The Duchess of Sussex wants slut-shaming to end.
On the latest episode of her podcast “Archetypes”, Meghan Markle sits down with Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell to talk about the stigmas around women’s sexuality.
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“As you’re getting older, you’re exploring and starting to understand your sensuality, your feminine divine,” Markle says during the episode, in a conversation with trans actress Michaela Jaé Rodriguez.
“But your sexuality can be very much used against you… [a man] is a player or out having fun or whatever he’s doing, it’s often celebrated, even heralded,” she continues. “But for a woman, I don’t care if she is perhaps the most successful woman in finance in her mid-50s I promise you someone will still come and say, ‘Yeah, but she was such a slut in college.'”
Markle continues, “It will stick with her. 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 and I wonder what that experience.”
Later in the episode, Bushnell talks about how her view of women’s sexuality informed the book series that was adapted into the HBO franchise.
“My question is always: What is women’s real sexuality when you take away the ‘I am dependent on a man’ aspect?” the 63-year-old writer says. “What if women had their own money, and they had their own power? What does their sexuality look like? It looks a lot like Samantha Jones.”
Bushnell explained that being a single New Yorker in the ’90s, and being surrounded by many friends “who weren’t dependent on a man for any reason” meant “there was a lot of sex going on and a lot of enjoyment of sex”.
She says she learned during that time 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.”
