Meghan Markle, if she was minded to, could easily corner the erotic ASMR market – that weird bit of the internet in which women breathily relate fictitious experiences with their mouths too close to the microphone for the gratification of lonely nerds everywhere.
It’s impossible to listen to her latest self-glorifying venture into podcasting, Archetypes (get it?), without understanding this is something of which the Duchess herself is keenly aware.
At the outset of the first episode, released on Tuesday, she explains with a deliberately pleasing huskiness how the podcast would be concerned with exploring a ‘dirty, dirty word’.
I don’t mind admitting the way she said the line elicited in me – as no doubt intended, she being a trained actress and all – a dry throated stirring that for a moment seemed to more than make up for the long months I have impatiently waited for the follow-up to the podcast (a masterpiece of woke nonsense) that she and her husband released back in 2020, after signing a $25 million deal with Spotify.
But my excitement was short lived. It turned out, predictably, the word in question was not ‘bottom’ or ‘knickers’ or anything like it – but instead boring old ‘ambition’. Talk about killing the mood.
She says: ‘I don’t ever remember personally feeling the negative connotation behind the word “ambitious” until I started dating my now husband, and, um, apparently ambition is a terrible, terrible thing, for a woman that is, according to some.’
And then we’re off – an hour in which Markle seems very obviously to be either launching a political career or admitting without actually saying what large parts of the British public have long suspected: that she would kill if it meant getting what she wanted. Probably both.
Meghan seems to imbue every syllable she utters with repressed longing and desire.
The photo of herself, too, that she has chosen to accompany the podcast and at which the listener is invited to gaze as she speaks is unapologetically sexy. Shoulders bared and throat exposed, is it too much to say the beautiful royal’s gaze seems suggestive of sexual yearning? Perhaps it is, but there’s no two ways about it: she looks hot.
There’s irony, of course, so huge as to be unignorable, in the podcast’s name. You don’t have to be Jordan Peterson to know that archetypes are archetypes for a reason: human personality types all humanity recognises because over the course of centuries of our evolution as a species we have seen them again and again.
Meghan, it goes without saying, is viewed by many, particularly here in Britain following her fall out with the royal family, as a perfect fit for the archetype of the woman who will stop at nothing to get to where she believes she should be and who is prepared ruthlessly to tread over anything and anyone who stands in her path.
Harry, too, is increasingly viewed as being a fully signed up member of the archetype of the terminally dim and entitled noble, too thick to realise that his wife controls him – a character that has popped up repeatedly in literature for centuries.
Perhaps these descriptions are wildly unfair – who knows what anyone’s really like behind closed doors? – but the theme of Meghan’s podcast seems to be that it’s not the fault of people whose behaviour results in them being bracketed within a negatively perceived archetype, but rather humanity’s. It’s big ask of the listener, frankly.
‘I’ll be talking to household names, experts and cultural commentators, and they’ve all borne the brunt of the labels we’ll be picking apart,’ she explains at the outset.
To make her point in this first podcast, she is joined by her friend, the tennis legend Serena Williams. Meghan, it must be said, seems keen to the point of insecurity that we know the extent to which she and Serena are close, referencing at every opportunity how they are in endless contact, how she knew Serena was going to retire before the rest of the world found out and how often she comes by the house. She refers to her more than once as ‘my girl’.
If we’re talking about archetypes – which we are – then it’s worth pointing out, despite the Duchess’s ceaseless attempts to imply both she and Serena have been placed by society in the same ambitious woman negative archetype, the reality could hardly be more different.
The story of Serena’s rise from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of her sport – the greatest woman player of all time, no less – is rightly celebrated throughout the world. Everything she has achieved in life has been earned the hard way: through dedication, talent, sacrifice and hard work. Nothing has been handed to her on a plate – by dint, for example, of marriage.
But it feels a bit mean to go on like this, slinging rocks at what is obviously a misguided attempt at a form of journalism – a kind of first-person feature in which the person responsible for producing it attempts to put forward one narrative when the opposite seems plainly to be true. The target is too easy to hit.
Some of the points Meghan makes are fair, even if so obvious they have been made a million times before. Clearly, there are differences in the way society expects men and women to behave, and very often those differences do not seem terribly fair.
Even here, Meghan seems guilty of double standards, one moment bemoaning the way being a mother can limit a woman’s professional outlook, the next gushing about how ‘sexy’ Serena managed to look when she was pregnant. Motherhood, we learn, isn’t about children; it’s about feeling empowered and loving ‘being a mother’.
The podcast is nauseating, make no mistake, but perhaps the quality of the output will improve over future episodes. Like any journalist, Meghan must learn her new trade if she is going to master it. But if it doesn’t work out, one suspects she’ll be ok. There’s always the ASMR work to fall back on – and on this evidence she’s definitely got a talent for that.
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