Jameela Jamil: Making the World a Better Place
Jameela Jamil is a name I hear back in the early 2010s. I occasionally see her with Steve Jones presenting T4 on Saturday mornings while I nurse a sore head after clubbing with my friends the night before. She is at that point just another presenter reading from an interview script and I don’t pay specific attention.
To my surprise Jameela pops up again several years later in a collection of feminist essays curated by Scarlett Curtis entitled Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies. Her piece is called ‘Tell Him’, a powerful call to action and reminder to women raising little boys that the patriarchal world can be just as damaging to men. The essay is so beautifully written that Jameela now gets my full attention.
“Tell him to cry when he is sad, tell him how important it us to talk about feelings. Tell him it is better to be soft and strong than hard and weak. Never let anyone tell him to ‘stop being a girl’ when he is showing sensitivity.”
The essay stops me in my tracks and I realise I must find out more about this woman and so I begin following her on social media and am stunned at how the shy T4 presenter from my early 20s has transformed into a magnificent feminist, body-positive activist and influencer with a loud, confident presence online. Jameela shares radically honest posts on her experiences of trauma, chronic illness, mental health, eating disorders and being a celebrity woman of colour in the media spotlight. She has a platform called iWeigh where she offers a podcast and space to ‘amplify, advocate and pass the mic’ to others she feels are also fighting for ‘radical inclusivity’.
What captivates me so quickly is Jameela’s honesty about her own naivety and her willingness to be put right on a large number of topics. Her twitter bio for a while even had something to the effect that we are not all born perfectly woke about everything and that that has to be okay, as long as we remain open minded and willing to learn.
The courage that the willingness to be wrong about things cannot be understated - goodness knows I struggle with it. Being a know-it-all just feels SO good. Yet here is Jameela, who has moved to LA, got a starring role in the hit show ‘The Good Place’, loudly and confidently reminding us woke-aholic social media users that it’s okay that we don’t know everything all of the time.
It took me back to my years at uni where I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by a group of women of colour who did not hesitate in educating me on countless areas of which I was deeply and woefully ignorant. I can only hope I had even a fraction of Jameela’s good humour and grace at being called in and or out.
A particular example of Jameela’s humility that stands out to me, was when she applauded the TV host Ellen DeGeneres who had done a segment on her show and a social media post about her friendship with George W Bush. Social media exploded. People were already upset with Ellen, a gay liberal woman for hanging out with a president who, amongst other horrors, had waged an illegal war. Jameela celebrating Ellen’s statement about being friends with “individuals who had different values” when the issues of the Bush administration remained so fresh in people’s minds, triggered an avalanche of righteous rage.
A part of me wanted to leave my own comment. Social media encourages all of us to be judge, jury and executioner, but before I could say anything Jameela had responded. She acknowledged people’s hurt and explained a little of her own background, namely an incredibly difficult family life that made access to current affairs and news sources almost impossible. I watched in humbled astonishment as she filmed herself sharing this very personal information and saying that thanks to people’s comments, she was researching the Bush years and on the Iraq invasion. She was appalled. She no longer endorsed Ellen grandstanding about being buddies with Bush.
The bravery to be openly willing to learn from her mistakes is I think an extraordinarily powerful act of resistance to a media culture that pushes female celebrities to be perfect, flawless icons and then seeks to tear them down at the next opportunity. The printed press in the UK has behaved this way for years and it has become depressingly commonplace for a number of us to replicate that relationship with celebrities on social media and succumb to the temptation to use aggressive, threatening and scary language to shame someone for their ignorance or mistakes.
Jameela then is a radical counter to this. On a recent episode of Red Table Talk with the three generations of the Pinkett Smith family, she shared her promise to herself that as part of her recovery from an almost lifelong eating disorder, she would always say exactly what she wanted and not fear the repercussions. Even now, as we head into the third decade of the 21st century, this stance from a woman — and a woman of colour — is about as fiercely a radical position as you can take. And because she does this, she is able to point out so much of the insidious toxicity that we are all absorbing on an almost daily basis.
This toxicity ranges from media headlines about her and other supposedly ‘controversial’ women (a.k.a women with opinions), to the aggressive multi billion dollar diet industry and all the influences pushing young girls and women to hate food and themselves, to the systemic racism and misogyny that we all participate in through our white supremacist patriarchal status quo.
Jameela is also keen to deconstruct the Hollywood mystique that we, well I, certainly, have been buying into for decades. She has done this by filming herself getting ‘red carpet ready in under ten minutes,’ and although it sounds like a simple, frivolous thing to do, I found it utterly mind blowing. Because Jameela herself is revealing the illusory nonsense that perpetuates the Hollywood and celebrity machine.
Jameela has also recorded herself working out, not to sell a form of exercise or follow a trend, but to share ‘this is what’s making me feel a bit better today, but my form is probably rubbish so don’t be hard on me’. And I tell you, the relief I get from hearing someone with that level of fame say that their form probably sucks is the biggest motivation to exercise and not feel bad about myself that I may have ever had. She is unafraid to challenge influencers across media platforms who intentionally or unintentionally sell body-shaming detoxes, diets or medications.
Jameela takes us behind the curtain in Oz/Hollywood and in social media and holds our hands while exposing the truth that we need to hear. Whether it’s the truth about the institutionalised ferocity of fatphobia, body shaming, misogyny, racism or the pedestals that we put individuals like her on, only to drag them down and through the mud as soon as they show even the slightest of flaws or weaknesses. The beauty of Jameela is that she asks us to hold her hand in response, to show her where she can learn more; she is not simply preaching, but looking for a reciprocal exchange of learning and understanding.
Jameela Jamil is unafraid to be human, and although she may look like a Goddess (red carpet ready or not), she is not trying to be anything other than her most real self, for which many of her fans including myself are profoundly grateful. And if we could all follow her example, who might we be today, tomorrow and for the rest of our lives?
Check out Jameela’s podcast and platform I Weigh
Follow her on Twitter and Instagram for a glorious counter to toxic media narratives about celebrity women
Check out her Red Table Talk with the Smith women, where Jameela gives watchers a wonderfully real, vulnerable and hilarious insight into her life and character
