“What do you think Meghan is up to? Have you seen it yet?”
The message popped up in my DMs along with another opinion piece about Meghan Markle’s new Netflix lifestyle show With Love, Meghan.
What is Meghan up to? While I could write a dissertation on the topic that has been mercilessly throttling public consciousness for almost 10 years, I’ll get right to the point.
We need to stop. As a society (yes, I’m using the “as a society” hook here) we need to move on. The discourse has become negatively intimate, unbearable, exhausting.
It’s not only us who needs to stop though. Meghan Markle, and I say this kindly, needs to leave us alone.
After this show, which has been renewed by Netflix for a second season, and the latest announcement of her new podcast entitled Confessions of a Female Founder, I would request from Meghan Markle to stop girl bossing for a substantial period of time.
She’s millennial hustling too close to the sun – with the sun being the public, the internet, the comment section, the you and me of every day.
This is an intervention. We need to break the shackles of this toxic relationship with a woman, who in all honesty, and I mean this with no facetious intent, a woman who is not as interesting as we’ve been led to believe and a woman who doesn’t deserve this.
Because no woman does. In case you thought this whole thing was about Meghan Markle, you’re mistaken.
It’s about a sophisticated infrastructure, hyper fixated on the age-old troupe of the marked woman - the it girl to hate.
Often cyclical with the it girl to love, the it girl to hate is an overwhelming, obscene vortex that we’ve become accustomed and obliviously addicted to.
Before I delve into that mob mentality of loathing, I have to begin with the most pertinent piece of news.
Have I seen With Love, Meghan?
Yes. Obviously. Conclusion? There’s a lot to talk about but nothing to say.
Pointless, angle-less, harmless. While the Pinterest aesthetic is on vibe, there is nothing ground-breaking, influential, or educational about this show. Its noise in the background while I scroll through my phone.
Perplexing that with all the resources available to Meghan Markle and her team, that they’ve created this. A strange nonlinear narrative, transparently curated to show off her “likeable” and “authentic” qualities – traits Meghan Markle has often been accused of not possessing.
After Megxit and the “were you silent or were you silenced” cultural moment, curtesy of Oprah Winfrey, this show’s too little, too late attempt at yet another re-brand is desperate.
While each episode of the show has no point, there is a purpose. It’s for us to get to know her, understand her and finally fall in love, or at least in like, with The Duchess.
A PR campaign transparently disguised as a show is always a sad state of affairs.
While coming up with the concept for the show, it feels like Meghan Markle went through all the collated data and then briefed her team and herself to “be more transparent, be more authentic.”
Unfortunately for Meghan Markle and her team, audiences are too emotionally intelligent and media savvy. We are a generation raised on reality TV and can sense a planted prompt or an improvised script.
This is a shame as there were plenty of opportunities in the show to elevate it educationally or give it more narrative depth.
However, I must reiterate, the show is not terrible, she is not terrible. It’s simply pointless and pretty to watch. No one would care if this was a show hosted by one of the hundreds of thousands of influencers doing the same thing on YouTube.
So why do we care?
Leave Meghan Markle Alone
My position on this topic has always been very clear. Leave Meghan Markle alone.
I’ve always maintained that the way the media and public targeted Meghan Markle was misogynist, racist and cruel. She became the avatar through which the worst parts of our collective culture revealed, without shame, how they think, feel and are willing to treat women, particularly women like Meghan Markle.
By that, I mean a woman of colour, a woman who is divorced, a woman from a complex background marrying, in the words of an ex-colleague, “above her place.”
It remains insane to me that the average person isn’t able to ascertain how these labels were used against her and that her alleged behaviour - controlling, manipulative, demanding - justified this subtle or overt misogyny and racism.
While I’ve always championed her, I’m not blind to the fact that Meghan Markle is a person who wants to have full control of how she’s perceived. This is not a crime - naive and impossible, sure, but a crime it is not.
Meghan Markle’s real crime is that she’s cringey, corny, cheesy.
OK, not technically a crime, but yes, highly irksome to many and - there’s that word again - inauthentic.
The Problem with Meghan Markle
When the Megxit strategy was implemented and the aftermath of the Oprah interview seemed to be settling, I thought, yes, please show us what you’re really about in this next phase of your life. Show us what you’ll do with this well-earned freedom away from the British press and The Firm.
What we got was a number of half-baked or unsuccessful projects and a million brand names. A charity foundation, Netflix deals, books, podcasts, a lifestyle brand with a list minute name change – all of these joint ventures between Harry and Meghan, are confusing.
Despite the number of platforms, projects, and voices screaming at us, nothing is being said. Meghan Markle is desperately trying to tell us who she is, but we can only sense one thing for sure.
Meghan Markle would love to be liked and the world can’t, won’t, refuses to oblige.
To be liked… not a noble purpose but not an unusual one for a celebrity. Or a celebrity influencer as she’s positioning herself to be now. I mean she has all the ingredients – beauty, intelligence, style, presence, she was (or is? I still get confused) a royal.
So, what is it? What’s not working? I’ll tell you.
Meghan Markle has made her public persona a brand that is always re-branding. That is to say she has no idea who she is.
Who is Meghan Markle?
Meghan Markle, and for that matter Meghan and Harry, don’t know who they are outside of being the “Meghan and Harry.”
Meghan Markle can’t reconcile who she was before she was married to Harry with who she was as a royal, who she is now, and who she wants to be. She, and they, have become so obsessed with controlling their own narrative, that they’ve lost the plot and can’t just be.
It’s complicated to be authentic and show it when you’re not sure who you are anymore – as a brand anyway. It’s a marketing disaster.
I would love to say that what Meghan Markle does is none of our business. What an easier point to argue. But she is literally making who she is and what she’s selling a business for us to consume.
But does that warrant a public flogging of this magnitude?
Yes, Meghan Markle is trying so hard to be liked that she can’t see beyond that. But this is not completely her fault.
It’s a reaction to that machine, that tidal wave of abhorrence, the micro needles pinning every part of her being to task – it’s the ‘get her’ mentality, the public dragging of the it girl to hate.
I never thought I’d write these words, but here I am wishing Meghan Markle would take several steps back, do a sharp U-turn and speed away from all of this.
From a marketing perspective, she was much more interesting as an elusive figure, a shimmering opaqueness compared to this cosplay of transparency.
In both cases however Meghan Markle isn’t protected from the onslaught of unwarranted aggressive criticism coming from all facets of the public sphere. No one has the right to be loved or liked without critique. But this has gone beyond that.
Whether hidden away in the nucleolus of the Royal family who never complain, never explain, or right there on our screens making honey, jam, and fruit plates, we seem to care deeply, violently about what Meghan Markle is up to.
Why Do We Care About Meghan Markle?
It’s an inconvenient truth, but a truth none the less, that we don’t care about Meghan Markle - we hate her. Primed, positioned, ready to devour, we have been conditioned to take the bait, piranhas lunging at raw meat.
It’s foul. And it’s not only Meghan Markle.
There have been plenty of adjacent it girls to hate over the years, chosen either by the media or through online mobs or some hybrid creature in between. These women who we, with laser focus decide to loath, have navigated through this minefield of viral take downs, personal invasions, public scrutiny, and character attacks in various ways.
Gwyneth Paltrow: hated for being rich and out of touch. Her response? She doesn’t care.
"I am who I am. I can't pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year," she said during an interview with Elle UK in 2009.
Kim Kardashian: hated for her hunger for being famous for being famous. Her response? She’s used the consistent backlash to her advantage and motivation.
"The biggest misconception about me is probably that I don't work hard and everything comes easy. I like to prove people wrong and just live my life and do what I do and work hard and I'm proud of that," she said to Vogue Australia in January 2015.
Anne Hathaway: hated for being too Disney and not cool enough. Her response? She looked inward and rose above it.
“You try to shut it off and I couldn’t and then I realised why I couldn’t. I hadn’t learned to love myself yet. I hadn’t gotten there. And if you don’t love yourself, when someone else says horrible things to you, part of you is always going to believe them,” she said in an interview at the Ellen show in 2015.
Most recently Millie Bobby Brown was hated for simply growing up and experimenting with different fashions. Her response? She chose to face it and call out the hate.
“This isn’t journalism, it’s bullying,” she recently said in a video statement on her Instagram calling out the journalists who commented on her appearance.
These women, and many more, are victims. And whatever their “crimes” were why is their “punishment” always a public flogging via dissection of everything that makes them human.
Meghan Markle’s “crimes” are many, depending on who you ask. Her response is, I suspect, attempting to prove everyone wrong, by showing how hard she works and how likeable she really is.
It’s not the route I would have advised if I were on her team, but she’s free to do as she pleases.
For my part, I refuse, even for a moment, to hone in on any details of With love, Meghan. I wrote about the show in the context of its angle, the narrative it presents and its positioning. This is fair game, it’s a show in the public arena which should be critiqued for the quality of its storytelling.
But I will not pick and pull apart every scenario, ever fashion choice, mannerism, inflection of her voice, choice of words – I will not be complicit to this culture of micro pettiness.
I don’t care how much Meghan Markle puts herself in a position to be judged, ridiculed, and compromised to public scrutiny. No one deserves this much public dissection even if they somehow benefit from it.
I understand that writing this article is contributing to the Meghan Markle machine, but as idealistic as this sounds, I do think what I’m saying here is important. I’m not team Meghan Markle, team royal family or team let’s hate her no matter what.
I’m Team Hilary Mantel
The Man Booker winning novelist, Hilary Mantel is best known for her trilogy - Wolf’s Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & The Light. The novels are a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII. It’s safe to say that Mantel has a thorough understanding about the history of the British Monarchy.
In 2013 she delivered a speech at the British Museum entitled Royal Bodies.
The speech explored how the media has framed royal women for centuries. From Marie Antoinette to Ann Boleyn and more recently Princess Diana and Kate Middleton - all of them at some point were inducted members of the it girl to hate club.
Mantel’s speech was pre-Meghan Markle, and I’ve always been curious about what Mantel, who died in 2022, would make of all this.
A significant portion of Mantel’s speech focused on how the media had been framing Middleton since marrying into the royal family. At the end of her speech, she concluded:
“I’m not asking for censorship. I’m not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.”
Ironically, predictably, the media took Mantel’s words out of context, plastering them across headlines positioning her as being critical of Middleton. Of course, Mantel then faced major public backlash to which she released a statement:
“My speech ended with a plea to the press and to media in general. I said ‘back off and don’t be brutes; don’t do to this young woman what you did to Diana.’
“My whole theme was the way we maltreat royal persons, making them one superhuman, and yet less than human.”
Is her statement revolutionary? Surely not but yet somehow it really is.
Megxiting Megxit
The problem is we are either wired or conditioned to be fascinated by status, power, and the social narratives that play out in front of us. Especially in a 24 hour sensationally motivated news cycle.
Meghan Markle’s Cinderella narrative not only taps into that, but also hits another trope - the story of defining your own destiny.
She was an outsider entering a powerful and living cultural and political institution where she then experienced conflict and chose to forge a new path out of it. This part of the narrative was, by her defenders, woven into the very contemporary ideation of everything feminist and liberal - a notion that frustrates those who lean toward conservative traditional or royalist values.
Today, those who wanted to see Meghan Markle win feel robbed by what she’s presenting. Those who felt her choices, and her very existence in the royal family, attacked their ideals, feel vindicated.
As much as she tries from Netflix shows, to podcasts and book deals, no matter how she positions herself, Meghan Markle can’t win.
While this is about Meghan Markle it’s also beyond her. It’s about how we use her, as we have used other women like her, adjacent to her, before her, to continuously show our delusional expectations of what women are supposed to be and then our rage when they fail to live up to that ideal.
Superhuman, and yet less than human.
For now, at least, Meghan Markle needs to stop and understand who she is as a brand, and what she is presenting to the world - because whatever she’s trying to do isn’t translating to her fan base or convincing anyone else.
I don’t know how much faith I have in humanity to break the cycle of the it girl to hate. However, Mantel’s words ring true to me.
At this point in time though, we need to Megxit, Megxit. We need to leave Meghan Markle alone, for her sake and our own.