Meghan's new Netflix series in which she offers cooking and home tips arrives next week. She's just the latest high-profile woman to present herself as a lifestyle guru – and divide opinion in doing so.

The Duchess of Sussex's lifestyle show is finally arriving on Netflix on Tuesday, after being pushed back because of the Los Angeles fires. With Love, Meghan sees her picking flowers, cooking with friends, and looking radiant in a huge, glossy Californian home.

The move into such well-worn domestic-goddess territory saw Meghan instantly dubbed "the millennial Martha Stewart of Montecito" in The New York Times. But of course, this being Meghan – the subject of a vast amount of criticism in the British media specifically and on social media generally – backlash flared the minute the trailer was released. She's flaunting her wealth, said her critics: tone-deaf. She's becoming a trad wife: bad feminist. She's fake, she just wants to sell products, she's unbearably earnest…

And yet, Meghan has her fans as much as her detractors, and it's likely that With Love, Meghan will be a ratings hit for the streamer, bringing people together: not always in the way the show intends perhaps, but by persuading both those who buy into the pretty-princess fantasy – and those who may "hate-watch" it – to tune in, agog. "Everyone's invited to create wonder in every moment" – as Meghan puts it.

The public's feelings towards domestic goddesses – those women who sell a lifestyle, and a very particular idealised version of womanhood – have always been complex, but they may have never been more conflicted than in 2025. "Of course, the image of the idealised woman has changed over time, and even more rapidly in recent years" says Dr Edith Hill, an Australian academic whose research is in social media, influencers and women's bodies online. These days, Hill tells the BBC, "there is no one ''ideal' image of a woman online, as each community and sub-community has their own version of the perfect creator." This means that the most famous end up both loved and loathed: figures like Meghan, Gwyneth Paltrow and Nara Smith walk the line between having devoted fanbases, and being scorned, castigated and even blamed for a wealth of societal ills.

Nara Smith is probably the most famous iteration of the most vexed contemporary version of the domestic goddess: the trad wife. Smith has 11.5 million followers on TikTok – that's a lot of people who want to watch videos from her home in Texas, where she raises kids and bakes their food from scratch. While wearing ballgowns. In a gorgeous kitchen. You could say it's aggressively aspirational – but it's also patently unrealistic. I doubt many people watching genuinely wish they too could make their toddlers homemade bubblegum while wearing a lime-green conical-bust gown.

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Of course, many women do find joy and satisfaction in the kitchen – or in other traditional domestic activities, such as hosting, home-making, arranging flowers, dressing in a feminine way… there's nothing inherently "unfeminist" with any of that. But the broader interest in trad wives – women who espouse traditional 1950s-style family values, and dedicate themselves wholly to keeping house and raising kids – has been seen by many as a worryingly retrograde step. Less domestic goddess, more domestic servitude, is the gist of the criticism. "There is a certain undertone from some of........

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