On the latest episode of her podcast Archetypes, the Duchess of Sussex took aim at those who frequently use harmful labels to describe women.
One of those she pointed out is Jordan Peterson, the divisive psychologist and former professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, who rose to fame when he began posting his lectures on YouTube.
Peterson was recently named by Olivia Wilde as the inspiration for the villain in her latest movie which you undoubtedly heard of, called Don’t Worry, Darling.
Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila took exception to Wilde’s categorization of her father’s viewpoints as being villainous and tagged her in a tweet to contest Wilde’s perspective of what her father represents. The Tweet, posted in early September, has now been deleted. Wilde never responded.
Unlike Wilde, Meghan Markle simply focused on a statement made by Peterson, as she discussed how detrimental labels such as “crazy” can be to women. Her guests were actresses Jenny Slate, Deepika Padukone, and Constance Wu, who recently shared that she was sexually harassed on the set of Fresh Off the Boat.
Markle played a clip of Peterson, a podcaster himself, saying, “I don’t think that men can control crazy women.”
She also played a clip of the character Barney, portrayed by Neil Patrick Harris in the popular 2005-14 sitcom How I met Your Mother, where he says, “A girl is allowed to be crazy, as long as she is equally hot.”
Markle states that “Hysteria and craziness” is something defined by men and that “It’s a definition meant to shame and limit a certain type of experience.”
She further states:
“Calling someone ‘crazy’ or ‘hysterical’ completely dismisses their experience. It minimizes what they’re feeling. It doesn’t stop there, it keeps going to the point where anyone whose been labelled it enough times can be gaslit into thinking they’re actually unwell to the point where real issues of all kinds get ignored.”
Previous Archetypes guests include Mariah Carey, Serena Williams, and Mindy Kaling.
Published: Oct 11, 2022 03:11 pm