Cooking for Money

Meghan Markle and Canada’s Pamela Anderson are sending you serious Love

So. We just had that day when we ‘celebrate’ women again, except it kind of rings hollow these days. We’ve been doing this since 1910 and the wrinkles are showing. Since I have never completely bought into the fantasy world of the feminists, I say, finally! Asking questions about what it means to be a woman today instead of rehashing old stereotypes, yes, I think that’s good. Except the way we’re showing modern women how to live, on podcasts especially is a bit, shall we say, shallow? Take Meghan Markle, for example. About five minutes ago, she bailed on what was her much promoted Netflix series, With Love, Meghan. In that series, she’s being an entirely inauthentic ‘housewife’ and it bombed immediately. Others however do succeed where poor Meghan failed.

This being the dreaded Ides of March, let’s keep it light and talk about …the End of Feminism via Fake Cooking Shows by Real Weird Celebrities, like Meghan Markle now named Sussex, and Pamela Anderson, ageing Canadian blonde bombshell turned respectable.

Let’s zoom in on the more famous of the two damsels, the actress and wife of Prince Harry, Her Royal Unpleasantness, Meghan. She is famous for lots of things, among them being a bitch to anyone who has the bad luck to be working with or for her. Her new Netflix series, rumoured to be worth a whole bunch of millions, is sadly, a flop. James Delingpole, culture critic at the Spectator, sums it up nicely so you don’t have to actually watch this fake-o-rama:

‘You almost feel sorry for her’ he muses, while she ‘goes through the motions of pretending to be a domestic goddess’. He comments on her cooking and housewifely chops ‘when she cooks you think,’ she actually doesn’t do this very often, does she’, and so on.

Talk TV said it was just incredibly boring. Since nobody I read had anything nice to say about With Love, Meghan, I will say this: she and the whole pack of ‘influencers’ who cook, order our messy homes, decorate us into oblivion and give us ‘fashion advice’ on how to wear the blue jeans du jour, have managed something none of us actual housewives like me ever did, that is, get paid for what we’re doing. Being Housewives who also look good.

They did studies back in the day of what the services rendered by a ‘housewife’ were worth in terms of paid hours and it was a substantial sum that none of us ever got or dared to dream of. But if you do it online or TV or Netflix, as in the Real Housewives series, who also lived their lives in a fake universe of gilded riches nobody lives in, well, the money ain’t bad as they say. However, putting even a totally unnecessary production like this together is work, of sorts, even if she did the least of it. She’s a working girl, all right, is our Meghan. And now we all know that she can’t even fake cooking, poor woman.

She got the message and right away, being the take charge girl she is, she started a new podcast that offers ‘confessions’ about how to be a ‘female founder’, as she puts it. Because cooking for money wasn’t working, maybe this will?

https://people.com/meghan-markle-announces-new-podcast-confessions-female-founder-lemonada-media-11696031

As for Pamela Anderson, her older, somewhat more talented Canadian counterpart, she is a hilarious lesson in how to become famous for ‘leaked’ sex tapes, star in Baywatch, a series dedicated to close ups of swelling body parts, star in The Last Showgirl and becoming a ‘real actress’ while finally coming home to Ladysmith, Vancouver Island to reinvent yourself as a nice Canadian girl who loves her grandma and is cooking up True North Canadian Veggie Dishes, eh? Interesting that her show too is about love—Cooking with Love, she named it. Smarter than the title Meghan chose because there is an active verb in hers.

Now that shows real talent! Unlike Meghan, Pamela has always read the Zeitgeist correctly and aligned herself accordingly. See leaked sex tapes. And she has hit the current Canadian Zeitgeist again by cooking only with Canadian ingredients and Canadian fake bacon, like the true patriot she is. Well done!

So what’s all this really about? Are we really all hooked on ‘celebrity cooking shows’ like this? I doubt it. Maybe this is just an inept way of luring modern career women back into their marble countertoppped kitchens? Because in the background, something like a backlash against the feminist advice to ‘live your own life’ and avoiding the burden of a bunch of screaming rug rats is brewing. Mary Harrington, one of the most influential women writing on Substack, is a signal that we’re rethinking the role of women yet again. She is a master of linking thoughts about raising kids to the level of international politics, something I’m trying to emulate here with talking about housework.

As far as I can tell, we’re tired of being tired while trying to ‘have it all’, that is being mothers, housekeepers and high earning lawyers all at the same time. Somehow, the feminist revolution wasn’t thought out properly and here we are, 115 some years later, airing our doubts. And these idiotic fake housewife shows are a weird attempt to lure us all back into domestic bliss. Could something as fake as Meghan actually deliver that message? I sincerely doubt it. Her building a business podcast is also not well timed and fated to sink into oblivion. Because the leading vibe is the belated realization that a career can be a wonderful thing, it cannot compete with fulfilling one’s biological destiny as a woman, having babies, a home with a husband in it, doing homely things for one’s family. The family unit is making a last minute, desperate comeback, possibly because of the populist vibe but also, because feminism has run out of steam entirely. We have to rethink it, and fast. Why, you ask.

It turns out that if many millions of women decide not to do that so much and instead be free and untrammeled economic agents—well, then society collapses. And before it collapses, it imports in unseemly haste a whole bunch of foreign women who might do all of that because they have no other choices. But then it turns out that doesn’t work either and lo, the society hits a demographic brick wall. The End. If you don’t believe me, watch Peter Zeihan on demographics. Very compelling, isn’t it. Also, Douglas Murray from the other end of the political spectrum, agrees with Zeihan. And if that doesn’t convince you, listen to Mary Harrington, who is a mother as well as a noted public intellectual. They can’t all be wrong, can they.

And yes, it is about LOVE. Of course it is. Women and Love and Cooking and pardon me, Fucking, it’s all connected. And if we’re just doing it for the money, we’ve earned the name prostitute. As this story about Churchill and Lady Astor demonstrates so wonderfully:

…he supposedly asked Lady Astor whether she would sleep with him for five million pounds. She said she supposed she would. Then he asked whether she would sleep with him for only five pounds. She answered,"What do you think I am?" His response was, "We've already established that; we're merely haggling over price."

Happy Weekend!