Emily Ratajkowski wanted to feel desired as she raised a toddler, and to recognize the sexual part of herself alongside her identity as a mother. In her June 12, 2026 essay for The Cut, the model, actor and author described that wish and the painful physical adjustment she’d experienced after childbirth.
Her son was born in March 2021. Looking back on the period after his birth, she described pain in her breast and swelling in the finger where she wore a ring. Her memory of her crying baby at her breast was part of what she called “a violent transition into a new reality.”
In an interview dated January 18, 2024, Ratajkowski said she’d once judged her body by how it looked. Becoming a mother had given her a new appreciation for what it could do.
“Now I see it as this amazing vessel that actually knows a lot more than me in some ways,” she said.
The June 2026 essay also described a deliberate effort to change who she felt she was through sex. “I decided to fuck my way into a new kind of woman,” Ratajkowski wrote.
She called the woman she’d worked to become before childbirth “the Madonna” and wrote of wanting to replace her with “the whore.” She described having absorbed an idea that separated the role of wife and mother from being a woman who wanted things for herself.
Her account also set out the rules she’d followed while dating. Guests didn’t stay overnight, and she made sure she was there for her son’s bedtime.
