Emily Ratajkowski and Hailey Bieber sat down to discuss the importance of women supporting women.
During an episode of Hailey Bieber’s YouTube series “Who’s In My Bathroom?”, Bieber invited Ratajkowski to the talk show where they made gin martinis, ate nachos, and talked about their experiences in the modeling industry.
“I just feel like there’s a barrier in general when women meet each other of kind of like, ‘Are we competition?’ I think that’s so sad,” the 30-year-old author of My Body said. “And I don’t blame women at all for doing that. I think it’s, like, how we are trained to be. But I just think that I would like that to change. It’s one of the reasons that I wrote my book.”
Bieber agreed, adding that she feels “people really perpetuate women-on-women drama and women competing against each other”.
“And I’ve just always really felt like there’s enough space for everybody,” continued the 25-year-old model, who’s married to Justin Bieber. “There’s enough room for everybody to thrive, and we’re so much more powerful when we’re just supporting each other.”
For Ratajkowski, she feels that women have to constantly remind themselves that there is no competition amongst them. “I feel like that’s what we as women have to do all the time, is remind ourselves, like, you have your world, you have all these wonderful things,” she said. “Just because you see somebody else doing their thing doesn’t mean that you need to compete.”
This is not the first time Ratajkowski has reflected on the importance of female solidarity. In her memoir My Body, which was published October 2021, the supermodel details her own experiences with feminism, sexual harassment, and bodily autonomy. Speaking on The Independent’s “Millennial Love” podcast last November, Ratajkowski discussed her changing opinions on modeling and choice feminism.
“Not only did I feel like I was sort of a hustler who was using this thing, my body and my image, to make a life and build a living, I also did feel like it was empowering, which is a word I think gets overused a lot these days but it felt good for me and like there was a shift in the power,” she said.
“As I got older I started to realise that I had a lot of anxieties ... a lot of unhappiness that I couldn’t put a finger on … it wasn’t until I really started to face those feelings that I realised that my politics were not aligning with my experience,” Ratajkowski said. “There were moments, or many times in my life, when it did feel like power or something close to power and I was complicit in dynamics that are complicated. But yes, I no longer believe what I used to believe.”
