Jameela Jamil interview: Actress and body image advocate on her Australian tour, ageing and beauty standards
Jameela Jamil is giving herself permission to age.
The actress and body image advocate tells 9honey she has sworn off the invasive anti-ageing procedures that permeate her industry.
“I never want to have surgery,” the 39-year-old says.
“I never want to erase the experience on my face. My face looks older than it did 10 years ago and I’m grateful that I’ve been alive 10 years longer than I thought I would.”
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Jamil said she feels “very, very sad” the current beauty standard expects women to “look young forever”.
She believes the fixation on being thin and young causes women to lose focus on achieving their dreams and she, for one, almost didn’t survive it.
“I’m not going to judge anyone. I’m lucky to be one of the people who survived and recovered, but at the same time, I didn’t know anything,” she says of her past battle with an eating disorder and mental ill health.
“I didn’t have access to the mass education we’ve been given … the danger of filler. Filler doesn’t go away after a decade.”
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She wants to challenge women’s tendency for “obedience” in the face of such impossible beauty standards.
“I want us to recognise that when we feel a call to make ourselves try to look 19 or 21 forever, we are being obedient,” she says.
“We need to challenge that obedience in ourselves because it’s beaten into us. And when we start to look at it as obedience, I think that will make us want to rile against it.”
When it comes to social media, Jamil admits it’s complicated.
On the one hand, social media has taken the impossible beauty standards projected to women around the world via magazines and placed them in our hands 24/7 via smart phones.
“I think for me, I just try to create safe space pockets, that’s what I try to do,” she says.
“I’m not gonna be able to take on the toxicity of the internet But what I can do is create a safe space where everyone openly discusses how they feel.”
When it comes to protecting younger women from such harm, Jamil warns against preaching to them.
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“What I learned that through my own advocacy … I was piling out all of my thoughts and feelings at everyone. It came across as creepy,” she says.
These days, she starts by questioning the system, and nudging younger women to begin questioning it themselves.
“The way to help a teenager dismantle the system of bulls–t is to just ask them, ‘Why do you think that? And why do you want to be so skinny? And where does that come from? And why do you feel this way about yourself?’
“‘Would you tell a friend they should feel this way about themselves? You’d tell a friend that they don’t deserve friends or they don’t deserve love, or they shouldn’t be in a photograph because they’re not skinny? So why do you say those things to yourself?’
“I stopped speaking and I started asking, and that’s when I started to really make an impact in this work,” she says.
For her upcoming Australian speaking tour An Evening with Jameela Jamil, she says she plans to pose “big questions” similar to those she poses on her Substack ‘Low Desire to Please’ in which she discusses all the issues important to her.
She borrowed the title of her Substack from a dog trainer who tried, and failed, to train her Barold.
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He told Jamil her pet had a “low desire to please”.
“I was like, ‘That is my mantra for the rest of my life.’ I have a low desire to please. And so that’s what you will see from this tour,” she says.
Jamil revels in the fact she is a rare breed of ‘un-cancellable’ celebrity, owing to her “very unfiltered” advocacy.
“I feel the most myself I’ve ever been,” she says, adding that her speaking tour is going to be “very raw, very unfiltered, very disobedient and very encouraging of mass disobedience, specifically women”.
“I think what I want us to understand is that so much of what we believe and so much of how we behave and so much of the ways that we reduce ourselves, not just physically, but we reduce ourselves intellectually in ways that we don’t ever even recognise sometimes.
“I want to know why. And I want them to question why. And I want us to break out of it together.
“I don’t want this to be this sad sob story about the state of the world’s women. I want this to be a fun celebration.”
If you or someone you know is in need of body image support contact The Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673.
Book your tickets to Jameela Jamil’s Australian speaking tour here.
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