I don’t think it’s interesting to say I love The Beatles. Most people love The Beatles, and some of them love The Beatles more than I could dream to. But, just as people love to love The Beatles, many also love to hate Yoko Ono.
I, like many, grew up with an awareness of The Beatles and was equally aware of the “fact” that Yoko Ono broke up the band. According to everyone else, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr had been happily creating groundbreaking pop music until Ono attached herself to Lennon and drove the lads apart. In the aftermath of The Beatles, she continued on as a ball-and-chain, leeching off the fame of her new husband even in his death.
Even when I was young, I was wary of assuming all fault fell to Ono. This certainly didn’t mean I’d never noticed how complicated she could be. Her strange moments fall on a continuum of “just odd” to “not a good look,” where at one end she caterwauls over a jam session between John and Chuck Berry, and at the other she denies her stepson the letters written between him and his dead father. I cannot justify everything Yoko Ono did, nor do I intend to. All the same, I could never believe she was capable of single-handedly tearing The Beatles apart.
My perception of Ono especially changed when I first watched Disney’s “The Beatles: Get Back.” Nearly eight hours long, the documentary series reveals important details that were left out in the original “Let it Be” film. Ono is one of those more complicated details. She doesn’t insert herself into the band, but rather exists in the background as The Beatles go about their own business. She reads fan magazines, practices calligraphy and rarely speaks.
“The Beatles: Get Back” most importantly paints a picture of the band in their final days. It’s not all the doom and gloom seen in “Let it Be,” but there’s certainly a sense that things are coming to a close after the death of their manager: Lennon is going in a different direction creatively, Harrison doesn’t really want to be a Beatle anymore and McCartney is becoming a family man.
The death of The Beatles is often pinned on one person alone — mostly Ono and sometimes Paul or John. But if anything, the end of The Beatles came at the hands of four manager-less grown men who were no longer the people they had been a decade prior; a breakup was coming at some point or another. And even so, the blame falls to Yoko Ono. As Paul prophetically notes early on in Part 2 of “The Beatles: Get Back,” “It’s going to be such an incredible sort of comical thing in 50 years’ time. ‘They broke up ‘cause Yoko sat on an amp.’ ”
More than half a century later, the treatment of Meghan Markle mirrors that of Yoko Ono. The two are similar enough that memes and posts from the likes of former French first lady Carla Bruni have likened the two. Both found their husbands in the United Kingdom and returned to the U.S. after breaking apart brotherly bonds, and both are heavily scrutinized for it.
As an American, I remember the period leading up to Meghan Markle’s wedding to Prince Harry as something people were excited for. As an American, a woman of Color, a divorcée and a former actress, she seemed to be a refreshing addition to the British royal family. However, public support for Meghan quickly began to wane as she was criticized for the smallest actions she took, from holding her baby bump to eating avocados. Compared with her sister-in-law, Kate Middleton, Meghan was unfairly slammed by the British tabloid press for every minute detail of her being.
On some level, I can understand why someone might feel iffy about Meghan Markle. On the surface, Harry and Meghan’s decision to leave the royal family shortly after she arrived could appear as if it was Meghan’s decision alone. Many chalk up Meghan’s discomfort to her not knowing what she was getting into, and many likewise attribute her and Harry’s continued expression of discomfort to be a media tour.
I’m certainly not a fan of the royal family, or even of Harry and Meghan. No one is obligated to love Meghan Markle, or Yoko Ono, for that matter. But just as The Beatles’ breakup was the result of tension predating Yoko’s arrival, Harry and Meghan’s departure from the royal family is more indicative of institutional issues than a leeching wife.
We too often treat these women as seductresses who lured their men away from the best things in their lives without considering that someone like Harry might live a better life with them. After all, being born into (or even marrying into) an institution like the royal family spells a lifetime in the spotlight with decisions already made for you.
It’s also worth pointing out how racism and misogyny play into the experiences of both Yoko and Meghan. As a Japanese American woman, Yoko was subject to slurs, mockery and comments telling her to “get back to her own country” by both Beatles fans and the press. Meghan herself has been faced with #MeghanGoHome and continues to be held to double standards that her white counterparts don’t encounter.
When The Beatles break up or the royal family falls apart, it seems easiest to attribute it all to one person, especially if that person is a complicated woman who makes decisions that are hard to understand. Rarely do we take into consideration that these situations, as well as everyone involved, are likely more complex in ways we as a viewing public will never know.
As Yoko Ono now reaches her 90s, her legacy and treatment have been reexamined. She was always more than just John Lennon’s weird second wife; she was an artist and a feminist, long before she met her husband and long after he died. As we consider all of this, we also must evaluate why we were so cruel in the first place. Perhaps most importantly, we also need to reflect on why we keep doing it again and again.
Whether it’s Yoko Ono, Courtney Love, Meghan Markle or whomever else, we continuously repeat this cycle of blaming women based on their proximity to men. Only decades after the fact do we realize our faults until we find another woman to blame. The truth is, women are allowed to be complicated, odd and sometimes hard to understand —, and one doesn’t have to be blameless in order to not be blamed for everything.
Audra M. Woehle is an Opinion Columnist who writes about gender and sexuality in popular culture. She can be reached at awoehle@umich.edu.