Chapter 1: What does Jameela Jamil believe about pleasure and happiness?
I really enjoy the job that I have the privilege of doing, but I also have a tremendous balance. And I care about nothing more than my happiness. I care about nothing more than pleasure. And I feel as though there's been such a war on women's pleasure in particular. It's considered this privilege, not a right.
You know, that's why in the chocolate adverts from when we were growing up, the woman has like an orgasm from eating a bite of chocolate because she can't believe. Yeah, but she can't believe she's like, oh, something nice for the day. Yeah.
Shamila Jamil. Hello. Welcome to Reclaiming. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's so nice to meet you. When I was thinking about, it's like, oh, we've been connected on social media, but we haven't actually met.
Yeah, it was years and years ago, right? I think we would have messaged...
yeah each other like pre-pandemic maybe oh i'm sure it was yeah absolutely and then you've got we have mutual friends but in beanie feldstein yes and scarlett curtis yeah yes i love them yeah me too me too well i mean i i had the You can correct me if I'm wrong and we can always cut it. I had the impression you guys were like a little group. No. No. Okay.
No, no, no. Scarlett and I have been friends for a really long time since she was 14. And then I met Beanie because we did a movie together.
Okay.
Okay, because Scarlett and Beanie are close. Very. Right. So I just made the assumption that you guys were.
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Chapter 2: How does Jameela view the importance of friendships versus romantic relationships?
Yeah, no, they're like a decade younger than me. So I'm just like, I'm more of a, I'm the internet's drunk aunt. And I am that in real life as well.
Did you give yourself that name or did somebody? I did.
Yeah. I think it's important just to come out front with how you wish to brand yourself. And I feel as though that felt like a very safe space for me. It felt like something I could live up to.
And also unique. I don't think anybody else has that. No, I agree. I agree.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not trying to hang on to my youth. I'm trying to launch my crone years as early as possible and just get as far away from youth as possible.
Yeah. I mean, there's so much to talk to you about. And I was thinking about when Julia Fox was on, she was talking a little about how She lives with friends of hers and her son, but she didn't talk about it necessarily as this like communal living, right? Which I think is what you're doing.
I was doing for the last 10 years. We've taken a kind of brief respite, but the plan is to get back to communal living as fast as possible. Everyone's just working out their logistics and saving up for a home and we're going to buy land together and actually do it properly as like a commune that I'm going to call Jamilville because I'm a maniac.
Okay.
And because I think it sounds funny.
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Chapter 3: What experiences shaped Jameela's perspective on life and fulfillment?
It was five.
It will be probably more like 20, I imagine, or so. And I don't plan on us, you know, we're not all going to be fucking or anything. It's not going to be a cult. It's just going to be more like everyone being near each other, helping tend to the land together, helping build up a community, making ourselves somewhat independent. and having one another nearby.
Really being able to actually love thy neighbor and being able to fraternize if and when we feel like it, but mostly just having a village. We don't have villages anymore, especially not in the West. I grew up largely in Spain in my childhood and the way they raise children there is completely different. The way that they live is completely different.
Everyone's like 20 minutes walking distance from each other. And the teenagers help with the kids and that's very normalized. And children don't go to bed at six or seven and the parents don't stop their lives at 7 p.m. There's wine in the children's parks for the parents to be able to enjoy socializing. The children go to sleep whenever.
Maybe that would help solve shit in our country. Yeah, I'm telling you. I'm telling you.
And also I would go to bed. in whatever restaurant my parents were eating. So you'd fall asleep on the chair or on their lap or on the floor, whatever you have to do. And it's just normal to have children just flopped all over the place. And so therefore you learn how to act in a restaurant by the time you're two years old, you know how to behave.
This coddling, isolated, spousal, disappearing off away from all of your friends and your community, which then means that you expect everything out of one partner. I think it's crippling relationships and I think it's crippling society. It's really suffocating.
It's interesting. Esther Perel had a great line about, I won't quote it exactly, but from one of her TED Talks where she was saying how that we look to our partners to be everything, that they're somehow supposed to know everything about us and we're supposed to still be mysterious. And that's actually not possible.
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Chapter 4: How does communal living influence Jameela's approach to connection?
No, it's not possible and it's not healthy and it's quite boring. And I think it makes people grow sick of each other. I think it's really important that my partner, I've been with my boyfriend for 11 years, that we have very separate interests. We actually actively glaze over certain things that the other one is interested in.
And then there's someone else to go and enjoy that thing with and indulge in that thing with. So you get a bit of space, not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally. I think it would be creepy to expect everything I get, especially from my girlfriends, to find that in just one person. My friendships are...
paramount to my existence and I never ever let that slip when I started entering into a serious relationship because I think it's imperative you hang on to that relationships can come and go and they are also dependent on someone wanting to see your genitals whereas your friends largely don't and so therefore you have a friendship that is only dependent on your character not your ability to be attractive to another person yeah
So I think friendships are far more important to invest in than romantic relationships even. That is just my personal opinion. You should invest in both, but your friendship should not be going by the wayside for love because love is very, very, it's not guaranteed. It's transient.
Yeah.
Well, I also, I think too, there's, I mean, well, actually I should ask you, have you always felt that way? Yes. Okay. Because I think for me, I think that I naively really thought and wanted a kind of partner husband who- You pour into. That would be my best friend, that would be that everything. And at 52 and not having been married and having these incredible relationships
intimate relationships with my friends you know and that emotional intimacy I think also that you're talking about is so fulfilling that I see what you're saying but I didn't get that when I was younger well we're not conditioned to we're conditioned to pour everything into your your husband and then your children and that's it and then maybe after that your parents because fuck knows your brothers aren't expected to do it
So as a woman, you are just expected to pour outwards. And when you pour outwards towards girlfriends, you are more likely to get something back. And I love my boyfriend and he is my best friend, but there's a specific magical bond that women have with each other that I'm so sad that so many men in the West in particular don't have.
I don't think it's men worldwide, because when I look at men in the Middle East, for example, they face each other, they kiss each other on the cheek, they're very tactile, they're very emotionally invested. I'm not saying they have a perfect culture, but I'm just saying that the friendships between men, there is a real sense of brotherhood over there.
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Chapter 5: What role does capitalism play in shaping societal expectations?
Men atrophy after middle age and they allow their friendships to... to dissipate and they're expecting, well, my wife will have friends and I'll just make friends with the husband of whichever friend of hers I get along with. And they lose their own sense of stability and then they lose their sense of self.
A lot of what we're talking about is sort of reflective of a more heteronormative culture, right? Do you think some of that comes from the shifting that's happened in society around men and kind of an emotional learning, I think, that's happened? Or an opening up to men are beginning to be more, I can't think of the right word. It's like emotional intelligence.
But that there's also, I look at my brother who's a dad as compared to when my dad was
was raising us you know that my brother not saying my dad didn't want to but my brother not only wanted to but is expected to be way more involved as a dad than i think the boomer generation dads were so do you think that some of that is the generational change that's happening and we're just happen to be in the middle of it so they haven't figured out
No. Okay. No, I think men have been misguided by patriarchy to think that there is no reason to live other than you work and then you raise a family, even if you don't really spend much time raising that family. It's just like you provide and you protect and you go out and have a job. I don't think men have really been instilled with much meaning by patriarchy.
I don't think they've been encouraged to enjoy their lives, enjoy their friendships, indulge in pleasure. very much. It's all just like a quick wank on Pornhub, a quick outlet like that. It's a quick burst of release everywhere. But men aren't encouraged to have any softness whatsoever and to really make memories of their own. They're not encouraged to really spend that much time with their kids.
that you know this idea that it's changing it is changing it's changing what it was changing and now we're swinging back to a culture where we don't want women to work and we want women back in the home and and what happens when we do that is that then the woman spends all the time with the kids and the woman grows the bond with the kids and you're the fucking guy that checks in and checks out like you're off before they wake up for school and you're they're in bed by the time you get home this is not going to work out for men the direction in which we're going um and so i do think that
I personally think, you know, just to be fully... It's all capitalism based. I think that you... I think we are a culture that deliberately pushes isolation because isolation makes you more likely to be depressed and being more depressed makes you more likely to consume. I don't know about you, but I've never...
done online shopping when i feel really good and really content and really satisfied i online shop when there's some part of me that feels dissatisfied and uncomfortable or not good enough or lonely and i need a little hit of dopamine i am i i don't buy anything from i can tell my my bank account tells me how happy i am my uber eats account tells me how happy i am
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Chapter 6: How does Jameela define a meaningful life in relation to productivity?
And we then have this really unnatural, separated, dystopian society that then we're given pills for and everything's pathologized. But people who feel anxious and depressed in a world in which we are so isolated from each other, in which loneliness is now an epidemic, was an epidemic before the pandemic. Right.
I think the numbers were something like 70% of people within huge bursting populations felt desperately lonely. This was in the Surgeon General of the United States' book, Dr. Vivek Murthy. And so he was reporting this before the now beyond ridiculous shift in the way that we socialize with one another. I really think it's all down towards... I genuinely do. I think it's towards...
making us as unhappy as possible, so we'll buy as much as possible. And I know that that's a really big swing to take, but I don't really give a shit because I think I'm right.
It's interesting. I think it's a strand. I mean, I don't know that it's everything. Yeah. But I think it's, I mean, for me, I think that certainly sounds like a valid argument in terms of part of why it happens. I mean, and I think a layer of it has happened, and we're going to see it again with AI, but from the internet.
So I think it was sort of this technological, you know, invention slash revolution that that we saw the good things, but we didn't actually know where it was going to go. We didn't actually know how it was going to blossom.
We did have lots of warnings, though. We were warned like two or three years ago that 100 million jobs would go within five years.
Right, but that's what I mean.
And then we kept on using it to write our work emails and be our therapists.
Right, but that's what I mean where we are going with AI. And I think with the internet, I don't think we saw... I don't know. I mean, I think from the outside, in terms of social media, it leaned more towards a positive than a negative, right?
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Chapter 7: What insights does Jameela share about body image and societal standards?
It is. I'm sure in some other timeline, they just sort of cross over and go, not that, not Earth, not this dimension, not third dimension. No, thank you. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I feel like there are both with the internet and I think where we're going with AI, which is going to, which is following the exact same pattern. We didn't retrain people from with the technological revolution.
And I think that's a large part of where, how we ended up where we are today. Right. People don't have purpose. They don't. And I think that's, I think that's almost the most dangerous thing is when people don't have purpose.
It's going to be really scary when, you know, especially in a country like the United States of America, people's entire identity has been tied to their work. Often, you know, I don't know if this is outside of California, but wherever I go, the first thing I'm asked is always, what do I do? It's supposed to be such a defining part of culture.
And so when you take that away from people, you just pull the rug from under their feet. They haven't developed their hobbies. They haven't had time to develop their hobbies. They don't know where they want to go. Yeah. You know, there was a whole period of thousands of years in which we didn't have a place to clock in and clock out. We had personalities and identities and passions.
And so I think the other side of that might be really beautiful. But in the meantime, there's going to be a huge mental health crisis where...
And we haven't even really addressed the one that emerged from the pandemic. Yeah. So I agree. I mean, it's... It's existential.
It is.
It will be.
It will be really, really crazy.
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Chapter 8: What is Jameela's vision for empowering women and men in society?
And I think I started pre-preparing for that years ago, the fact that I need to distance myself from my... career as my identity and really start building up who I want to be because this shit's all going away. And so I've been very, very focused in what the next chapter of my life looks like.
And it's very much so not, you know, I was coming up through the girl boss era and being turned into the face of a girl boss era. whilst being someone who really hates working. So being really confused by that. And so I really enjoy the job that I have the privilege of doing, but I also have a tremendous balance and I care about nothing more than my happiness. about nothing more than pleasure.
And I feel as though there's been such a war on women's pleasure in particular. It's considered this privilege, not a right. That's why in the chocolate adverts from when we were growing up, the woman has an orgasm from eating a bite of chocolate because she can't believe. Yeah, but she can't believe she's like, oh, something nice for the day.
And so I believe that pleasure should be my main focus in life. And that's everything that I
am gunning towards and i i'm not going to find that always within this system yeah unpack for me what pleasure is for you so it's like what what's underneath pleasure do you know what i mean like is that is that your your soul's expression is that feeling like Does that make sense, this question? Yeah, of course.
Pleasure for me personally, and I think it's completely different for everyone, but ultimately it's peace. Ultimately, peace is pleasurable, but also delicious food, treating my body kindly, not denying myself, not starving, not masking, obedience as discipline, It means spending time with my loved ones.
It means laughing a lot, like belly laughing every single day, spending time with my animals, spending time with my boyfriend, orgasms, seeing beautiful things.
I was raised to believe that there is this sort of point system, and it's ironic that I made The Good Place, which is actually a show about the point system, that you believe that we're raised, especially if you're raised religiously, to believe that Well, life is just the bit that you get through and you do as well as you can because the afterlife is going to be so great.
And I stopped really feeling confident about an afterlife in my teens. And so after that, I started to think... I don't think I want to live my life for this utopian guarantee. It's a gamble. It's a lottery. And I had a near-death experience when I was 15, I think. I had meningitis. And I don't know, man. Who am I to say? But I didn't see shit. And I think that's what...
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