You’ve got to hand it to Meghan Markle – she’s really used her smash hit podcast Archetypes (launched in August this year with a pause in programming to mark the death of theQueen in September) as a mouthpiece for defending herself from some of the criticism directed at her over the last five years.
While deconstructing the stereotypes that hold women back, Meghan has shared her thoughts in depth on the subjects she discusses, from the ‘Angry Black Woman’ trope to ‘The Misconception of Ambition’, which she discussed with global tennis champion Serena Williams in her first episode.
Now she has been asking ‘To B or Not To B’ with Starbucks Chairwoman Mellody Hobson, the first Black woman to be chairperson of an S&P 500 company in 2017, discussing the ways in which the term ‘bitch’ is most often used in lieu of words like ‘difficult’ or ‘pushy’. In other words, it’s a term to gaslight and shame women out of being forthright in what they know they want and deserve.
‘What these people are implying when they use that very charged word, is that this woman, "Oh, she's difficult",’ Meghan said on the podcast. ‘Which is really just a euphemism or is probably not even a euphemism. It's really a codeword for the B-word.
‘My friend said to me, there's a certain point when you come to terms with the fact that not everyone is going to like you; the goal can't be for everyone to like you, but the goal can be for them to respect you'.
However, she did go on to speak about women who reclaim the word, in the context of ‘bad bitches’ and the like, saying that, while she has no interest in using the word for herself, ‘these women I respect whose work, I love a lot of them are entirely comfortable with that.’
She went on, ‘It actually has a really interesting parallel here and it's a strong [comparison] especially in the context of this larger notion of "difficult women" who are threatening the human social order. [People assume that] being masculine is being aggressive and dominant and being feminine is being submissive and nurturing.
‘But, you know, it really annoys me these labels because actually being feminine, you know, amongst the animal kingdom, involves being aggressive and promiscuous and competitive, and dominant, and dynamic and varied and all the things that males are so these distinctions between masculine and feminine.’