Meghan Markle’s Podcast Is Fluffy 'Feminism'

The Don't Buy List: Issue #35

Hello, dewy dust bunnies, and welcome to another edition of the The Don’t Buy List! Meghan, Duchess of Sussex has a new podcast out — Archetypes with Meghan — and it’s exactly the kind of fluffy, feel-good “feminist” project that I personally find to be ineffective, apolitical, embarrassing, and yet! absolutely enthralling. I can’t stop reading about it! I can’t stop listening!

According to its tagline, the show is meant to “investigate, dissect, and subvert the labels that try to hold women back.” I’m gonna ignore the anthropomorphizing of the word “labels” there — labels don’t “try to hold women back”; people do — and dive right into Episode One, in which Meghan is joined by tennis phenom Serena Williams. The friends spend 30 minutes discussing the label ambitious (“according to some … ambition is a terrible, terrible thing for a woman,” Meghan says) and debating whether or not Serena is fearless (no; she is “scared of the sea”). Then this happens:

Meghan: I didn’t have time to get my hair done so I was like, I’ll just put this [baseball cap] on.

Serena: Thank God this is a podcast!

Meghan: I know, right?

Serena: My eyes are swelling from my flight!

Meghan: Literally.

Serena: I’m like, Oh my god! What’s wrong with my face?

Ah, yes. Because women aren’t fit to be seen unless they’ve first wrestled their hair, skin, and lymphatic fluid into submission!

It’s a little thing, and I don’t mean this as an indictment of Meghan or Serena or anyone in particular. The fact that this made it into a podcast about “ripping apart the boxes women have been placed into for generations” would be laughable if it weren’t so typical. The fact that Meghan and her editing team didn’t think to question the sexist, racist standards of “presentability” on a podcast about questioning sexist, racist standards is a testament to our collective case of Beauty Culture Brain. And this is why I go on and on and on about beauty culture! Because it’s everywhere — even our most palatably feminist podcasts — and we barely notice.

For instance: Every episode of Archetypes features an ad from Pure Leaf Tea declaring that “saying no” is “a superpower” and that “no is beautiful.”

😩😩😩😩😩

It is not superhuman to say “no”!! It is a nice, normal thing that human beings sometimes do! It is not “beautiful” to say no, either! It is important, though, and because beauty culture conditions us to believe that beautiful is the most important thing one can be, brands and citizens alike end up insisting that all important things — saying “no,” for example, or just having a body — are “beautiful.” It’s like that’s the only way we know to signal their importance or something?? (I think this may be the best example of the totalitarianism of beauty culture I’ve come across yet.)

Anyway!

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