Emily Ratajkowski asks comedian to stop mimicking her photos

‘I just don’t want you to do this to me anymore’

Emi­ly Rata­jkows­ki wants come­di­an Celeste Bar­ber to stop mak­ing fun of her Insta­gram posts and has issued a plea to the come­di­an to stop par­o­dy­ing her.

The 40-year-old Aus­tralian has gained a cult fol­low­ing off the stage for humor­ous­ly recre­at­ing celebri­ties’ Insta­gram posts. But the tar­get of the posts, haven’t always found them quite as amus­ing.

Rata­jkows­ki spoke about Bar­ber in an episode of her High Low pod­cast after hav­ing a bit of his­to­ry with her

The 31-year-old blocked the come­di­an in 2021 after she mocked one of the model’s swimwear cam­paigns, cap­tion­ing it: “We are sick of you objec­ti­fy­ing our bod­ies! Also, here’s my a**.”

Bar­ber not­ed the con­flict dur­ing an inter­view with Fitzy and Wip­pa on Australia’s Nova radio sta­tion, say­ing: “I don’t think Emi­ly is a fan. That’s OK, she’s allowed to not love it. But she blocked me.”

The post had also faced crit­i­cism from Barber’s fol­low­ers who claimed it was an exam­ple of “inter­nalised misog­y­ny” and blamed women for being objec­ti­fied if they showed off their body.

Speak­ing about the dra­ma on her pod­cast, Rata­jkows­ki said: “This whole dra­ma with Celeste has been blown out of pro­por­tion. In gen­er­al, I find her to be real­ly fun­ny. But, [the] mes­sage I was try­ing to send to her was, ‘I just don’t want you to do this to me any­more.’”

She con­tin­ued: “[I want] to be able to do my thing, whether that be writ­ing about my ter­ri­fy­ing expe­ri­ences in an indus­try that doesn’t pro­tect women and young girls and femme-pre­sent­ing peo­ple while also hav­ing a bathing suit line.”

At the time of Barber’s post, Rata­jkows­ki had writ­ten a post in The Cut titled ‘Buy­ing Myself Back’ about oth­er peo­ple using her image for their own gain with­out her con­sent. 

She added: “I was like, I’m not giv­ing her my con­sent for this joke any­more. It just land­ed at a spe­cif­ic time for me.”

Rata­jkows­ki con­firmed that she has no ill will toward Bar­ber but finds her style of humour to be inher­ent­ly misog­y­nis­tic about women who put their bod­ies on dis­play, explain­ing: “We real­ly love to pick on female influ­encers, like they are con­sid­ered the trash, lamest, most cringe, most embar­rass­ing peo­ple on the plan­et

“I fun­da­men­tal­ly find that to be sex­ist. Yeah, no s**t women want to be influ­encers – it’s one of the ways that women have learned to be suc­cess­ful and make mon­ey. They’re hus­tling.”