Jordan Emanuel posed nude for ‘Playboy.’ Now, she’s practicing celibacy to prove a point.
It Figures is Yahoo Life's body image series, delving into the journeys of influential and inspiring figures as they explore what body confidence, body neutrality and self-love mean to them.
Model and activist Jordan Emanuel is letting it be known that she maintains ownership of her body years after posing nude as Playboy’s 2019 Playmate of the Year.
“There are many people who think that because I posed for Playboy, that means I signed off all the rights to my body — comments about my body, interactions about my body,” she tells Yahoo Life. “If I'm talking about my body, I'm talking about my body. It's something different when somebody else is making statements.”
It’s a stance that the 31-year-old star of Bravo's Summer House: Martha's Vineyard has felt inclined to take after recognizing people’s inability to respect boundaries since she posed nude for the magazine. While some seemingly perceived the spread as an open invitation to see Emanuel as an object of desire, she says her inclusion in Playboy was actually a message of empowerment.
“Honestly I did it for the girls, I really did,” she explains. “We are taught to be ashamed of our bodies in some way or another, that’s just a part of our society … It became obvious to me that women needed a point to be comfortable with their bodies, and if that meant that I was going to go internationally nude for people to be empowered, then I was going to do that.”
It wasn’t unnatural for Emanuel, who recalls being “overly comfortable” in her body growing up. “I went to boarding school, so, you know, there's a bunch of girls around,” she says. “I never had any reservations about changing in front of anybody or anything like that.”
Still, while she might've started out comfortable in her body, she was soon socially conditioned to question that — especially when she went through puberty earlier than girls around her and looked “more developed” than her peers in middle school, she realized the onus was put on her to be appropriate.
“Constantly figuring out what fits, what doesn’t, what’s appropriate for my age, how people are going to perceive me,” she says. “It was always at the expense of somebody else and their gaze rather than what it was that I felt comfortable in, at least as a child.”
When she got older, she adopted the mindset that “I’m gonna do what I want to do because my body is mine.” She expressed that agency by co-founding a women’s empowerment nonprofit called Women with Voices, aiming for “sexual education and liberation.” Posing for Playboy was a piece of that mission.
“In that moment, it was important for me to show that Black women can be beautiful, they can be comfortable with their bodies, they can be sexy, if that's what they choose. They can also be conservative if that’s what they choose,” she says.
Most importantly, Emanuel is showing that women can be those things and more — a point which she's proven with her decision to practice celibacy while displaying a sexy aesthetic online.
"When you are comfortable with your body, that means you're a slut, or that means you're available for everybody to do A, B and C, because now they own you in some way. Instead of it being looked at as, 'OK, this is an individual who's comfortable with themselves, who's letting us in on this vulnerability.' But also recognizing, that was a job," she says. "I've modeled, I’ve DJ’d. It’s a sexy lifestyle, it seems like I would be out here in the streets every day, you know what I mean? So when you hear that I'm actually abstaining from that, it’s like, 'Wait, that feels like a contradiction,'"
In reality, it just goes to show how multifaceted Emanuel is as a person, separate from her public persona.
"I was always a little bit prude in terms of who I was sharing my body with," she says. "I still don't think people accept women being more than one thing."
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