Actress Jameela Jamil wants men to do better.
In the wake of sexual assault
allegations against comedian
Aziz Ansari, Jamil, star of the TV series “The Good Place,” has some advice. In
a post
on her website titled “What We Need to Learn from the Aziz Ansari
Clusterfuck,” Jamil says she has “no right, nor inclination, to
comment,” on the assault allegations against Ansari, and instead focuses
on the concept of consent.
The
Ansari story “has indeed sparked an interesting conversation about
consent, both technical and more importantly, emotional, and how vital
it is to read the room and make sure the other person is not just
willing, but damn well enthusiastic,” Jamil writes. “Especially, in my
opinion, if that person is the one to be penetrated. You want to enter
them. You best ensure you are a welcome guest, not someone who just
begged, pressured, guilt-tripped or harassed their way inside.”
Jamil points to the “bullshit fantasy” of pornography as a main reason men feel they can objectify women.
“We
have allowed pornography to continuously promote that narrative that a
woman is a hole for a man to enjoy when and how he feels like it,” the
British-born actress writes, arguing that the mentality leads to women
finding sex dissatisfying.
“Learning sex from pornography is like learning how to drive from The Fast and the Furious. A terrible idea,” she writes.
Jamil
also places blame on popular culture, and blasts music videos, “where
the girls are always practically naked and performing rehearsed dance
routines for the men, who are sitting there on their arses, sometimes in
outdoor winter layers, doing nothing other than enjoying their needs
being met.”
She
critiques music lyrics as well, which she says have gone from “’Try a
little tenderness,” to
“MURDER THAT PUSSY. BEAT THAT PUSSY UP. PUT THAT
PUSSY IN A TOASTER. SHRED THE PUSSY AND PUT IT IN THE BIN. THROW THE
PUSSY OUT THE WINDOW. FLUSH THE PUSSY DOWN THE TOILET.
″(Poor old pussy having a terrible time.)”
The culture’s message to men, Jamil says, is that they “do not need to worry about what our needs and boundaries are.”
Which is why Jamil argues that mere consent isn’t enough.
“CONSENT
SHOULDN’T BE THE GOLD STANDARD,” she writes. “That should be the basic
foundation. Built upon that foundation should be fun, mutual passion,
equal arousal, interest and enthusiasm.”
Jamil’s response to
babe.net’s story about Ansari — which
Jezebel calls
“amateurish” and says “left the subject open to further attacks” —
echoes the sentiments of some female writers who have raised the story
of a young woman’s crushing experience as an opportunity to discuss what
women have been conditioned to expect in their romantic and sexual
lives.
“If
the #MeToo movement is going to amount to sustained culture change ―
rather than simply a weeding out of the worst actors in a broken system ―
we need to renegotiate the sexual narratives we’ve long accepted,”
wrote HuffPost’s Emma Gray. “And that involves having complicated conversations about sex that is violating but not criminal.”
Jamil
suggests those conversations sometimes need to happen during sex, and
encouraged women to “act in honour of your needs” (that is, she
mentions, as long as one feels safe).
Jamil urges men to step up as well.
“’erm…Ok’ shouldn’t be encouragement enough for you,” she writes. “You can and must do better.”
