“I am kind, I have a big heart, I’m an Aquarius. I love animals and I’m shy. I’m a tomboy. I’m an undercover nerd. I love cartoons and I’m a girl’s girl,” says Paris Hilton at the start of Archetypes, Meghan Markle’s podcast about “dissecting labels.”
This time the label is “bimbo,” and with an intro like that, Cockburn is so glad that Paris doesn’t feel the need to play into the bimbo trope. Meghan helpfully adds that “you may not have quite picked up on my voice. It’s Paris Hilton, the real Paris Hilton, not the archetype that you’ve come to know for so long.” Thanks, Meghan!
The two aren’t alone — lucky us. This episode is joined by journalist Clare Malone and comedian Iliza Shlesinger, apparently to help Meghan “unearth who is really in on the joke.” Newsflash: it’s none of you. Malone leads off by bitching about the New York Post over a headline that ran twenty years ago: “Bimbo summit,” it blared, with a photo of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. Malone disdainfully observes that the “three women that were young, beautiful and labeled as party girls back in the early 2000s.” “Bimbo is an insult for women,” she adds.
Cockburn is used to Meghan’s attempts to rewrite history, but now it seems that her guests are falling victim to their own “truth.” For in the aughts, these three women were, quite literally, the party girls. Paris Hilton once said that she “invented getting paid to party,” adding, “I get half a million just to show up at parties. My life is, like, really, really fun.”
And what would Archetypes be without a long-winded soliloquy from Meghan, about Meghan? In this episode, she tells the story of her short stint as a briefcase girl on the game show Deal or No Deal. She starts by talking about how she appreciated the job because it meant she could pay her bills, only to add that she quit “with this pit in my stomach, knowing that I was so much more than what was being objectified on the stage. I didn’t like feeling forced to be all looks and little substance. And that’s how it felt for me at the time, being reduced to this specific archetype.”
Cockburn wonders if this is a running theme in Meghan’s life, walking out on a job because not every aspect of it suits her. Well, at least this time, with the help of Spotify, she won’t need to worry about paying the bills.
