Emily Ratajkowski has found herself at the center of a heated online backlash after publishing a deeply personal essay exploring her life as a single mother following her divorce.
The piece, released on Friday, June 12, reflects on the breakdown of her marriage, her early anxieties about the label of a “divorced single mother,” and her experiences re-entering dating and hookup culture while raising her son.
The essay sparked controversy after it was accompanied by a series of breastfeeding images that many netizens called “disturbing” and “creepy,” accusing the portrayal of being “tone-deaf” and disconnected from the realities of most single mothers.
“Is this what it takes for someone to read your essay these days?” one critic wrote. “This is what they mean when they say that every dollar is getting harder to earn.”
Emily Ratajkowski recently published a highly controversial personal essay titled Motherf*cker in The Cut
Emily Ratajkowski wrote and published the piece to process the traumatic aftermath of her divorce and challenge the societal stigma surrounding single motherhood.
Ratajkowski stated that her marriage to film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard collapsed unexpectedly less than a year after their son was born, throwing her into an excruciatingly painful transition.
The couple had been married for four years and shared a whirlwind romance, tying the knot in a surprise New York City courthouse ceremony in February 2018 after only a few weeks of dating.
In March 2021, they welcomed a son, Sylvester “Sly” Apollo Bear.
Image credits: emrata
In the essay, Ratajkowski wrote that her marriage to Sebastian “collapsed” after they stopped being intimate six months following the birth of their son.
She described the postpartum period as a “violent transition into a new reality of a screaming baby.”
“And then, in a time period that felt both instant and excruciatingly slow, my marriage collapsed. Six months after my son was born, my husband and I stopped having s*x. Less than a year later, we separated.”
The model filed for divorce in September 2022, and the divorce was finalized in 2025.
Emily wrote the candid essay to reflect on the immense emotional toll of the divorce and the initial, deep-seated shame she felt about becoming “the very thing I’d always known to fear: a single mother.”
She added that she “hated the condescending way people looked at me in the wake of my breakup,” and that she “couldn’t stand my pathetic reflection in their eyes.”
She felt that transitioning into motherhood stripped away her identity as a s*xual being.
She expressed her decision to shatter the traditional “Madonna” image, the submissive, perfect “good girl” persona, and replace it with a raw, liberated version of her s*xuality.
The 35-year-old accompanied the essay with a series of breastfeeding images that critics described as “disturbing” and “provocative”
In a polarizing admission, Ratajkowski wrote that she decided to “f*ck my way into a new kind of woman.”
She characterized her post-divorce phase as a period of compulsive dating during which she channeled a hyper-s*xualized, detached “supervillain” persona.
Emily explicitly outlined strict boundaries she maintained, such as always sneaking out of partners’ apartments late at night so she could be home for her son’s 6:00 a.m. wake-up call.
Ratajkowski penned, “Before my separation, I’d never had a one-night stand. I’d never slept with someone the same day I met them. In fact, I’d only slept with eight people: four of whom had been live-in boyfriends, and one of whom was my male best friend in high school…”
“I didn’t f*ck anyone I wasn’t pretty sure would fall in love with me, because I wanted to be precious.”
She also addressed the fear that having a child would make her undesirable.
Instead, she discovered that many men were uniquely drawn to her status as a mother, viewing her capacity for parental self-sacrifice as an attractive trait, which even led her to question whether they subliminally “want me as their mommy.”
“In these months of dating post-separation, I learned… that many men are turned on by motherhood…”
Image credits: emrata
The essay was published alongside a now-controversial photoshoot featuring breastfeeding-themed imagery.
For the main cover, Ratajkowski posed while looking directly into the camera in full glamorous makeup, wearing skin-tight black leather Gucci pants and an unbuttoned black Gucci jacket with no shirt underneath.
Her breasts were partially exposed, and she held a prop baby doll up to one of her bare breasts, mimicking nursing.
In another image, she held the baby doll to her chest with one hand while holding a cocktail glass filled with wine or a martini in the other.
“In these months of dating post-separation, I learned… that many men are turned on by motherhood,” Emily wrote in her piece
Adding to the single-mother dating theme of the essay, one of the snaps showed her nursing a plastic doll while a man wearing only boxer shorts, representing a casual partner or hookup, stood by a window in the background.
However, Emily faced heavy public criticism over the essay and photoshoot, as critics argued that the visuals turned a natural maternal act into a sensual, performative stunt designed for the male gaze.
One person wrote, “What is going on with people? That photo is genuinely disturbing. The desperation for attention has reached a point where people have completely lost their sense of taste and crossed into pure ridiculousness. Terrible.”
Another user added, “Since when do we breastfeed and drink a**ohol? This is so…uncomfortable. It doesn’t even seem like art.”
“S*xualising breastfeeding and using a ‘baby’ as a prop, nothing cool or fashionable about that; Why are we s*xualising breastfeeding?” questioned a third.
Another comment read, “This is weird; l adore you but w*f? s*xualising breastfeeding? girl no; This is sad honestly; W*f are you trying to show; I’m sorry but this ain’t it.”
Others commented, “Breastfeeding a baby doll is wild. Ma’am, the real one is at home wondering why mom is out here practicing on props.”
“Woman have forgot what breastfeeding is about. This is disgusting. There is nothing normal about breastfeeding in this photo. It’s f*cking weird.”
Others used humor to criticize the setting, with one person writing, “Dude on the firescape must be her bf ready to take the jump seeing the antics.”
“Controversy gets attention and helps content go viral, but I honestly don’t understand why these photos were necessary. It’s weird, uncomfortable, and honestly hard to look at. Maybe the message you’re trying to send is a good one, but these images completely distract from it,” said another person.
The same user doubled down, writing, “As a mother, you should know that children should never be placed in a context that’s meant to be perceived as s*xy or provocative. That’s where this crosses a line for me.”
The New York Post also published a highly critical opinion piece titled, Emily Ratajkowski is wrong — single moms aren’t broken or easy, written by Miska Salemann.
The New York Post also published a critical article by writer Miska Salemann, who voiced her disappointment with Ratajkowski’s message
Salemann, a young single mother living in New York City and raising a child, used the platform to explain why Ratajkowski’s portrayal felt profoundly “detached from reality.”
The piece heavily criticized the way Ratajkowski’s version of liberation still centered entirely on men.
Miska argued that by focusing so heavily on whether men “want her as their mommy,” Ratajkowski reinforced a toxic culture that ties a woman’s ultimate self-worth to her s*xual desirability.
She wrote, “Reading it, I felt a sick twist in my stomach. It felt as though she was recasting s*x as a kind of ritual performance — where one hopes reckless intimacy becomes self-discovery, and the male gaze is sought to approve of a body transformed by pregnancy and childbirth.”
“It’s a troubling message, especially for young women, because it reinforces the stereotypes of single mothers as ‘broken’ or ‘easy.’”
While Salemann added that she normally supports women owning their bodies and posting “thirst traps,” she found the visual imagery accompanying the essay highly upsetting.
She explicitly wrote that “s*xualizing motherhood in the same frame as an infant somehow feels perverse” and called the use of the lifelike prop doll “disturbing.”
The opinion piece concluded that Ratajkowski’s perspective sends a damaging message by reinforcing archaic stereotypes that single mothers are inherently desperate for attention, when true maternal strength comes from self-sacrifice, protecting a child’s peace, and building independent stability.
Miska concluded, “The model, by contrast, describes ‘getting off on the thrill of being romantically inaccessible for the first time.’ …She writes confidently, knowing ‘I had the upper hand: there was no chance of falling in love with him,’ adding that he offered her nothing more than ‘superficial escapism.’ As a mother, I felt especially sad for her reading that.”
“Because why would you try to escape one of the most precious seasons of your life, especially when you’re experiencing it in one of the most privileged ways imaginable? Ratajkowski’s emotional detachment and numbness didn’t read to me as feminist liberation or self-realization. It was just sad.”
“This is disgusting. There is nothing normal about breastfeeding in this photo…” wrote one social media user
