The Problem With Emily Ratajkowski’s <em>My Body</em>

Rewatching the music video for “Blurred Lines,” the totemic Robin Thicke song, is an interesting project. In 2013, when it was released, the song spawned a new microeconomy of commentary denouncing it as a distillation of rape culture, or fretting over whether enjoying its jaunty hook was defensible. (“I know you want it,” Thicke croons presumptively over and over, even though honestly, no, I do not want it at all.) In the video, directed by the veteran Diane Martel, three models dressed in transparent thongs peacock and pose with a baffling array of props (a lamb, a banjo, a bicycle, a four-foot-long replica of a syringe) while Thicke, the producer and one of the co-writers Pharrell Williams, and the rapper T.I. dance, goofy and fully clothed, around them.

As an artifact of its time, it’s a remarkably deadened and nonsensical thing. But what most surprises me now is how pitiable the men seem, pulling at the models’ hair and playing air guitar for attention, less musical superstars than jejune dads who don’t exactly know what to do with the women they’ve paid to be naked. This is the raw power of the female body, and yet what kind of power is it, really? At one point, Thicke seems to push the