feel like a maneater, she decides to sleep with him one last time. In the heat of the moment, he delivers a slap, “a hard one, harder than any he’d delivered before.” Too late, Ratajkowski realizes her mistake. “I was there for power, but I’d forgotten: Animal brain.”
This episode undercuts the self-assurance Ratajkowski had hoped to gain from her sexual exploration. In spite of the insights she articulated in My Body, the same sexual power differentials that characterized her early professional career continue to play out in her personal life. Post-divorce, the lecherous advances of Thicke and seedy fashion photographers have merely been replaced by those of DJs, chefs, and billionaires’ sons. Although the context has changed—she is older, consenting, and sometimes even initiating, telling herself that she is the one with the power—the underlying dynamic, with female vulnerability at its center, remains eerily familiar.
Ratajkowski’s 2021 memoir belonged to the broader #MeToo era, which lifted the lid on a wide spectrum of sexual misconduct claims. Largely ignored in this conversation were voices that, while recognizing legitimate claims of victimhood, also criticized a sexual culture that encouraged both men and women to treat a deeply consequential act as transactional. In her 2018 critique Sex Matters, for example, Mona Charen argued that modern feminism’s push towards commitment-free sex, usurping the previous norms of modesty, emotional investment and marriage, had damaged many of the protections traditionally afforded to women. The same cultural fallout echoes throughout Ratajkowski’s body of work.
Following the virality of “Motherf*cker,” Ratajkowski signed a seven-figure deal for a book of the same name. Based on the essay’s shock value, further salacious escapades can surely be expected. Far more interesting than the details, however, will be the way that Ratajkowski chooses to interpret them. Has she undergone a further shift in her outlook? Does she regret this chapter of her life? Or will she hold fast to the empty promises of sex-positive feminism and simply chalk it up to the necessary dating disasters people have before settling down again? Now that we have the grisly autobiographical details behind the cheery claims of “choice” and “empowerment,” the failure of 2010s feminism is clearer than ever.
The lesson is clear: it’s time to move on.
