No Deal

Meghan Markle (the Duchess of Sussex) has a podcast on which, earlier today, she hosted Paris Hilton as a guest. The topic of their discussion was “bimbos.” (They said it, I didn’t.) In the course of their conversation, Meghan lamented her stint as a “briefcase girl” on the television show Deal Or No Deal. Her complaint was that she was valued for her looks rather than her intelligence:

“There were times when I was on set at Deal or No Deal, and thinking back to my time working as an intern at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina in Buenos Aires, and being in the motorcade with the secretary of treasury at the time, and being valued, specifically for my brain,” she said.

But on Deal or No Deal, “I was being valued for something quite the opposite,” Markle added.

“There was a very cookie-cutter idea of precisely what we should look like,” the Duchess said. “It was solely about beauty, and not necessarily about brains.”

“I was thankful for the job, but not for how it made me feel, which was not smart,” Markle complained. “I would end up leaving with this pit in my stomach, knowing 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,” she continued. “And that’s how it felt for me at the time: being reduced to this specific archetype.”

I suppose it goes with the territory of being a briefcase girl. I was not familiar with Deal Or No Deal, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. The rules seem rather complicated, and guests tried to win money. But what about the briefcase girls?

Deal or No Deal features 26 models who each bear one of the cases in play.

Being a model who “bears a briefcase” doesn’t seem like an intellectual achievement. This is a photo of the Duchess as a briefcase girl:

I don’t know. Call me old-fashioned. But if you don’t want to be known primarily for your beauty, you probably should choose a different career path. Maybe even a different career from acting.

In the podcast, Markle claims to be a “nerd.”

“My entire sense of self-confidence was wrapped up in being the smart one and not the pretty one,” Markle claimed….

Of course, real nerds don’t generally wind up as briefcase girls. If Markle wanted to be known as the smart one, she might have, for example, gone to engineering school and become an engineer. Her looks wouldn’t have gotten her anywhere if she couldn’t do the math.

But then, if she had been an engineer rather than an actress, Markle would never have become a Duchess. So maybe she wasn’t so dumb after all.

Actually, I don’t think Markle is dumb: I think she perfectly exemplifies the have-one’s-cake-and-eat-it-too attitude that is ubiquitous on the Left, especially among feminists.