Emily Ratajkowski on entering her 'B**** Era': 'It can just mean standing up for yourself'
Emily Ratajkowski doesn’t see anything wrong with the label “bitch.”
On Sept. 30, the My Body author, 31, took to TikTok to share that women need to embrace their “anger” — an emotion that is “hard to fetishize.” She declared that women “all need to be a little more pissed off,” adding that it was time to enter our collective “Bitch Era.”
In an interview with the Cut, the model — who is launching the Sony Music Entertainment podcast High Low With EmRata — spoke about embracing the term bitch.
“Generally speaking, I think anger is something all of us have a negative relationship to,” the mom of one shared. “At least for me, I associate it with masculinity and toxic masculinity and violence, even. But I think what the world could use is a healthy dose of female anger. It’s interesting with what we’re seeing in the world and what’s happening in Iran right now. Justified rage can be really productive. A lot of good things can come out of anger, and it doesn’t mean violence or toxic masculinity; it can just mean being a bitch.”
She said that she likes the word because while it has a “negative, derogatory” connotation, it can mean so much more than what it seems on the surface.
“It’s a slur, but I’d like to say that, in the same way we’re thinking about how anger doesn’t have to be a negative thing, being a bitch doesn’t have to be a negative thing,” EmRata added. “It can just mean standing up for yourself.”
Ratajkowski, who has long been outspoken about feminism and gender issues, recently appeared with Tory Burch at the 10th Annual Forbes Power Women's Summit to weigh in on these topics.
"I always say that sexism is bad for everyone, including men,” the We Are Your Friends star said at the September event. “I think toxic masculinity is a huge issue and we feel the ramifications of that, but also, men live with that as well. As somebody who has a son, I think about that a lot. It's, for me, very important to expand that conversation to men."
She also used her TikTok to talk about the idea that love can be challenging in heterosexual relationships due to the expectations of the patriarchy.
"There's this premise of men getting women, like getting them, pulling them like they are something to possess,” she said in the since-deleted post. "I feel, as a recently single person who's thinking about dating and stuff, I've really seen that with my friends and with the conversations kind of around it, its like, 'Well who is going to get her' rather than, you know, 'This is a reciprocal mutual relationship where two people could potentially foster love.' So yeah, basically that's why we don't have a lot of love in cis-hetero relationships."
This week, she made a video on the platform about why she doesn’t think #MeToo has had the impact it intended to have.
“All we have now are men who are afraid of consequences,” the Gone Girl star noted. “And as a parent, I can tell you when you want to teach your child something like not to hit other kids, you don't want them to not hit other kids because they're scared of a timeout. You want them to not hit other kids because they have empathy and they understand that hurting other kids is not nice because it will hurt those kids, and they don't want to hurt other kids.”
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