Emily Ratajkowski covers the March issue of InStyle. She’s promoting some actual film/Netflix projects too – she has a small part in a Netflix series called Easy, and she has two independent films coming out, In Darkness and Cruise. I don’t know what to make of her acting career, but much like my feelings regarding Kate Upton, I’m fine if Emily wants to stick to modeling and being an internet celebrity. Then again, I’m sort of an Emily Apologist. I don’t think she’s dumb, and I often find myself agreeing with what she says about feminism, sexuality and more. This InStyle interview was like that – while no one is ever going to say “let’s give Emily Ratajkowski an award for feminism,” I don’t have a problem with what she says about the choices she makes for herself. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

Moving to New York in her early 20s: “All I met was trust-fund babies. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is no longer the amazing cultural center my parents had told me about.’”

Her bad choices after Gone Girl: She was hit with a flood of offers, including a few “cheesy” ones that she admits she was too quick to accept. (She doesn’t name names, but her role in 2015’s We Are Your Friends seems a likely candidate.) “At the time I thought, ‘I’m going to just make a bunch of money and then go back to school. To be honest, I hadn’t figured out that I had a real career on my hands. So I was like, ‘OK, this person wants me to do this? Cool.’ And then all of a sudden I realized that these projects are just not me. That’s when I shifted toward more meaningful things.”

Choosing to post and pose for half-naked photos: “The main criticism that I get is ‘Aren’t you just conforming to a patriarchal standard of beauty?’ Well, this is just the body I was given. I didn’t do anything to it—it’s just my body. But even if I had altered it, that would be fine too.”

Whether Caitlyn Jenner is “bad” for caring about her clothes and nails: “She’s allowed to do that—it’s her choice. If she decides she wants to be a super-femme who’s all about the clothes, great. She can conform to that gender identity all she wants because it’s a personal decision.” Applying that same standard to everyone, Ratajkowski says, “is a way of including all women and also saying that no matter what the circumstances, it’s up to them how they want to be a woman.”

Being mad about a 2012 photoshoot she did which is being shown at an art show: “So I used Twitter to reinforce an idea that I’ve believed in forever, which is that it’s up to me to choose when and how I want to share my sexuality.” It was no accident that she posted a particularly revealing photo on Instagram a few days later. “Of course, a bunch of the headlines were like, ‘Emily complains about nude photos and then posts her own sexy selfie.’ And I was like, ‘That’s exactly my point! The difference is, it’s my decision to post that.’ ”

She’s real, and cynical: “My friends are not in the industry—they’re young artists or knitwear designers or whatever,” she says. Her boyfriend, Jeff Magid, a musician who studied philosophy at Brown University, jokes to her that when he moved out west a few years ago he was eager to chill out in the land of carefree optimists but somehow he ended up with the dark, intense Rataj­kowski—“the one cynical Californian.”

[From InStyle]

Not to nitpick (ha, I love to nitpick), but Emily’s argument about choosing to post photos sort of falls apart when she’s talking about that art show – you can see more about that here. Okay, so she doesn’t appreciate that an old photoshoot she did is now being used in a photography exhibit. But wasn’t it her CHOICE to pose for the photographer in the first place? And didn’t she sign a release? I mean, the argument is more complicated than “I’m the only one who can post my naked photos!”

As for her argument to this: “Aren’t you just conforming to a patriarchal standard of beauty?” – her answer is okay, but the larger point is that because she naturally conforms to the patriarchal standard of beauty, she profits from it and finds fame from it. It’s not so much that she’s “conforming” as she’s a cog within patriarchy.

Cover courtesy of InStyle, photo courtesy of WENN.