Photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images for The New York Times
To all the female journalists hoping to score a big interview with Jameela Jamil, I regret to inform you that that ship has sailed. The actress-podcaster-presenter bid au revoir to women reporters in an extraordinarily long Substack post titled, “I think I’m done with being interviewed by women.” According to Jamil, her “trust has been broken” following a recent profile of her in the Sunday Times by Liz Edwards that she thought “read like a cheap, bitchy, Daily Mail blog, written by a student desperate to get clicks to keep their job.”
Jamil, who is now perhaps more well-known as a vocal, body-positive feminist than as an actor, wrote that of the “hundreds of women” who have interviewed her over the course of her 17-year career, only three of them have written about her fairly. “The others turned up with a preconceived idea of who I was, having never met me, or even known anyone who knows me,” Jamil wrote, unknowingly describing the majority of all journalist–celebrity interactions. These women apparently came to Jamil with “an angle,” which was not “designed to actually uplift the audience, but to instead tear down or embarrass the woman trying and hoping to uplift the audience.” The issue here might be that Jamil is one of the few people in the world who clicks on a celebrity profile hoping to be “uplifted” by the opinions of a famous person.
To her credit, the offending Sunday Times profile does not paint Jamil in an amazing light. It has a headline meant to generate attention (“Jameela Jamil: ‘I stood up for Meghan long before I met her’”) and opens by rehashing some of her wildest tweets (which she did, in fact, write of her own free will). The story then lists all of the various medical issues she’s said she’s endured throughout her life, and when asked about the claims that she might have fabricated some of them in order to clarify, Jamil dodged, saying, “Foolishness is something we should discourage in the media.” It’s not until almost the end of the profile that you realize what she’s even promoting, an upcoming Pixar movie and a new podcast in which she and her guests discuss embarrassing moments.
Jamil’s argument is that when she is interviewed by women, they ask her to prove herself. “They want to interview me about feminism they say, but they rarely explore my actual thoughts and ideas about our collective experience, but more seek to interrogate my character, why I have a right to speak when I have privilege, why I care, hyper fixate on my fairly innocuous mistakes compared to most men in my industry, and force me to justify why anyone should take me seriously,” she wrote. She is upset that despite all of her “frankly prominent” work advocating for women, writers of her very same gender have the gall to drudge up her past and situate her within the context of her own past.
“I hate to say it, but male journalists have always given me a fair shot,” Jamil wrote. “Men do seem at large more interested in actually exploring and challenging my ideas, rather than demanding my credibility to have ideas in the first place.”
To all the young women currently in J-school, don’t worry! Jamil, who herself interviews people on her podcasts, has figured it out for you — she’s willing to share her wisdom. “As an interviewer I start with where someone is at now, how they arrived there, including the hairy moments, and then I end on what positive thing they have recycled that into that will nourish or help my audience,” she wrote, echoing David Frost, I believe. “I don’t just try to embarrass them, and guide the audience to start thinking of them as insufferable and then try to flimsily pull them back in with strategically unrelatable throw away lines and quips.”
Jamil goes on to say that when men are interviewed, they are not subjected to any scrutiny at all. “We don’t seek to humble or embarrass them from the jump. We don’t open articles with paragraph upon paragraph of their controversies. Even if there are illegal/violent allegations made about them.” This is, according to her, a problem that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. “ADAM WAS A GROWN MAN WITH HAIR ON HIS BALLS WHO ATE THAT FUCKING APPLE,” she wrote, “STOP EMASCULATING ADAM. DAMN.”
Right on, sister. Jamil wraps up by saying that she will “never stop trying to uplift women.” That is, of course, unless they’re a bitch with a recorder. “I sometimes, more charitably wonder if female journalists hyper focus on my mistakes and flaws because they’re so constricted by their own, or fear of making some, that they can’t believe I dare still stand after breaking the rule of being perfect, liked, believed and approved of by everyone.” Ugh, damn, she got us.
Jamil is actually too self-actualized for all those pea-brained women journalists, who are mostly jealous of how free she is. It’s not that they think it’s funny that she once said she hoped her fellow celebs shit themselves from drinking detox tea, or that they’re trying to examine the self-aggrandizing and abrasive version of feminism she’s peddling.
In the comments of her post, Jamil provided a brief follow-up. “For whatever it’s worth. We contacted her,” she wrote, referring to Edwards, “Told her how I felt. No apology, no retraction. No action. Humanity is worth less than clicks bait [sic] I guess.” She may not want to talk to female journalists anymore, but maybe she could consider a female editor?
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