Jameela Jamil takes aim at Hollywood’s beauty standards in a fiery Substack and radio interview, criticizing Ozempic culture, facelifts, and what she calls the infantilization of women. The timing could not be more significant.
In a blistering post published Monday on her Substack amid the release of the Epstein files and “the powerful men in media and fashion” considered accomplices, actor and activist Jameela Jamil declared the end of what she calls a brief cultural reprieve from body shaming. “I am writing to you from the funeral of a short lived trend called ‘The Body Positivity movement.’” The post reads like a manifesto.
The Substack comes days after an interview with W!ZARD Radio Media, where The Good Place star sharpened her critique of Hollywood’s beauty arms race, saying, “I’m very exhausted by how obedient a lot of the women in my industry are being at the moment — so obedient, so compliant. All the facelifts, all the Ozempic, all the everything. And this is not like Ozempic for health purposes. This is just to achieve the super, super skinny look. And then, because they’re losing weight too fast, they’re needing to get facelifts, and then they get the facelift, and then they look 19 forever, and then they start to behave like they’re 19.”
For consumers watching timelines flood with before-and-afters, “snatched” transformations, and face-lift speculation threads, Jamil’s anger cuts directly through the algorithm.
Body positivity’s ‘funeral’
In the post, often writing in all caps, Jamil describes body positivity as a fleeting period of relief from public self-loathing. “It was this brief, sort of, manic episode (?) of self sovereignty and respect, in which we had a little holiday from shaming, open bullying, and unrelenting self hatred,” she wrote. The tone is biting, sarcastic, and deliberately unvarnished. She continues: “Women were embracing these things called… thighs. They had more time in the day to focus on fun things, hobbies, work, relationships…etc. They were no longer allowing a weighing scale to dictate whether or not today was allowed to be a good day.”
Jamil argues that the shift did not simply fade; it was actively pushed back by industries threatened by women disengaging from constant self-surveillance. “It was dangerous,” she writes. “People were promoting a lifestyle of having an identity outside of your body shape.”
Her most incendiary claim goes further, suggesting that the pressure for women to remain in a pre-pubescent state is rooted in something darker. “The prescription for grown women to be hairless, smooth, curve-less, and ageless is a response to a pedophile-dominant media/entertainment industry, and they’ve found a smart way to exploit the image of the very young,” she wrote, later stating bluntly, “I really think: pedophilia.”
Jamil connects these standards to decades of imagery that glamorized youth, citing cultural flashpoints like the early sexualization of pop stars. She references the moment “we put that poor, traumatized, extra young looking, 16-year-old Britney Spears in a school girl outfit, on a world stage,” arguing that the normalization of hyper-sexualized girlhood accelerated from there.
Hollywood, Ozempic, and the compliance question
In her W!ZARD Radio Media interview, Jamil turns her frustration toward peers. “All of this is just to make men happy. Ultimately, they think it’s to make them happy, but the conditioning is that we behave like infantilized little girls so that men can feel like big, strong and wise people…I don’t want to be part of it.”
She echoed her Substack’s invocation of “spite” as fuel. “I’m f—g sick of it, and I don’t want to be obedient ever, and I don’t want to be compliant ever. I would like to live a life of spite.”
Her comments arrive amid explosive demand for GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy. According to recent data, since 2020, the number of prescriptions for these drugs has more than tripled, driven not only by diabetes treatment but by weight loss demand. Fifteen percent of women between ages 30 and 49, and 20 percent of women ages 50 to 64 have used GLP-1 drugs, the research noted. The cultural ripple effect has been visible from red carpets to TikTok feeds. Jamil repeatedly returns to purchasing power as the decisive hinge. “We literally just have to stop buying this stuff.”
Jamil has criticized diet culture for years. In 2018, she launched I Weigh, a social media movement encouraging women to measure themselves by achievements and values rather than pounds. She has also called out detox teas and appetite suppressants marketed to young followers, including in public disputes with fellow celebrities. In the interview, she described her colleagues as “so obedient” and “so compliant,” shifting the focus from faceless patriarchy to personal participation. That pivot may alienate some, but it also reframes the conversation for everyday consumers: If even the most visible women feel pressured into surgical escalation, what does that signal to everyone else?
The Substack also devotes significant space to the normalization of cosmetic surgery, particularly facelifts. “Women I know are pre booking their 100-200k facelifts….saving up for them, instead of a house,” she wrote. She also references reports of medical tourism gone wrong, invoking news investigations into botched procedures abroad.
Her outrage extends to the language of “bouncing back” after pregnancy. “Why is it a brag to lose weight straight after pregnancy? After your body has created a human inside?” she asks. “Why is the brag not the baby you made?”
Jamil does not position herself outside aging. “My voice is getting deeper. My fuse shorter. My laugh lines more defined. My knees resemble Donald Trump a little more each day. My wings are flappier. My arse checked out years ago. I am 40 in the next year. I don’t need to look like a girl because I am with a grown man. I want to attract a man who likes women.”
The politics of women’s bodies
While Jamil is taking aim at what she sees as the beauty and compliance economy’s grip on women’s bodies, Gisèle Pelicot’s highly anticipated memoir was published in 22 languages yesterday. In the memoir, A Hymn to Life, Pelicot, 73, lays bare the literal and systemic violence that silences women. Pelicot famously chose to waive her right to anonymity to testify in a landmark 2024 trial in Avignon, France, in which her then-husband and 50 other men were convicted of drugging and raping her over nearly a decade.
Her decision to publicly confront that ordeal — to expose the horrors inflicted on her rather than let shame sequester her story — served as a catalyst for shifting discourse on consent, victimhood, and accountability. In the memoir, Pelicot unfolds her experience, retracing her life from decades of quiet conformity through the traumatic revelations that upended it, and into the emotional work of reclaiming agency and joy. Pelicot has said that her purpose in telling this story was to transform shame into strength.
Speaking ahead of the release, Pelicot told French national television, “I wanted my story to help others,” and described the memoir as “a message of hope to all the women who are going through a very complicated period in their lives.” Olympic champion and survivor advocate Simone Biles underscored Pelicot’s impact in a message shared by the BBC, saying that by refusing to feel shame, Pelicot “paves the way for other victims to come forward.”
Pelicot’s memoir and Jamil’s critique reveals two converging threads in the modern conversation about women and power: one underscores the internalization of standards — the relentless pressure to conform to a narrow, infantilizing notion of beauty — and the other confronts outward violence and silence that cultures have historically imposed on women’s bodies and voices. Pelicot’s choice to share her journey echoes Jamil’s insistence that women’s worth cannot be reduced to surface, youth, or obedience — a resonance that extends beyond Hollywood and into the raw, unfiltered reality of women’s lived experience.
Jamil is noticeably careful to ensure that the argument is not against beauty or adornment. It is against the erasure of womanhood in favor of perpetual girlhood. “All of this shit is coded to say… erase all signs of woman hood. Age, bodyhair, autonomy, motherhood, thighs, creases. Adopt girlhood as the forever norm. Girlhood good. Womanhood bad.”
For readers toggling between Sephora hauls and “preventative Botox” explainers, Jamil’s message is confrontational, but also consumer-focused and unapologetic. “Body Positivity died because not enough people joined the movement out of fear of the consequences of disobedience,” she says. “You can’t beat evil with love. That is a huge misconception. We need to activate our spite. Spite is the most powerful fuel I’ve ever been able to run on.” Pelicot’s reminder is considerably softer, but equally as strong: that the policing of women’s bodies does not exist in a vacuum, and that silence, whether about violence or about coercive beauty norms, has always served someone else.
“Nothing is off the table anymore,” Jamil writes. “Wake up.”
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