First, I apologize for all the emails you will get from me this week. I accidentally posted one yesterday afternoon that was supposed to be scheduled in August. I guess we are definitely in the Mercury Retrograde’s shadow. *sigh*
I follow Jameela Jamil on Instagram. She played Tahani on The Good Place. I like her a lot. She is outspoken and not afraid to push back against culture. For the past decade or so she has focused on weight issues and brought a lot of awareness to eating disorders. Many people do not like her because of how outspoken she is. Like her or not - she brings a lot of attention to whatever she is focused on in the moment. Her new focus seems to be how women treat each other. I happened across her Substack post about how she was being treated by female interviewers when the interview was in written form. She makes a point to say this does not happen to her when the interview is a video or audio recording, only when the interview will be published in written word. I highly recommend that you read her post. She is really funny and she does a great job of explaining what happens. The very short version is that female interviewers, more than male interviewers, will take apart what she says and print it without any context and the picture they paint of her is not only not accurate, but is intended to discredit her. She says these interviewers are more concerned with whether they believe she is worthy of the message she is putting out there or whatever she is talking about - the work she is doing. And this is important because the reason why this cultural programming keeps working is because it has created a system where we police each other and keep each other in “our places”. You can see this in the comment section of almost every video or picture online where a woman might be feeling good about herself or is proud of herself (especially if she is in any minority group or is not the current ideal of thinness - but even then, she isn’t safe). There will be other women who tear her down for things that are either completely untrue or are completely irrelevant to whatever the picture or video is about. Just like how employers can require women to be attractive as part of their job requirements, women will require that other women be the right level of attractive to talk about whatever we want to talk about. They hold us to the standard that if we are not attractive enough, then we don’t have a worthy message or we are not worthy enough to talk about it.1 Please do read Jameela’s post about the problem. She does a much better job than I can and she talks about how tenacious she is when she has a bone to chew. We all need to be more like this, in our own way.
Remember a few weeks ago I said we needed to see ourselves and each other differently in order to see the world change and take us seriously. This is an example and an action item for creating that change. We need to stop telling stories about Other Women. We need to stop defining Other Women as a dangerous threat to us.
We also need to take a page out of Jameela’s book and take the risk to change the narrative. Now, not all of us will do that on a public forum like she does. But there is a big risk in standing up to our friends and our family. There is a big risk in doing things differently. Jameela says, and she is right, that after awhile you become immune to the fear and the risk because you have built up enough evidence that your fear isn’t going to happen and even if it does, you have survived it or worse before, so you will survive this too. She posted a video about her Substack and the backlash on Instagram. She also did a series of slides in her stories that don’t appear to have been saved and posted anywhere, but I may be wrong and maybe you will find them.
I will leave you with a screenshot I took one of one her stories about the backlash. That last paragraph is everything. And when she says boycotting, she isn’t talking about everyone agreeing not to shop at Target or Walmart for a whole day. She means stop following, subscribing and talking about the “bad people”. Our attention is currency in this culture and these bad people make an obscene amount of money from every nano second of attention we give them.
But definitely don’t be too attractive. Then you still don’t know what you are talking about, you are still stupid and on top of it, you are a slut.