Model and actress Emily Ratajkowski complained that “Blonde,” Netflix’s new Marylin Monroe film, “fetishizes female pain.”
Ratajkowski made the complaint in a video she shared on TikTok on Friday, saying the fascination with the tragic life of the late actress — whose name is practically synonymous with the term “blonde bombshell” — was just another example of society turning a woman’s pain into something “sexy.”
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@emrataSo done with the fetishization of female pain and suffering. Bitch Era 2022♬ original sound – Emrata
“I’m not surprised to hear that it’s yet another movie fetishizing female pain, even in death,” Ratajkowski said, despite admitting just as the video began that she had not yet seen the movie herself.
“We love to fetishize female pain,” she continued, referencing public obsessions with famous women whose personal struggles had become front page news. “Look at Amy Winehouse. Look at Britney Spears. Look at the way we obsessed over [Princess] Diana’s death, the way we obsess over dead girls and serial killers. Watch any ‘CSI’ episode and it’s like this crazy fetishization of death and female pain.”
“And I think as women — I mean, I can say for myself for sure — but I’ve learned how to fetishize my own pain and my own hurt in my life so that it feels like something that can be tended to and that’s kind of sexy and I’m like this, oh, f***ed-up girl, whatever,” Ratajkowski said, noting that society often seemed to elevate women who were flawed and damaged — and that the resulting perception was that the damage was, in itself, “sexy.”
“I think we do that in many, many different ways. But I want that to change,” she added.
“But I was thinking about it and … you know what’s kind of hard to fetishize? Anger. Anger is hard to fetishize. So I have a proposal. I think we all need to be a little more pissed off. I’m going to be in my witch era. 2022, baby, is my b**** era. I think we should all be in our b**** era,” she concluded.
She repeated her suggestion as she ended the video: “So, yeah, I’m just going to get angry.”
