
Jameela Jamil has succinctly explained a phenomenon we've watched play out in front of our eyes for decades.
"Discredit is the new death. When a woman steps up and speaks out, she’s taken out of context, compulsively over exposed, her tone is exaggerated by media to look hysterical and violent, her integrity is questioned and society tries to slander her into silence. Every single time," the actor and activist wrote earlier this year.
She was talking about her own experience. Slowly but surely, she'd been watching the media turn the public against her.
She explains the process as so:
First, the tabloids build a woman up to an expectation she can't meet. They hyperbolise how great she is so that others will start to feel annoyed that her talent or skill or body is being exaggerated.
Then they start to associate this with her somehow having a big head, even though she's not writing the articles herself.
Then she's hyper-exposed, her face appears daily under increasingly negative headlines so people get sick of her, and think she's 'selling' herself to the papers, desperate for attention.
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