Wrong kind of feminist? Slate shames model Emily Ratajkowski for defending Melania

and this is why fewer and fewer people are taking you seriously.

— Matt Crowder (@mattcrowder07) February 16, 2017

Over the weekend, New York Times reporter Jacob Bernstein made the mistake of referring to First Lady Melania Trump as “a hooker” in front of model Emily Ratajkowski. Ratajkowski — no Trump fan by any means — defended Melania:

Sat next to a journalist from the NYT last night who told me "Melania is a hooker." Whatever your politics it's crucial to call this out for

— Emily Ratajkowski (@emrata) February 13, 2017

what it is: slut shaming. I don't care about her nudes or sexual history and no one should.

— Emily Ratajkowski (@emrata) February 13, 2017

Gender specific attacks are disgusting sexist bullshit.

— Emily Ratajkowski (@emrata) February 13, 2017

And in doing that, it seems Ratajkowski outed herself as the wrong kind of feminist. At least in Slate’s eyes:

Emily Ratajkowski defending Melania Trump is not what we need right now: https://t.co/saujX022RP pic.twitter.com/qOYQL2gzQc

— Slate (@Slate) February 16, 2017

Heather Schwedel writes:

So there you go: Don’t call anyone a hooker in the presence of Emily Ratajkowski, because she is not here for that. While protesting slut-shaming is a valid stance, if this seems like an annoying nontroversy, well, that might be an even more a valid stance. It’s not funny or amusing that a reporter saw fit to throw around the word hooker, but it’s also not clear that calling it out was the best use of Ratajkowski’s energies or platform. Much has been written about the riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in pearls that is Melania, and while it’s hard to say how much she should be held accountable for her husband’s politics (which she has at times upheld and other times seemed to distance herself from), I think we can all agree not to call her a hooker without patting ourselves on the back for it.

…

It’s not that she’s wrong, it’s more like … stop trying to educate me about feminism, @emrata. When defending Melania, why not also point out how much her husband’s administration’s policies stand to hurt women’s rights and safety? It’s for these same reasons that Melania’s thank-you message to Ratajkowski rings hollow. In addition to the fact that her husband has launched gender-specific attacks on women of the very nature Ratajkowski was criticizing, the notion of “support[ing] other women” just because we’re all in this together, ladies, is reductive and not a productive stance. What has Melania done to support real women who are not members of her family? If we really want to support women, we need less woke models speaking out on Twitter and more people actually taking action.