Meghan Markle rips into How I Met Your Mother for pushing 'crazy' woman narrative
Meghan Markle has taken aim at two hit TV shows in her latest podcast and used them as prime examples of how the media and popular culture likes to brand women as 'crazy'.
In her latest episode of her Archetypes podcast for Spotify, the Duchess of Sussex and her guests dive into 'the insidious ways "crazy" is used to diminish women’s credibility'.
"Raise your hand if you’ve ever been called crazy or hysterical or what about nuts? Insane out of your mind, completely irrational, okay? You get the point," Markle said.
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"Now, if we were all in the same room and could see each other, I think it would be pretty easy to see. Just how many of us have our hands up? By the way, me too."
She added: "And it’s no wonder when you consider just how prevalent these labels are in our culture."
Markle then played clips from hit TV shows How I Met Your Mother and Scrubs, which respectively ended in 2014 and 2010, to show how women can be branded as 'crazy' in the media.
In her clip from How I Met Your Mother, serial bachelor Barney Stinson can be heard telling his friends: "If she’s this crazy, she has to be this hot."
In another, Markle took aim at the female character Elliot Reid in Scrubs.
In the clip played on Archetypes, Reid (played by Sarah Chalke) can be heard saying: "I can’t take it, Carla! I cannot hide the crazy a minute longer! I’m just this big mountain of coo-coo is about to erupt and spew molten crazy, all over him and he’s gonna die like this."
Markle also played a third clip by controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson.
"I don’t think that men can control crazy women," Peterson can be heard saying in the clip.
Markle said using words such as 'crazy or hysterical' completely delegitimises, dismisses, and minimises what a person is feeling.
"It keeps going to the point where anyone who’s been labelled it enough times can be gaslit into thinking that they’re actually unwell or sometimes worse, to the point where real issues of all kinds get ignored," she said.
"Well, that’s not happening today.
“I feel pretty strongly about this word, this label crazy the way that it’s thrown around so casually and the damage its rotten society and women, frankly everywhere."
Markle's latest episode of Archetypes is the second released since the death of the Queen.
It is also the second where she has hit out at how movies and TV shows can sometimes perpetuate stereotypes.
In last week's episode, the Suits actor took aim at Austin Powers and Kill Bill for furthering the Dragon Lady narrative of angry Asian female characters.
Topics: Meghan Markle, TV and Film, Royal Family, Spotify
Rachel Lang