Jameela Jamil, self-described “feminist-in-progress,” wants you to know she’s officially done being interviewed by women — at least in print. In a lengthy Substack post titled “I think I’m done with being interviewed by women. Specifically in print”, Jamil details why the Sunday Times’ recent profile of her was, in her words, the “final straw.”

“Where I speak freely,” she wrote, “they can liberally pepper or smother the piece with their assumptions, interpretations, insecurities and projections.” The culprit? An article by journalist Liz Edwards that, in Jamil’s view, read more like a “cheap, bitchy Daily Mail blog” than a meaningful profile.

And she had receipts — or, at least, audio. Jamil says she recorded the entire interview, which was pitched as a thoughtful conversation about grief, misogyny, beauty standards, and advocacy. But when the piece dropped earlier this month, she claims nearly half of it was devoted to chronicling her perceived contradictions and controversies — and not the productive parts of her platform. “She compressed 17 years of the natural hairy ebbs and flows that come with being a scrappy, open, outspoken woman… into the opening SIX paragraphs,” Jamil wrote.

If you’ve followed Jamil’s media career, the beats of her frustration will sound familiar. There’s the time she was accused of Munchausen syndrome by a podcast producer. Or the years she spent fielding criticism for using her platform to talk about body image, while also being conventionally attractive. This time, though, her response hit a new note: she’s out — at least when it comes to interviews with women journalists.

Jamil insists her frustration isn’t about gender bias (or, at least, not hers). “I love being interviewed by women… But my trust has been broken for the last time,” she wrote, before praising a short list of journalists she believes got it right. The rest, she said, came with an “agenda,” and a tendency to use the profile as an excuse to humble, interrogate, or outright undermine her.

“They don’t scrutinize the systems I expose. They only scrutinize me,” she wrote. “What is my motive? I am a woman. I must have a motive.”

The irony, of course, is rich. Jamil has built her reputation on centering feminist causes — abortion access, fatphobia, domestic violence — and challenging systemic misogyny in media. But in painting women journalists with such a broad and scathing, brush, she inadvertently echoes a familiar trope: the woman who trusts men more because they’re less “emotional.” Or in Jamil’s case, because they ask about ideas, not character.

To her credit, she doesn’t shy away from naming the structures she believes are to blame. “The male-owned media is funded by the very male-owned companies that prey upon women,” she wrote. “What a patriarchal masterpiece.” But by attributing the “dirty work” of media misogyny to “spineless women” and “double agents for the patriarchy,” she seems to flatten a much more complex — and frankly, fraught — dynamic in journalism.

Her frustration is understandable — to a point. The Sunday Times profile did, at times, read like a character sketch padded with SEO bait: the $6.4 million house, the designer loafers, the requisite Meghan Markle mention (which Jamil claims she shut down in under 90 seconds). But those details aren’t thrown in for color; they’re there because they drive search traffic in an industry gutted by AI and hemorrhaging ad revenue. Writers today are tasked with both reporting and rescuing pageviews. That doesn’t excuse lazy framing — and yes, describing Jamil’s polite boundary-setting as her “claws retracting” was a textbook example of cringey, 1980s tabloidese — but it does complicate her sweeping indictment of every woman with a byline. It’s also worth noting that for many publications, there are other hands that touch the article before it goes live — some that might be, surprise! Male editor hands.

Because while Jamil’s critique of media sexism is, in many ways, accurate — female celebrities are more likely to be reduced to contradictions, wardrobe choices, and the perceived audacity of having opinions — the solution cannot be to withdraw support from women wholesale. Her blanket claim that male journalists have treated her more fairly, and her labeling of female reporters as “double agents for the patriarchy” doing “dirty work” for a “paycheck and a pat on the head,” is not just hyperbolic — it’s disheartening. It frames women in media as saboteurs rather than survivors of the same deeply flawed ecosystem she’s describing.

There’s also the question of power. Jamil isn’t a powerless figure being taken down by legacy media. She’s a public person with a platform of nearly seven million followers across social media, a history of policy advocacy, and the resources to publish a 3,000-word rebuttal on Substack with her own receipts. That she feels misrepresented is valid. That she sees the press as complicit in systemic misogyny is worth exploring. But when the response becomes scorched earth — “I think I’m done being interviewed by women” — it misses the mark.

That absolutist stance risks silencing the very nuance she says she’s been denied. To be clear, not every female journalist is out to tear women down. Some are just trying to do their job in a shrinking industry, writing for outlets that expect them to be thoughtful, SEO-savvy, and news-cycle relevant — all while underpaid and under-resourced. Critique the system? Absolutely. Dismantle it if you can. But alienating fellow women in media while claiming to champion all women feels, well, like a contradiction.

Jamil ends her Substack with a vow: “I will never be quiet. I will never stop trying to uplift women.” It’s a bold statement, and one she’s earned in many ways. But the hope is that next time, “women” includes the ones holding the pen, too.

Before you go, click here for more celebrities who’ve spoken out about being body-shamed.