Meghan Markle Returns to IG, British Media Loses Their Minds

Never has writing "2025" in the sand garnered so much controversy

Meghan returned to Instagram last week with a simple reel showing the Duchess of Sussex writing “2025” in the sand.

“Oh, she’s putting out a quick reel to garner eyeballs for whatever the big announcement is,” I thought to myself.

That came the following day when the trailer for her new, 8-part Netflix series—With Love, Meghan—dropped.

And the British Media lost their goddamn minds.

It may be 2025, but the British media is stuck in 2020 when it comes to reporting on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The media gratefully feasted on this homegrown, beautifully curated appetizer the Duchess of Sussex served up, signaling what’s to come in 2025.

Let’s Get One Thing Clear…Meghan Markle is Not a Trad Wife

Among the sillier pieces about Meghan’s new show was this disappointing column from The Times (UK):

In the With Love, Meghan trailer we see the duchess picking berries, decorating a sponge cake, arranging flowers and labelling homemade candles. If you think that all sounds a little Stepfordy for a self-identified and vocal feminist, then you wouldn’t be wrong.

Actually, you would be wrong. This is a narrow view of what it means to be a feminist and plays into the weirdly incessant need to paint Meghan Markle as a hypocrite when it comes to her feminism. This was one of the themes of my Roman Empire article on Meghan that I wrote about in a multi-part series last year.

Trad wife is a misused term. Trad wife stands for “traditional wife”. Some of the more popular accounts on TikTok, like Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm, are not just glorifying a traditional lifestyle aesthetic, but traditional gender roles as well that are a part of a larger conservative movement pushing for policies that chip away at the rights women have gained over the past 50 odd years. (For more on trad wife culture, check out

Sara Petersen

‘s brilliant Substack.)

As I wrote a few months ago, Meghan Markle isn’t a trad wife for sending out jam to 50 of her closest friends. She’s also not a trad wife for making focaccia and enjoying a good flower arrangement. Meghan has several jobs and spoke at SXSW last year—on International Women’s Day no less—about the barriers mothers face in the workplace in the United States. This is the woman who wrote a letter to Dawn about their sexist soap commercial as a tween. WHERE is the evidence that she is a trad wife in any sense of the phrase?

Ok, now that I got that off my chest, let’s delve into some of the other articles about the Duchess of Sussex.

White linen, Body Language Experts, Joy, Oh My!

All of the popular tropes were trotted out to cover Meghan’s return to IG and the trailer for her new show. This includes one of their faves: How much did this cost?!

Note how the responsibility is put solely on Meghan for the rental of the property where the show was filmed, not the production company or Netflix. There was a budget for this show! Also, expensive cookware for a cooking & lifestyle TV show?!

This isn’t strange or out of the norm! I fully expect at some point that Meghan will use her branded kitchen items and then royal reporters will salivate over that perceived slight to the average person watching her show.

The funniest part of all of this is that, for all the protestations about Meghan and Harry being outcasts in their California community, this house is owned by an influential Montecito family: The Cipolla’s. They’re described as, “fixtures in the high society circles of the American Riviera.”

Presumably if the Duke and Duchess were true outcasts, influential family’s like the Cipolla’s wouldn’t allow them to film in their home—even for 5 million.

Then there’s the outcry that she didn’t even FILM at her own home.

This isn’t a home video, this is a tv set.