“You’re going to see a lot of very thin actresses and models today with perfect hair, clear skin and great teeth,” The Good Place‘s Jameela Jamil tweeted ahead of the 90th Academy Awards today.
“A lot of it is smoke, mirrors and extreme dieting and amazing teams.”
It comes about a week after she launched her “I weigh” campaign in angry response to an Instagram post of the weight of the Kardashian–Jenners, which invited followers to ask if they “looked” like their weight.
“This is how women are taught to value themselves,” she wrote. “In kilograms.”
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she later wrote in a blog post (yes, it’s 2018 and the star of a major TV show has a Tumblr, which is just beautiful tbqh with you). “A group shot of grown women with their respective weights posted across each of their bodies, and the post asking what we think of their weights and then asking its followers, ‘What do you weigh?’”
She says she “snapped”, and posted a photo to her Instagram story with her “weight”: her friends, her activism, her job and her “bingo wings”.
Inspired by her actions, countless women began sending her their own weights. (I say “countless” because only Jameela would have the final numbers here, but it’s been over a week and the posts are still coming.)
She says that “women of every size and shape and age and background sent me their declarations of self love and clapped back at the shame they have been drenched in their whole lives.”
Her blog post about the unrealistic beauty expectations society holds of women – and the ways in which the media, the fashion industry and celebrities themselves are complicit – she gave her own version of the famous Cool Girl rant from Gillian Flynn‘s Gone Girl.
“We lack focus because we are concentrating on the wrong things. Most of the women I know wake up much earlier than men to get ready, and spend much of their time and money on complete nonsense like manicures and pedicures, hair treatments, and waxing. Women bleach their bumholes. THEY BLEACH THEIR BUMHOLES. This is how far we have gone with our pursuit of perfection, that we are no longer satisfied with the natural colour of an area almost nobody in the world will ever see. We have to be thin, but with big breasts and bottoms, gravity free, spotless, hairless, ageless, light skinned but always with a year round sun kissed glow; we must be fun and eat pizza and drink beer but also completely cellulite free and we must all have tiny noses and enormous eyes and lips but with skinny faces, but our skinny faces must never look gaunt and old.”
She specifically called on celebrities to start being honest with how they look the way they look, which isn’t an easy ask of a society that expects women to be almost effortlessly beautiful, but is worthy of asking all the same.
“I hereby MASSIVELY call out celebrities who don’t document what it takes for them to look the way they do. If you have had surgery, say something. If you have a strict diet and workout regime, say something. It is UNFEMINIST to push an image that was created in the fantasy lab of the patriarchy, essentially that of a sex doll, to other women, and pretend that it comes naturally to you, and that junk food and lying down in expensive hotel suites is what keeps you beautiful. You have a platform and have to use it responsibly.”
So yeah – today, at the Oscars, we’re going to see a slew of talented, fierce, brave, yet also impossibly beautiful women walk the red carpet. And if any of that serves to make you feel bad about your appearance in any way, then Jameela Jamil’s blog post is absolutely worth a read.
https://twitter.com/jameelajamil/status/970387541475049472
https://twitter.com/jameelajamil/status/970388256964530176
https://twitter.com/jameelajamil/status/970407449583796224
Side note: I fucking love Jameela Jamil.
