Jameela Jamil: ‘If you've assaulted a woman, you should just f*** off for a while’
Produced by Rebecca Corey
“Through Her Eyes” is a new weekly half-hour show hosted by human rights activist Zainab Salbi that explores contemporary issues from a female perspective. You can watch the full episode of “Through Her Eyes” every Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on Roku, or at the bottom of this article.
Jameela Jamil isn’t ready for prominent disgraced men to be welcomed back after being accused of hurting women.
“I think that we need to stop giving really big, well-paid, highly publicized roles to people who have hurt women, at least for a while. Let’s just take a little break from celebrating people who hurt women,” the actress told the Yahoo News show “Through Her Eyes” about the #MeToo movement and the possibility of redemption for celebrities.
Jamil, who stars in the NBC show “The Good Place,” was blunt in her assessment.
“I think that would be a great message for boys and for girls to see that we’re taking this seriously,” she continued. “And I would like to hope that we don’t allow racists and bigots to have big parts in Hollywood movies. So therefore, if you’ve assaulted a woman, you should just f*** off for a while.”
As Hollywood culture continues to evolve in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Jamil told “Through Her Eyes,” she is seeing some of these institutional changes trickling into her own career.
“I’m not being cuddled at the end of meetings anymore,” she said.
Jamil, who spoke last week at the Makers Conference, has started a new campaign on Instagram called #IWeigh, which encourages women to appreciate the aspects of their lives that bring them value and happiness beyond numbers on a scale. And she isn’t shy about taking on celebrities who are sending less positive messages to women about their bodies. Notably, last year she called the Kardashians “double agent[s] of the patriarchy.”
“A double agent for the patriarchy is someone who perhaps unknowingly is selling a rhetoric that the patriarchy benefits from us believing in,” she explained to “Through Her Eyes.”
“And so if you tell women that they should worry about their weight and their looks all the time, you are unfortunately recycling that patriarchal narrative that made you feel that about yourselves.”
But Jamil said the blame doesn’t entirely lie with celebrities like the Kardashians. She said the Kardashians — like so many women in the public eye — have been forced by the media into being “obsessed” with their bodies.
“They explicitly and blatantly, not even in a subliminal way, fat-shamed the Kardashians into now being obsessed with their aesthetic,” she said of the media.
Jamil told “Through Her Eyes” that she can also be susceptible to negative messaging about women’s bodies, and that her ally against these insecurities is her boyfriend, singer-songwriter James Blake, whom Jamil described as a “good feminist.”
“He’s an ally, and he is very dedicated to the equal rights of women,” Jamil said. “And he’s very good at supporting me when I falter, when it comes to believing in myself, and pushing for me to ask for more when I deserve more.”
“I’ve never had a champion like this, and so that’s been really cool.”
