Meghan Markle confronts stereotypes that 'hold women back' in new podcast she'll host

Prince Harry and Meghan's (pic) inaugural Spotify Original podcast will launch later this year and be hosted by the former 'Suits' star. Photo: AP

She's not just the Duchess of Sussex anymore: Just call her Meghan, the Host of Podcasts.

The former Meghan Markle officially earned a new title Thursday (March 24) when Archewell Audio finally announced Archetypes as the first podcast series in Meghan and Prince Harry's multiyear partnership with Spotify. Their podcast was apparently more than a year in the making, as the Sussexes first announced their production deal in December 2020.

Their inaugural Spotify Original podcast will launch this summer and be hosted by the former Suits star.

In it, the ardent women's rights activist will speak with historians and experts "to uncover the origin of these stereotypes and have uncensored conversations with women who know all too well how these typecasts shape narratives", according to a statement released Thursday by Archewell and Spotify.

Meghan says as much in a teaser for the series also released Thursday.

The minutelong preview opens with sound bites of men branding the opposite sex — "slut", "skanky", "weaker" and "less intelligent", among others — and saying they should be "quiet and submissive", or that they're "a little emotionally unstable" and insisting they should smile when they're complimented.

"This is how we talk about women: the words that raise our girls, and how the media reflects women back to us," Meghan says in the teaser. "But where do these stereotypes come from? And how do they keep showing up and defining our lives?"

She promises listeners to "dissect, explore and subvert the labels that try to hold women back" through conversations with them, as well as with historians "to understand how we even got here in the first place." We suspect the Los Angeles-bred performer is speaking from first-hand experience.

The former "royal highnesses" founded Archewell Audio in December 2020 and teased the production shortly thereafter with an uplifting holiday special that side-stepped the controversies of the tumultuous year, including their bombshell decision to step back as full-time royals earlier in January 2020.

The duchess and duke, who is the sixth in line to the British throne, have faced quite the uphill battle since moving to California but are attempting to carve out a niche with a number of philanthropic media projects with multiyear contract deals with Spotify and Netflix.

But last month, the couple got another round of bad press for not yet releasing substantial content on either platform. In April of last year, the Sussexes announced plans for their first Netflix project: a documentary series tracking a number of athletes as they train for the 2022 Invictus Games. The games are set to take place next month, but it's unclear when Heart Of Invictus will be released. – Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service