#bbbb interview

"When the show appeared, the millions who have long felt entitled to critique Meghan as a member of the British royal family were free to judge her as a wife, mother, cook, decorator and hostess. And many did, calling her saccharine, inauthentic and uninspiring. She was compared to Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm and other influencers riding the tradwife wave, who glamorize old-fashioned “women’s work,” like feeding chickens and cooking breakfast, that many women have no desire to return to.

This lie is equally as bad as:

I never looked up Harry online (NOprah 2021)

...NOW I understand their is a global interest in the British Royal Family (engagement interview 2017)

I only studied his Instagram feed bc that's the best way to learn about someone because they are telling you about themselves (Megflix 2022)

The Evening Standard got her Talking Points:

If you were even a tiny bit worried that the internet was close to running out of things to say about the royal family, fear not. Meghan’s back. I’m not sure any of us were really ready for American Riviera Orchard (established 2024) with its ornate swirling gold font, but the hazy video of Meghan’s flower arranging, mixing things in a bowl, prancing around her mansion in a ball gown is giving one quite clear archetype (to borrow her podcast term): trad wife. 

Which is, for the self-proclaimed feminist and activist, quite the pivot. Or is it? I mean she did seduce Prince Harry with a roast chicken, maybe after all this time she’s simply leaning into her truth. 

Her version of homely is very Hollywood does the Cotswolds, filtered through Richard Curtis. It’s the kind of whimsical, faux-rustic tweeness that only an American could possibly dream up. But in embracing her inner domestic wench, Meghan isn’t exactly backing a losing horse. Trad wives are one of Tiktok's most flourishing and lucrative communities. Nara Smith, wife of Mormon-model Lucky Blue Smith, has amassed 3.8 million followers for her seductive Le Creuset-enriched cooking videos (including spending two hours baking fresh bread to make her toddlers a cheese toastie for lunch) — all created with perfect hair and make up, obvs. 

See also Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm (8.8 million Instagram followers), the ex-dancer New Yorker turned mumfluencer who films herself baking for her 8 children, and recently took part in a Mrs America beauty pageant two weeks after giving birth to the youngest (and you thought Kate on the Lindo wing steps was a stretch). Or perhaps Meghan’s been eyeing up The Six Bells, the Brooklyn lifestyle emporium, sorry “country store” which is inspired by a fictional English village (no, really). This homely purveyor of floral patterned butter dishes, gingham bolster cushions and wicker baskets is the brainchild of Audrey Gelman, founder of now defunct women’s co-working club The Wing. What's a former girl boss to do but get into antiquing? 

Meghan might have also come across Nell Diamond of Hill House Home in her market research, purveyor of the Nap dress, who’s raised $20million in investment off the back of her Victoriana cotton sundresses.  

All in all, the Duchess is joining quite the burgeoning market of domestic pioneers, cheerily cashing in on all manner of outdated tropes of womanhood. But what might be troubling for the former “working” member of the royal family, is that in fashion terms, cottage core is a naff donkey. The current mood is more frazzled, overworked, cash-strapped mum. On the spring catwalks Miu Miu and Bottega Veneta models carried bags overflowing with stuff, hair mussed up, collars askew. Ayo Edebiri’s cheerily munching on oranges out of a plastic bag in this month’s Vogue. Even the magazine’s cover star FKA Twigs is pictured on the Tube. Meghan’s hokey, country mom schtick might well chart in Utah, but it’s prairies away from being relevant. 

The Independent Got the Talking Points:

"It was only a matter of time until the modern-day trad wife phenomenon became the premise for a horror film. Think about it: all the key elements are there.

The portentous setting of suburbia: quiet streets, palatial mansions, moneyed families with perfect hair. A life defined by domestic servitude: cooking, cleaning, doing everything for everyone except yourself. And a modus operandi steeped in archaic values that oppresses women, entrapping them within the home and stripping them of their autonomy, identity, and financial independence, one homemade marshmallow at a time.

Thank goodness, then, that someone has finally taken all this and put it in its rightful home of horror. I just didn’t expect that someone to be Meghan Markle. And yet, when I watched the trailer for the Duchess of Sussex’s new Netflix show, With Love, Meghan, all I could think was: I didn’t realise there was a sequel to Get Out.

Before I continue, let me preface this by saying that I don’t have anything against Meghan. Not even a little bit. In fact, I think she has been a great advocate for women’s rights.

I also respect her for speaking out about how she was allegedly treated by the royal family and taking steps to separate herself from them in order to preserve her mental wellbeing. And I wholeheartedly believe she was subject to an inordinate amount of racism and misogynoir in the UK, so I don’t blame her for heading stateside to sunny California.

But since then, Meghan’s output has been somewhat disappointing.

There was the nauseatingly saccharine Netflix docuseries with Prince Harry that came out in 2022; the Archetypes podcast that I found unbearably sanctimonious; and now this: an eight-part so-called “lifestyle” programme that seems to be little more than an exercise in showing us how lovely Meghan’s kitchen looks on camera with her famous friends inside it.

According to Netflix, With Love, Meghan (don’t get me started on the title), blends “practical how-tos and candid conversation with friends, new and old”, and will see Meghan sharing “personal tips and tricks, embracing playfulness over perfection and highlighting how easy it can be to create beauty, even in the unexpected”. If it wasn’t for the press release I received explaining all this, I’d think the whole thing was satire.

In the trailer, which Meghan shared on Instagram on Thursday, we are greeted with a sequence that sees the mother-of-two prancing around her garden gathering fresh fruit and veg, cutting into a few cakes, and making yummy noises after eating her own food. It’s not so much the content itself that rattles me – I love a good cooking show as much as anyone. It’s the tone, which is so jarringly earnest it feels sinister.

Everything Meghan says in the trailer is a twee platitude that could’ve been ripped off an Ikea poster: “We’re not in the pursuit of perfection, we’re in the pursuit of joy.”

Clearly, this is an attempt for Meghan to separate herself from The Firm – even Harry features in a single, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot in the trailer – and move on from the trauma of it all by returning to her lifestyle-blogging roots.

Look, I get it. And maybe it is time for Meghan to dip her toe back into this space now that a few years have passed since Megxit. But did it really have to be so mawkish? So traditional? So utterly cringe that I almost can’t bear to watch?

Who knows what the episodes of With Love, Meghan will bring. But, if they’re even slightly similar to the trailer, I will probably do my best to avoid them.

Her favorite, The Guardian Got the Talking Points:

April 2024 Guardian: Meghan’s gone from royal upsetter to tradwife in three short years. Given what’s out there, you’d do the same

Like most fantasies, its downsides are so screamingly obvious as to barely need spelling out – did feminism teach us nothing about depending on a man financially? – but nonetheless, it returns to taunt each new generation of knackered mothers, inviting us if not to live a lifestyle that for most people is simply unaffordable, then at least to buy into the trappings.

Of course, that isn’t remotely the world Meghan is asking women to buy into. All she wants is for you to watch the cookery and lifestyle show she’s about to present on Netflix, and ideally keep her in the lifestyle to which she’s become accustomed by splurging on a few branded napkins. Beyond that, presumably she hopes all the people who have been accusing her ever since she married Prince Harry of being supposedly too pushy, too political, or too angry, will like her better repackaged as an unthreatening housewife; that this softening of her edges will finesse the Sussex brand into something that can be seriously monetised.

Reactions by Anons:

Royal-Carob

Meghan’s show highlights everything I despise about the trad wife movement.

Meghan being Meghan is nothing new to me but this smoldering heap of media that is her most recent attack on society disgusts me in a whole new way when it clicked that this is an assault on feminism…..hear me out.

First off I have to make comparisons between Meghan’s Sh** Show and three sources I believe she drew inspiration from, or I should say she blatantly tried and failed to copy. Martha Stewart “obvious,” Pamela Anderson’s “Cooking with Love, and Sandra Lee’s Semi Homemade.

Martha‘s lifestyle is affluent but she doesn’t attempt to gaslight us into believing she‘s living like a humble peasant, she is an accomplished business woman and chef among other things. However unlike Meghan’s show Martha has always been an educator. Martha shows us how to create an excellent roast, she instructs us how she creates her own organic fertilizer, she shows us how her farm and gardens are managed, etc, and most importantly she doesn’t bs us into thinking she does it all on her own like magic, she has staff.

Pamela Anderson brings vegan cooking to a wider audience in a beginner friendly and intriguing way and shows us that we too can become better cooks simply by choosing to learn something new and she features professional chefs who are the primary instructors, she doesn’t take credit for their work. She understands that promoting a cruelty free diet is hampered by condescending pretentiousness and that has no place on her show.

Sandra Lee is something else. For those that don’t remember that show on food network it was pretty much how to slap some PB&J together to save time and then how to turn right around and waste that time you saved by creating the most intense table scapes imaginable. Also her kitchen set decor frequently changed to match the theme of her recipes.

The thing about Sandra was she wasn’t a liar. She substituted and took shortcuts which was the whole point of the show, how to dress up something small and make it feel special for those of limited means or time.

Meghan takes shortcuts and she takes credit for the work of others. Her chicken run has never had bird in it prior to filming and that’s clear. Someone else created her fruit rainbows and wild flower arrangements. An army of gardeners work on her garden to make it as wonderful as it is, but she would have you believe it’s nothing that anyone can do. Every detail is fake and it’s painfully obvious, yet she insults the intelligence of her audience by either directly claiming credit for it or by doing so by omission of not crediting where credit belongs.

This is the entire trad wife trend. It’s all bs.

For clarity I’m not talking about people that actually have traditional lifestyles, housewives, househusbands, homesteaders, subsistence lifestyles, down to anyone who prefers or tries to be more self reliant in the little ways they can.

I‘m talking the inauthentic image board instagram clout chasers, people that try to sell a stereotype or fantasy as reality. The type of people that claim they’re an old fashioned housewife but expose that they’ve never before set foot in a grocery store by the fact that they hit the ice-cream isle before they did the rest of the shopping. The kind of people that claim they’re a poultry farmer but “their pet rooster” clearly has no clue who they are and has never seen them before in his life. The people who don’t understand anything about what they’re peddling, made evident by the fact that they repeat proven falsehoods like they’re real that anyone who is actually involved in the trade knows to be bs.

This is what I’m referring to as “trad life” and that’s what Meghan is peddling.

Meghan is selling herself as a trad wife, fake, lying, and twiddling her day away with pretty but ultimately useless projects. She‘s not teaching anything worthwhile like any woman who’s competent or self respecting. She’s dishing out pointless eye candy garbage that accomplishes nothing . This is why I see this as an assault on feminism. Grind it down to it‘s most base components and her show is portraying her and her guests as phony, thoughtless, useless woman who’s diminished intellect is preoccupied with bagging store bought pretzels, arranging parties, and complimenting each other on their shallow, meaningless accomplishments and vanity.

Useful Ad

"According to her and the Sussex squad logic she is doing the homemaker duties because that is what she is passionate about and enjoys. Whereas Catherine and any other women are forced to conform to the standards of the family they married into. Due to her lack of perspective she doesn’t think maybe Catherine also enjoyed hosting and cooking for her friends and family. Her hypocrisy at this point is astounding.

Yes they are many women whose lives are about climbing the corporate ladder and they are some for whom domesticity is their calling. There is nothing wrong with either. But with Meghan she is a chameleon and jumps onto whichever will get her attention.

She firstly portrayed herself as the hard working feminist, who is a self made millionaire and didn’t wait around for a man so she can up-stage Catherine. Hence the waity Katie dig in the Opera interview.

When that didn’t work she saw that rise of trad wives and now she jumps onto the bandwagon and becomes a step-ford wife ( like she accused Catherine). And linking it to her Tig days to overcome all the negativity. This may have worked if she started this show on 2021 instead of Opera and Harry and Meghan. But she shot herself in the foot thinking she was popular on her own merit and not because of who and the family she married.

Wasn’t it in spare that Harry said everyone else married the people who fit the mould?

She has no respect or empathy for other people. She and her squad think everything she does is revolutionary."

Mickelborough

Meghan’s always been a fauxminist. She craps on about feminism, but I really can’t think of a single thing that she’s done for that cause. Neither can she, other than that letter she wrote which - regardless of what she thinks - didn’t, on its own, change Procter & Gamble’s advertising campaign.

To date, Meghan’s used her husband’s name and possibly money; her connections with a racist and colonialist (her truth) institution; and the work of others, to create an illusion of achievement.

Her basic MO‘s to do things which benefit her. She seemingly:

- donates to selected causes which can help cultivate her image of herself (caring, compassionate etc) via their own social media or giving flattering interviews in sycophantic magazines

- gives grants to people for work which supports her victimhood due to race

- promotes commercial ventures, in which she’s invested - if they make money, she makes money

Her trad wife antics are as faux as she is - but who’d have expected more?