What to Know
More than five years after welcoming her first baby (and so far, only child) Sylvester Apollo Bear into the world, Emily Ratajkowski sharing the raw, honest truth about the experience… and everything that came after. But for as tough as some of her new essay might be to read, the response it’s getting is nothing compared to the backlash that’s being thrown Emily’s way for the controversial photos that accompany the story. Yikes!
Emily’s essay is about the birth of her child, her divorce, and what it’s been like dating while being a single mom.
The essay, titled “Motherf—–,” was published earlier this week and is a lot to process, whether or not you’re an EmRata fan (or a mom yourself).
She dove right in without holding back, revealing that six months after Sly was born in 2021, she and her then-husband Sebastian Bear-McClard stopped having sex, and it wasn’t long before they were going their separate ways and divorcing.
This is when she said she “began compulsively dating in order to figure out what kind of woman I wanted to be.”
Surprisingly enough, the attempt ended up working for her — or at least, she says it did.
“The character I’d learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsively dating, was a villain: Poison Ivy. Catwoman. Sexual but scary,” Emily wrote. “And she drank gin martinis. Many, many gin martinis.”
She shared photos of herself while breastfeeding that have proven to be controversial.
Speaking of gin martinis, that’s exactly what Emily appears to be holding in the photos that go with the article, including the ones that were taken behind the scene that she shared on Instagram. She also appears to be breastfeeding a baby at the same time, though that baby looks like a doll (especially since her own child is way bigger than a newborn now that he’s 5).
Doll or no doll, so many of Emily’s followers took issue with the fact that she thought an image like this would be okay to post.
“What is going on with people? That photo is genuinely disturbing,” one commenter wrote. “The desperation for attention has reached a point where people have completely lost their sense of taste and crossed into pure ridiculousness. Terrible.”
Another asked, “Since when do we breastfeed and drink alcohol?”
(For the record, as long as you’re paying attention to your intake and feed times, you can totally drink while breastfeeding. The CDC does recommend waiting two hours after having a single drink to do so, though.)
Multiple people accused her of using a baby as a “prop.”
Technically, the baby from the photoshoot is a prop, since it’s a doll that isn’t real… but try telling that to the angry hoards of people in Emily’s IG comments.
For others, though, that’s what made it even stranger: “Doing it with a doll is why it’s weird.”
Emily hasn’t shared her thoughts about the reaction to her essay and photos so far, but who knows? She could be using it as inspiration for her next viral essay.
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