Jameela Jamil wants to “put airbrushing in the bin.”
“I want it gone. I want it out of here,” the “Good Place” star wrote in a recent essay for BBC.
Photoshopping should be illegal because it has been “weaponized” against women to promote damaging beauty standards, the British actress wrote. The tool, which is often used to make women look thinner, younger and lighter-skinned, “is responsible for so many more problems than we realise,” she wrote.
It exists to sell a fantasy to the consumer that this ‘perfection’ is indeed possible. If you have yet to achieve this beauty standard, it tells you, you should buy some expensive products immediately, because then you will look like the person in the photo. (But, as I said just a moment ago, you won’t.)
Jamil has been on a crusade to dismantle body-shaming in the entertainment industry. Earlier this year, she created an Instagram account called “I Weigh,” which celebrates body positivity and self-worth. Most recently, she called out Khloe Kardashian and Cardi B for promoting detox tea.
She added that when women’s features are Photoshopped, we are essentially “legitimising the patriarchy’s absurd aesthetic standards.”
In contrast, Jamil wrote, men are celebrated as “rugged” when they have wrinkles, and don’t have to endure the tight, often revealing clothing that women are expected to wear on magazine cover shoots.
“It is anti-feminist. It is ageist. It is fat-phobic. It looks weird. It looks wrong. It’s robbing you of your time, money, comfort, integrity and self worth,” Jamil wrote of airbrushing. “Delete the apps and unfollow those who are complicit in this crime against our gender.”
Head over to BBC to read Jamil’s full essay.