Pop Culture

Emily Ratajkowski on Post Divorce: 'I Decided to F*ck' My Way Into a New Kind of Woman'

The actor and model revealed she stopped sleeping with her ex-husband six months after the birth of their son.

Emily Ratajkowski.
JP Yim/Getty Images for Gucci

Emily Ratajkowski has opened up about her sex life, explaining how she's used sex to change who she is.

In a new essay for The Cut, the actor and model admitted that she stopped having sex with ex-husband Sebastian Bear McClard six months after the birth of their son, Sylvester.

"Six months after my son was born, my husband and I stopped having sex," Ratajkowski wrote. "Less than a year later, we separated."

Following their divorce, Ratajkowski wrote that she wanted to "fuck my way into a new kind of woman."

“I wanted to destroy the Madonna, the special girl I’d worked so hard to be before an eight-pound baby had torn my vagina in two, and replace her with the whore," Ratajkowski penned, before providing details about subsequent dating efforts.

"I wish I could say I’d started to date slowly … but the truth is just a week after my split, I found myself in Brooklyn, a shell-shocked and sleepless version of myself," she added "'I just need a distraction,' I’d said, tasking my friends, who had giddily gotten to work by texting every unattached and (relatively) unembarrassing man they knew," she wrote.

"[A] DJ was the closest man in the vicinity and the lowest stakes [because] he lived only two blocks away from the apartment I'd shared with my ex and our son, had been sober for nearly a decade and was a friend of a friend of a friend."

Ratajkowski explained that she didn’t actually sleep with the DJ, but it did help her get into a freeing dating phase.

"The character I’d learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsive dating, was a villain: Poison Ivy. Catwoman," she wrote. "Sexual but scary, and she drank gin martinis. Many, many gin martinis. She was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her. In fact, they should all be jealous."

Ratajkowski was previously married to Bear-McLard from 2018 to 2022, before their split. In the time since, she got used to dating as a single mom, which she brought up in her essay for The Cut. 

"Being a New Yorker made being a single mom feel sexier [and] bohemian, or at least that's what I told myself," she explained, before revealing that she'd never had a one-night stand before her recent dating phase.

Ratajkowski’s essay about her dating follows previous comments about the importance of sex for her during a 2023 appearance on the Forbidden Fruits podcast.

"Sex is very relaxing to me. It’s, like, an outlet. It's an expression, and I like to have it in my life," she said, before writing that "you learn so much about people by having sex with them, it’s crazy. I’ve learned that from dating."

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