The Ethics of Reading: Emily Ratajkowski’s Mother F*cker and Contemporary Society’s Literacy Crisis

Confronted with the spread of reductive readings of Emily Ratajkowski’s Mother F*cker – a personal essay tracing Ratajkowski’s sexual endeavours in the wake of becoming a single mother – I found myself preoccupied with the principles of careful, contextual reading.

While conservative commentators attacked The Cut article as a modern feminist guide to female empowerment, my initial understanding of Ratajkowski’s writing signalled something considerably more ambivalent.

To me, Mother F*cker articulated both the imperatives for, and consequences of, appropriating sex as a means for autonomy and control – encapsulated in the essay’s closing passage: ‘Which is maybe why, mid-thrust, when I felt the sting of a slap, a hard one, harder than any he’d delivered before, with the hiss of his words “I didn’t ask for your feedback, bitch,” I almost started to cry. I was there for power, but I’d forgotten: Animal brain, I thought, waiting for him to come.’ This singular depiction of boundary violation alone renders any reading of the essay as wholly endorsing sexual exploration unimaginable. It was therefore sobering to encounter Megyn Kelly’s assessment of the piece as ‘celebrating how now [Ratajkowski] goes to bed with anyone […] seem[ing] much happier […] becoming a whore.’

More concerned than surprised, I wondered: what in the literacy crisis is this?

While the closing passage provides more than sufficient evidence to regard Kelly’s reading as not merely inattentive and reductive, but unethical and corrupt, the essay as a whole also complicates this evaluation.

Established within the essay’s opening paragraphs is what Ratajkowski describes as ‘a violent transition’: a sequence of events that makes the author’s engagement with her sexuality inseparable from a traumatic birth, the dissolution of a marriage (speculated to have involved infidelity) and, perhaps most critically, a newfound identification with single motherhood. In doing so, Ratajkowski illuminates that although sexual exploration underpins her narrative arc, it is by no means the essay's sole preoccupation.

Its structure exemplifies this, oscillating between sexual encounters with Elder Millennial and extended ruminations on identity – not simply in relation to sexuality, but also divorce and single motherhood (the terms ‘single mom’ and ‘single mother’ recurring nine times across the piece). Thus, to define Mother F*cker as no more than an endorsement for what Candace Owens referred to as ‘becom[ing] a slut’ is to negate a substantial proportion of the writing itself.

Whilst the essay employs a narrator versed in the rhetoric of empowerment, its arc dismantles that very logic (evidenced in moments of critical self-commentary and surmised in the essay’s finale), suggesting something far more complex about the human condition.

So, although Ratajkowski does write, ‘The character I’d learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsively dating, was a villain: Poison Ivy. […] She was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her. In fact, they should all be jealous’, the wider narrative in which this passage is situated conveys it more as a mask than a self-assured statement.

Considering the essay as a whole is therefore critical for a comprehensive understanding of Ratajkowski’s writing, making readings such as Owens’ ‘trying to turn being a slut into a superhero character’ essentially unsupported by the text itself. Owens’ characterisation of Mother F*cker reduces Ratajkowski’s mantra of sexual empowerment to a statement of endorsement, rather than an expression of hurt – stripping the narrative of its depth. Put simply, what I read as a self-protective reframing of tragedy into agency—her rhetoric of empowerment born of divorce, single motherhood, and shame—Owens read as merely uncontextualized words on a page.

The problem here is obvious.

If all elements of a text are fundamental for its apprehension, neglecting a considerable amount of its body forecloses not only the full scope of a narrative but its capacity for critical understanding and human connection.

This is not simply a crisis of literacy, but politically motivated erasure.

To me, Owens’ reading of the article as ‘encourag[ing] women to behave like sluts and tell[ing] them that that's empowering’ presents itself as not merely reductive, but deliberately so. With Mother F*cker being labelled ‘an example of everything that is wrong with modern feminism’, misreadings of the personal essay as a tale of empowerment operate as sites of conservative propaganda, corroding the framework of a complex narrative to fulfil certain ideological agendas.

This carries both political and human consequences: feminism is labelled damaging to women, whilst the nuances of individual expression become dismissed, flattened, and categorised according to preconceived notions. This is a serious matter of ethical concern. With literature affording access to voices and perspectives divergent from our own, it is fundamental that its interpretation remains grounded in the imperatives of receptivity, listening and learning, rather than ideological imposition. Yet, Kelly and Owens’ evaluations of the essay rely upon selective reading – a practice that, in and of itself, reflects a wilful deafness to not only the literary text, but Ratajkowski herself.

Mother F*cker in its very architecture is a navigation of selfhood – one in which sexual exploits operate as a literary site for this delineation. As such, it resists the reductive categorisations of empowerment, nor, as Candace Owens termed it, ‘degrad[ation]’ - portraying the efficacy, motivations and consequences of sexual exploration within Ratajkowski’s life.

Thus, to read Mother F*cker ethically is then to read it for what it truly offers: access to another perspective and a chance to expand one’s understanding of the relationship between sexuality, identity and control.

Words by Josie Chaplin, she/her