The Price of Exposure

Emily Ratajkowski, Jiayang Fan, and the stories we tell

Emily Ratajkowski’s predicament is a fickle one. On one hand, she’s built a comfortable, ostensibly successful life as a professional supermodel. On the other, her likeness is a commodity that can be bought and sold.

Her essay this week in The Cut had me thinking about who owns the various pieces of ourselves that we leave in the world, an invisible or sometimes hypervisible trail: impromptu interviews for cable news, viral memes, photographs taken in public, words. Of course, Ratajkowski’s predicament is not that one exactly: as her essay describes, she is a victim of a predatory photographer named Jonathan Leder, a man who photographed her for a magazine, then sexually assaulted her, and then—once her meteoric rise to fame was complete—published an entire book of these photographs.

Ratajkowski isn’t offended by nudity (she has posed topless countless time before); she doesn’t seem to be offended by the buying and selling of her own image, either—earlier in the essay, she details her quest to purchase a certain Richard Prince piece, a simulacrum of a nude she herself reposted on Instagram. But while she condemns the horrific circumstances of her assault and Leder’s cowardly brand of manipulation, she swerves around implicating the culture atop which the her industry sits: one that treats sex like any other form of capital.

I felt, after reading, of two minds (though perhaps ~feelings~ is more apt here); the first being one of sadness—that what Leder did is reprehensible, and that formal recourse is unlikely. I also felt that Ratajkowski is complicit in creating the very culture she claims to despise, though I don’t think she is alone in this. Her words reminded me of the ways in which most of us do the same on a micro-scale. Those of us attuned to various social media know this well: we post pieces of our realities—some combination of fantasy and mundanity—and we feel ownership over it, which we call our content. And though we might hate ourselves for this—the self-branding, the promo, the performance and the narcissism—our acknowledgement
neither absolves us from this nor makes it feel any less hollow.

Zucchi Ceiling by Antonio Zucchi

There’s another moving story making waves on the internet, this one a personal essay by New Yorker writer Jiayang Fan. “How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda” is about Fan and her mother—their past immigrating from an army compound near Chongqing, China to Greenwich, Connecticut—and their present, namely, her mother’s ALS diagnosis and Fan’s desperate attempt to save her life at the height of the pandemic in New York City, which culminated in an impromptu Twitter campaign in which Fan begged president of NYC Health and Hospitals to allow her mother’s aides to return to her bedside. In the end, Fan’s public plea got her mother’s aides back, but it also resulted in Fan’s vilification on Chinese social media.

Fan’s story is a testament to many things: the cruelty of people on the internet, the complications that arise when your mother claims a different country of belonging than you, and the particular cost-benefit analysis of going viral on the internet for something that’s very personal to you.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what writers can write about, and from which perspectives. There’s a growing sense among literary types, it seems, that writing outside of one’s own experience or specific identity configuration is a recipe for tired, insensitive, and perhaps even racist writing (see American Dirt controversy, etc). Hence, I suppose, the proliferation of autofiction—fiction that feels only mildly discernible from memoir—or even very self-aware essays (Eula Biss’ On Having and Being Had comes to mind).

I haven’t landed on whether this push toward self-cannibalism is good or bad (I’m trying to view things more in shades of grey) but I do know that I do this too, in my own writing, and often wonder if my propensity to mine my own life for material is fundamentally exploitative or rather natural, since we write what we know. This dilemma doesn’t feel fundamentally different than Ratajkowski’s, whose essay capitalizes off her own experience (capitalizing off her own image), or even Fan’s. In fact, of publicizing her and her mother’s pain, Fan writes: “I knew that I was exploiting our private trauma and making a performance out of the kind of emotion that my mother and I have spent our lives hiding. But saving face would not rescue my mother.”

Fan allows such self-exploitation, as she calls it, as a matter of life or death. She uses the scope of social media as a way to save her mother, which, in the end, actually works. But it doesn’t save her from the fear that her mother will register her actions as betrayal. Posting on Twitter was her way of leveraging the American attention economy in her favor—“America was an entirely different system, with its own levers and gears,” she writes. “And I was better placed to operate them than she had been.” She continues:

I was about thirteen when I hatched a plan to save us. I would divide myself into a Chinese self and an American one: at home, I was the dutiful, Confucian daughter; at school, a dedicated student of clenched politesse and Wasp pieties. I sincerely thought that I could slip in and out of these different versions of myself; they were like costumes, and, if sewn and crafted with sufficient skill, they would help us keep going, my mother and me. There was only one problem: I didn’t know that a person capable of engineering multiple identities was not necessarily a person who could control the borders between them. 

It feels strange, almost wrong, to highlight Ratajkowski’s and Fan’s stories in the same space. One reflects hot-girl-exclusionary feminism, the other complexities of migration, dual nationalities, mothers and daughters; both are resilient reflections on trauma, and exhibit the slow tide and subtle power shifts of image, the internet, and personal relationships.

But there’s a moment that comes near the end of Fan’s essay in which we as readers glimpse the impetus behind writing such personal accounts of pain and shame. It comes after a man on the street registers Fan and hurls the words “Fucking Chinese” in her direction:

That night, I tweeted about the incident. It was an act of exposure that my mother would have frowned upon. “Where’s your bruise?” she would say, if I complained about being mocked at school: if an incident does not physically harm you, it shouldn’t register. But why had I felt pinned to that tableau in which the man’s words seemed more real than my body? To assert that it had happened was the only way I could wrest the moment away from the stranger.

(Emphasis mine.)

In both Ratajkowski’s and Fan’s writing, there’s both an explicit and implicit message that penning these true stories—the pain, trauma, and most of all, the double bind of betraying both with words—is an act of control, of reclaiming power that was once taken from us. The question to ask, I think, is to what end?