Meghan Markle: Women are ‘vilified’ and slut-shamed for sexuality

Meghan Markle and legendary Sex in the City author Candace Bushell discuss the sexual double standard between men and women.

Meghan Markle and legendary Sex in the City author Candace Bushell discuss the sexual double standard between men and women.

It’s the penultimate episode of Archetypes. Meghan Markle drops the word "slut" and pleads ignorant to the bimbo reclamation movement. She also, finally, talks about sex.

In conversation with legendary writer Candace Bushell, whose landmark 'Sex and the City' column in the New York Observer brought fresh and spikey insight into what the sex lives of single women in the nineties actually looked like, Markle probes the sexual double standard between men and women. 

It's taken nine episodes for Markle to broach subjects like sexuality and sexual identity — hairy territory for a member of the royal family — territory that makes for her most compelling episode yet. 

Archetypes podcast by Meghan Markle

“I don’t understand what it is about the stigma surrounding women and their sexuality, the exploration of their sexuality that is so much more vilified than for a man,” said Markle. Musing that, if a man is 'a player, it's often celebrated'. On the flipside “for a woman, I don’t care if she’s perhaps the most successful woman in finance in her mid-50s, I promise you, someone will still go, ‘But she was such a slut in college.’”

Women are told to “only have sex with one person,” said Bushell. “We live in a world where it’s not just how we tell women how they should look, there’s a lot of pressure put on how they should feel.” 

Candace Bushnell.

The journalist and author says she was compelled to use her writing to explore what “women’s real sexuality” looks like when you take away the “I am dependent on a man” aspect. She says that when she was single in the 90s she had “a lot of women friends who were single, not dependent on a man, there was a lot of sex going on. A lot of enjoyment of sex.”

Sex and the City.

She said that through this experience of New York in the 90s she discovered that  “pretty much any of the cliches about women’s sexuality were just not true.”

“And that was really the impetus for writing Sex and the City. It was to explore what women’s sexuality really looked like," she adds. Bushnell also revealed that she didn't write the script for Sex and the City, because she was told "she couldn't do that sort of thing." 

Noting that she didn't make "a tonne of money" from the sale of her column to HBO. When Markle asked how that made her feel, she replied: “Angry. It makes me feel angry. And that’s one of the realities."