Emily Ratajkowski: ‘Why Won’t People Take Me Seriously?’

She sprang to fame following a nearly-nude appearance in the video for Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’s controversial 2013 hit, “Blurred Lines”, and was in the headlines again recently after she posted a joint topless selfie with Kim Kardashian.

So perhaps Emily Ratajkowski (whose name, we learn in a new interview with ES magazine, is pronounced pronounced Rat-a-kow-ski) shouldn’t be completely surprised by the fact that film directors and studio bosses aren’t lining up to cast her in the most serious of roles.

However, the London-born California-based actress and model, who has become a reference point for ideals of contemporary beauty, perceives sexism on the part of Hollywood, telling ES, “If you’re a sexy actress it’s hard to get serious roles.”

The famous video featured her and two other models, wearing flesh-colored thongs, dancing with Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, both of whom were fully clothed, and was received with roughly equal parts of condemnation, outrage, banning orders and ecstatic applause.

The new shoot is hardly demure, either.

However, Ratajkowski tells ES the video was art, saying, "Like any art, there’s a million ways to interpret it. All I can say is that when a woman is naked, that’s not immediately anti-feminist. I have no apologies for it, and I’m not ashamed at all."

Ratajkowski has recently been involved in an online spat with British journalist Piers Morgan, who criticised Kim Kardashian for posting a nude selfie.

Ratajkowski leapt to Kim’s defence, tweeting, “Love when a man comments on a woman’s decision to post a nude photo. Her body, her career. Sexist bullsh*t.”

A few days later, she and Kim took their infamous joint topless selfie of them flipping the bird at the camera.

Morgan retweeted the picture, next to a picture of famous British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, with the caption, “RIP Feminism.”

In the interview, Ratajkowski says, “[He was] talking about the fact Kim is 34 and a mother and that we’re over seeing her in a sexual light, which I had a lot of problems with. He also implied that her husband [Kanye West] was writing her tweets, as if she isn’t capable of writing them herself, which to me is incredibly sexist… There are lots of [criticisms] I can understand one might have about the Kardashians and reality TV, but even someone who you might be critical of is allowed to post a naked selfie if she wants to.”

“He criticises everyone,” says Ratajkowski. “I think he’s also really attention-seeking.”

Morgan said today that her description of him as an ‘attention seeker’ constituted, ‘a sublime moment of chronic self-awareness failure.'

We await the next round in this intriguing battle of the sexes with bated breath.