Written by Amy Beecham

Actor and campaigner Jameela Jamil shared her own experience of tabloid body shaming on the Guardian’s Pop Culture With Chanté Joseph podcast.    

Content warning: contains mention of eating disorders and anorexia.

Jameela Jamil isn’t one to hold back when it comes to calling out toxic diet culture. After founding her I Weigh movement in 2018, the actor has become a vocal activist and ally within the anti-diet, body positive community, calling out everyone from celebrities peddling detox teas to tabloids exploiting women’s images (including as Stylist’s guest editor in 2019).

Now, appearing on the Guardian’s Pop Culture With Chanté Joseph podcast, Jamil once again took aim at the unrealistic and unhealthy beauty standards imposed on women after a now viral article by the New York Post declared: “Bye bye booty: heroin chic is back”. 

“No, we tried this before inthe 90s and millions of people developed eating disorders,” Jamil told host Chanté Joseph in response. “I had one for 20 years. We’re not doing this again, we’re not going back.”

‘Heroin chic’, a phrase characterised by pale skin, emaciated features and an extremely thin physique, was popularised in the early 1990s fashion industry, with its seeming return linked to the revival of Y2K trends across social media platforms like TikTok.

In the episode, Jamil recalled her own experience of this time, including being weighed alongside her classmates and compared by their teacher.

“We weren’t aware of our bodies yet, no one was pulling in their tummies and we were so innocent, but we all got weighed and she put our names on a chart like a leaderboard,” she said. “I weighed the most because I was the tallest and the biggest, and I was immediately made fun of. It was so quick, even as kids, for us to realise that there was a hierarchy and that that hierarchy involves thinness and how little space you take up.”

Later on, as she began her career in TV and media, Jamil said that she was often photoshopped without her consent during magazine shoots, as well as being hounded by paparazzi photographers looking to take ‘unflattering’ photos of her after she gained weight.

On the return of terms like heroin chic, Jamil said it was undoing the good work of the body positivity and body neutrality movements. “It can’t be about beauty because of how many beautiful people exist in different shapes and sizes and bodies and disabilities and non disabilities. This is about control and distraction,” she said.

“It’s a backlash to many people embracing their curves and not buying into the diet industry. But we control the market, we are the market, women in particular. They don’t get to tell us what the trends are. We will tell them what the trends are.”

Elsewhere in the episode, which also featured climate justice campaigner Simmone Ahiaku and blogger and author Stephanie Yeboah, Joseph explained that scrutiny is a heightened experience for Black women, who often find themselves imposed with both body standards and racism.

“Everyone should be able to arrive to a point where they just feel nothing about their bodies,” Yeboah said. “They should see it as a vehicle to take them through life.”

However, she stressed that as long as fatphobia and the demonisation of bigger bodies exists, body neutrality can never be applicable for every single body. 

Images: Getty

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