‘Our Liberation Is Mutual’: Examining the Limitations of White Privilege in Protecting the Female Body and Why Our Feminism Must be Intersectional

By Laura Rodríguez-Davis

In June 2017, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by author Roxane Gay was released to the world. It offered an honest narrative about Gay’s life, her body and her relationship with it. She speaks from her personal experiences as a large, queer Black woman coping in a society bound by Eurocentric, heteronormative standards that is simultaneously deeply fatphobic.

Gay recounts the numerous ways that the world is not made for a woman of her size, from the pressure to consider surgical weight loss to getting bruises from armrests on chairs not designed for a body of her size. Her tale provides a sobering examination of the hegemonic culture that demands thinness, whiteness and straightness for acceptance, celebration and protection.

Fast forward to October 2021. Model Emily Ratajkowski releases her book, My Body. She details her life in front of the camera and public eye as a model, caught in the throes of benefiting from her enviable looks and losing control of the right to her own image.

Ratajkowski writes with a poignant self-awareness and depth that we might not expect from someone who built a career based on aesthetics. She does not sugar-coat the privileges she has been afforded, such as sponsored vacations. Nevertheless, Ratajkowski’s narrative astutely illuminates the forces that shape the mass production of image and beauty (at any cost) and mould the standards we aspire to.

At first glance, there is seemingly nothing in common between these two authors. Their lives and experiences are vastly different, marked by their identities and positionality: Gay, a queer, Black, fat writer; Ratajkowski, a straight, white, thin model. And yet, they are both victims of sexual violence.

In the age of #MeToo, it is no secret how common and pervasive this phenomenon is, so, in a way, it is hardly surprising that both Ratajkowski and Gay have experienced sexual assault. Still, this offers a profound insight into the limits of protection privilege offers women.

While Ratajkowski’s body meets all the standards of value in society, she was still not protected from the harm of sexual abuse. Most notably, she boldly shares her experience of being groped by Robin Thicke on the set of his music video ‘Blurred Lines’. In many of her essays in the book, it is overwhelmingly clear how Ratajkowski’s body, for all its beauty, is reduced to a commodity under the patriarchal structures that give powerful men wrongful claim to the female body – something that not even thinness and whiteness can protect women from.

Feminism that only offers empowerment and resistance for white, cisgendered women is not only unjust but short-sighted. It foolishly aligns with a power that is steeped in misogyny. The commonality of whiteness between men and women does not guarantee equality and protection. Racism and sexism are not so easily pulled apart.

On 25 April 2023, Carolyn Bryant passed away. She was infamously known as the white woman who accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of grabbing her at the grocery store in Mississippi where she was employed, leading to his horrific lynching and adding fuel to the civil rights movement in the United States. While Till’s murderers (one of whom was Bryant’s husband) were charged with Till’s death, they were eventually (and inevitably) acquitted. Bryant died having never recanted her words.

This story is not one of a husband nobly protecting his wife, his equal and respected partner, from imminent danger. This is not a story of a woman’s dignity and safety being threatened and then heroically defended. It is a story of a white man violently protecting his property. Carolyn Bryant’s worth was not founded in her humanity; it was founded in being her husband’s commodity.

Bryant may have been a victim of misogyny, denied gender equality both systemically and maritally. But all it took was her words, with no verification, to move her husband to brutally murder a young Black man. Bryant appealed to a power she believed would protect her, and it did. But not because it esteemed her; it was because it owned her. Bryant’s whiteness may have protected her from racial harm, but it would not afford her an equal standing with her male counterparts.

Ratajkowski’s whiteness and beauty have given her many privileges. But they did not protect her from misogynistic harm and sexual violence. She was not safe from the misplaced entitlement of men who would market, exploit and use both her body and image for their own purposes.

So many exclusionary powers have been systemically fused together, so the fight for equality must address them all. It bears self-examining our own failures at inclusion and considering who benefits from that exclusion. Do the powers and privileges we trust actually have our best interest at heart? With whom does our solidarity lie, and will they reciprocate?

If the various forms injustice takes (misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia and ageism, to name a few) cannot be separated, then neither should our liberty be. Emily Ratajkowski’s freedom is bound in Roxane Gay’s freedom. My own is bound in yours. Our liberation is mutual. May it also be inevitable.