This post is apropos of not very much. Some time back, while drinking my third cup of coffee of the day, I read yet another piece about 'Megabit' - a contribution to the dumb-down, divide, and divert war being waged by the mass media in the service of - well, we all know who the vast bulk of the mass media serves - protestations about them being "dominated by the left", notwithstanding. The lie that the media is left-wing is shot from a trusty old cannon fired by the corporate-adjacent right.
The piece that energised my tired old brain that morning was a claim that Meghan - I don't use titles as a matter of principle - is a 'feminist' AND what is more, so is her husband, Harry.
What sort of feminist this writer thinks they might feasibly be, may be gleaned from the following :
“Like many millennial feminists, we want to approach the idea of taking down the system with evangelical zeal: tossing a lit match and strutting away from a slow-motion explosion just like Rihanna. Yet sometimes the most feminist thing to do – and smartest – is remove yourself from the system completely. Especially when that system is cooked.”
Note there is no explication of what "the system" is, let alone any hint as to what “we” might want to replace it with.
The specific system that this writer is referring to Meghan removing herself from is, of course, the still obscenely rich and powerful remnants of the British ancien régime. The wider system she talks about taking down is not corporate capitalism as, like Meghan, she’s unlikely to want to blow up the goose (1) that lays the golden eggs for the privileged ones who inhabit the buffer zone of the coordinator and celebrity classes. So I'm having to guess "the system" is The Patriarchy.
Meghan's pre-royal fame rested on the TV series Suits which I hadn't seen until recently - or at least I thought I hadn't but watching it again after a conversation with some friends - I realised I had seen the pilot years ago and clearly had decided ce n'était pour moi.
But, in the spirit of scholarly inquiry I watched a few episodes - fast forwarding through all the annoying, linky bits.
Corporate law - superficially glossy, essentially sleazy; overtly corrupt or skirting the edges of it - is the quintessence of the coordinator class, helping prop up and shield the worst excesses of the bloated, wasteful and exploitative system that feeds it.
The series pays lip service to equality; a mercilessly ambitious black woman is the managing partner having got there by shafting her nemesis, the other named partner who is Jewish. The other character who we are invited to hate is also Jewish and the fact of him being Jewish is much more front and centre and comes way too close to embodying some anti-Semitic stereotypes for my liking.
MM plays a sexy paralegal with exam block - the privileged daughter of a successful black lawyer father and an invisible white mother. There's a black associate lawyer and a few black clients - but the stories hinge around a cabal of white men whose standing is signalled by the cost of their suits, haircuts, and manicures and the rampancy of their ambition. The women - almost without exception - are heavily sexualised in appearance, tottering around in bum revealing tight skirts on improbably high heels - think one step away from stripper shoes - with occasional glimpses of deep cleavage.
The contrast between the men - and the women - is stark; the message is that women who want to succeed in this towering bastion of male privilege have to be at least as predatory, driven, and duplicitous as their male counterparts - and be decorative in a style and manner that owes far more to the phallocracy than it is does to feminism.
As for the character who is MM's love interest (and who somewhat resembles Harry prior to the onset of male pattern baldness) we are expected to believe that someone who never went to law school and hasn't passed the bar somehow - due to having the sort of photographic memory usually only found in people with autism, and the protection of the lead sleaze-bag - gets a job in a prestigious corporate law firm that only employs Harvard graduates.
As we say in Aotearoa-New Zealand, 'yeah right.'
Notes:
1. I am of course using 'goose' in the generic sense of a bird of the family of Anatidae, not wishing to impose a cis-normative binary on the proverb.
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