Who is Emily Ratajakowski's mother? Model led sad and sexualised childhood
Emily Ratajkowski was born beautiful but she's had to pay a heavy price for those killer features she has been gifted with. Behind all that glamor hides a dark reality that is filled with guilt, harassment, and everything in between. In her upcoming book titled 'My Body', which releases on November 9, EmRata reflects on everything that she endured in her childhood.
Earlier this month, EmRata made a bombshell revelation that Robin Thicke fondled her breasts during the shoot of 'Blurred Lines'. In the video, the supermodel appears topless in several scenes, wearing only a skin-toned thong, which gives the appearance that she is naked. The video created a lot of controversies after its release for promoting the date rape culture. EmRata said Thicke was slightly drunk when he groped her bare breasts from behind. "Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt the coolness and foreignness of a stranger's hands cupping my bare breasts from behind. I instinctively moved away, looking back at Robin Thicke," EmRata wrote in her book. She says, she "felt naked for the first time that day."
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Who is Emily Ratajkowski's mother?
EmRata was born to Kathleen Balgley. She has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego. She has been a lecturer at UCLA Writing programs and tenured as associate professor of English at California State University, San Luis Obispo. She is also an author and has written a memoir titled 'Letters to My Father: Excavating a Jewish Identity in Poland and Belarus', the foreword for which was penned by EmRata.
EmRata said growing up she understood her family was quite fixated with her looks. She remembers her mother telling her that the doctor who delivered her exclaimed, "Look at the size of her! She's beautiful." She remembers her mom saying, “The next day he brought his children to the hospital just to see you. You were such a beautiful baby.” EmRata says she grew up on stories about her mom being a beautiful woman herself. Kathy looked like a young Elizabeth Hurley and heard of “adoring boys standing on the lawn below her bedroom window in high school” and that she was a cause of envy of many girls.
“I tried to gauge where my parents thought I belonged in the world of beauties,” Ratajkowski writes. “It seemed important to them both, especially to my mother, that their daughter be perceived as beautiful.” EmRata prayed to God to make her "more beautiful" every night. “Beauty was a way for me to be special,” she explains. “When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most.” EmRata aside she was approached by an agent during her preteen years and thought modeling would please her parents.
EmRata's parents drove her to castings. Her father displayed her first modeling "comp" card with her measurements and images in his classroom. Her modeling photos made it to their Facebook pages. EmRata was still in middle school when she went to her first audition and Kathy asked her to flip her hair when meeting with the casting directors. While driving back, Kathy told her, “That boy looked at you when you stood up and flipped your hair. He was watching you.” EmRata said by 13 she was an expert in sensing male desire. Once a casting agent pointed at some of her closeup photos where EmRata posed with her mouth half-closed and lips pursed and remarked, "Now this is the look. This is how we know this girl gets f**ked."
EmRata was uncomfortable at the moment and wondered if this was something to be proud about. According to her mother, it was. She placed a sexy black-and-white photo of her daughter on the kitchen counter facing the front door which EmRata was quite "embarrassed" about. “Anyone coming in [the house] was immediately greeted by my pouty lips, bare legs and teased hair,” the model writes. EmRata says modeling helped her earn fame, money, and the ability to be an entrepreneur but she realized she didn't have much say over her body.
“It had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place,” she writes. “Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over. Facing the reality of the dynamics at play would have meant admitting how limited my power really was — how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at," the model writes. EmRata moved out of her parents' house and went on to become a successful model after which she demanded that her mother take the photo down. “It doesn’t represent you anymore,” her mother said, agreeing to take it down, all the time misunderstanding what the model meant. "You're more beautiful than that now," she said.