On Princesses and Privacy

A royal shitshow of thoughts

I’m going to preface this by saying that I do not care about the monarchy.

At all.

I don’t care about a single member of the monarchy, nor do I care about what it is they do or do not “deserve” when it comes to their role (whether inherited or opted into) in an entirely made up contract of power and privilege. The fact a global population of people collapsing under the weight of climate crisis, late stage capitalism and the violence of white colonialism and supremacy can still be lured into following the antics of a bloviated lineage of moral vampires is testament to how successfully we’ve all been drawn into perpetuating our own oppression.

Is that our fault? Not explicitly - but as with all systems of oppression, we should be doing our hardest to resist. And that (at least to my mind) includes rejecting the role expected of us to play dutiful subjects chastened into apologetic silence by the marching out of a Beloved Princess to put to bed once and for all the RUDE conjecture about where she’s been with a masterful bait-and-switch.

Surprise! Delicate white womanhood wins again! (If this makes you bristle, please just read on and let that percolate for a bit.)

I have some thoughts (unsurprisingly) about the Big Reveal in the season finale of Where In The World Is Kate Middleton? If you’re expecting them to be neat and tidy, I’m sorry to say you’ll be disappointed. Messy, untidy thinking is too often sneered at as being unproductive or uncharitable, but the truth is that in a messy, untidy world sometimes these are the only kinds of thoughts we can form.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. In almost all cases, a cancer diagnosis is cause for sympathy and compassion. (I say almost all, because there are some people for whom a cancer diagnosis is frankly too generous.) I may not care for the monarchy and think everyone directly involved in upholding it is an unsympathetic ghoul of one kind or another…but I’m the same age as Kate Middleton and I also have a young child. Having lost my own mother to cancer when I was only 26, I am all too familiar with the terrible pain of terminal illness. To have had to endure even the possibility of that when I was only a wee bairn would have been profoundly devastating, no matter how privileged the environment in which that trauma is being navigated. A mother is a mother and a child is a child, and I would never take pleasure in the thought of one losing the other.

But that’s as far as my care extends particularly in regards to the question of whether or not the *public* has behaved badly in turning her disappearance into a moment of levity - necessary, it must be said, in a world where entities and institutions like the monarchy have turned living itself for the majority of people into a anxiety ridden churn. Kate Middleton is also a prominent member of one of the most powerful, most corrupt families and dynasties that has existed in modern history. And not only does she maintain their grotesque aristocratic fuckery, she actively fought to be a part of it. The British Monarchy (otherwise known as The Firm) represents the most obscene of class based oppression, designating power as an inherited legacy and the privilege that comes with it as an ancestral right.

To conceal the repulsive inequality maintained by the monarchy - the same inequality that sees millions of Brits freezing each year (with almost 5000 of them actually dying as a result) even as the Royal Family pulls an annual “salary” of £86 million in a “Sovereign Grant” funded by British taxpayers as a starting point for their income - The Firm directs a world class performance committed to the pretence of duty, sacrifice and honour.

My mother referred to this kind of hypocrisy as noblesse oblige, which is the French term for “the obligations of the nobility.” Basically, if you have both wealth and power, you have a moral duty to behave honourably to those who don’t. This is why we see members of The Firm poncing about at ribbon cutting ceremonies, feigning an interest in charity work and pretending to care about the climate crisis and the need to find environmental solutions. If the British public can be persuaded to believe the family literally living in a gold plated palace cares about them and their needs, they’ll hand over their money and support eagerly and be soothed in exchange by the narcotic like effect of televised pomp and ceremony. They’ll line up for hours to see people with more money than the God they claim chose them for the job waving at them graciously from a balcony in which they literally look down at the people who fund their lifestyle.

None of this is hidden information. It’s not even all that controversial to point out. However much or as little we might know about these parasites and their day-to-day affairs, we all know that ascension to the throne is dictated by the order of birth. Until only recently, it was explicitly outlined that it was only the first born son (if there was one, which historically proved to be the death knell for a lot of women unable to fulfil their duty to King and Cuntry) who would ascend to the throne. When the decision was made to scrap this to just be first born child, a lot of people celebrated as if this was somehow a win for feminism and equal rights. This is how deluded we’ve become about what true liberation looks like, and how fantastically superficial and indefensible so much modern liberal feminism really is.

So why in the everliving fuck are we participating in this fucking pantomime?

Since waking up this morning, I’ve seen numerous accounts posting self reflective statements on how bad they feel about “hounding” a woman into having to reveal her “personal medical information”. Comparisons have been made to Diana, and the tragic circumstances of her death. In response, angry comments are being left from monarchists and class defenders chastising these people and their posts for contributing to a “witch hunt” and “forcing” poor old Kate to have to come out publicly during the worst, scariest time of her life to release a statement when it should be nobody’s business!!! I saw one such comment refer to the disgrace of badgering a “young mother” into exposing herself to the world. In another circumstance, a “royal watcher” (the fact that can even be described as a job title is absurd) has been forced to apologise while facing global trolling because he posted a countdown timer to the Palace announcement. SHAME ON HIM!!!

The bait-and-switch that’s taking place here is not just one where KM’s monstrous privilege is replaced by the time honoured trump card of the delicate wilting rose, but where the people who fund that privilege are now being chided for daring to step on it. I’m exhausted even thinking about the avalanche of think pieces being filed right now about a woman and her right to privacy, drenched in the sombre tones of people whose compassion in regards to this situation is mostly driven by the thought of their piece going viral.

I’m sorry, but fuck off.

This is where the messy, untidy thoughts come in - and perhaps to those two descriptors I’ll also add sharp, honest and to-the-point.

The Royal Family is a circus. They know it, we know it, and the Devil they make the pact with knows it. Except instead of a circus of people with actual talent and the genuine desire to spread joy, they’re motivated by maintaining the Big Top in which they perform and promising all those who keep it running for them that they can have a glimpse of a bit of magic in exchange. They gallantly agree to let The Poors line up for coronations, funerals and weddings, allowing them all to think that this is sort of, partly, not-quite-but-almost their family. It’s artificial bullshit designed to distract and placate a peasantry from rising up against them, just as it was back in the Middle Ages when the same aristrocracy conspired to quell the political uprisings of the serfs.

Kate Middleton is a real person in the sense that she has flesh and blood and thoughts and feelings. I’ve no doubt the fear she’s feeling right now is also real, as is her very real sense of grief about her children. I can feel empathy for her on that basis.

But that’s where my willingness to play along with the lessons of this particular After School Special ends. Kate Middleton is not a real person in the sense of literally any other metric. She isn’t a real person in the sense of having to go to work everyday for fear she won’t be able to pay her bills. She isn’t a real person in the sense of worrying about what might happen if she gets sick and can’t take care of her children. She isn’t a real person in the sense that the majority of people funding her lifestyle are forced to be “real people” just to survive in a society that still salivates over the idea of inherited royal power and the neat predictability of the British class system.

I’m not saying she has to like it or lump it, or that being a member of the monarchy means she has to agree to intrusions on her private life or the idea she owes details of her medical challenges to the public. I’m saying that this is the contract and it’s just one of an endless number of reasons why the contract itself - the very premise of a “royal family” practicing their petty little noblesse oblige all over the front pages of newspapers given carefully negotiated access to their lives - needs to be completely destroyed. It is a farce. An obscenity. An absolute charade of a performance designed to maintain the kind of absolute power and control that saw the British “empire” colonise nations for centuries under the auspices of the Royal Family. And like all oppressive systems, it’s become extremely good at rebranding itself, shapeshifting and pretending to have moved with the current of social progress.

True progress would be abolishing the monarchy altogether. Dismantling the power system, selling the vast amounts of property and assets and paying reparations to the people and states brutalised by that 1000 year history of white supremacy and colonisation. Returning the artefacts stolen by the monarchy to their rightful places of origin. If the Royals want to be considered “real people”, they could start by dismantling forever the system that clearly separates them from anything remotely resembling what that might even mean.

I cannot fucking sit here with a straight face and watch as people - and those calling themselves feminists, no less! - handwring over the rights of a fucking Royal to have her “medical privacy” respected. I am literally cringing seeing people try to turn her into the the victim of a misogynist media and commentariat.

And here’s where I’m going to bring in Gaza, and the hypocritical silence we’ve seen from so many of the same feminists now chest beating about Kate’s rights. Yes, we can care about multiple things at one time. But I would also wager that the vast majority of people making this their Big Issue have spent exactly ZERO time caring about the mothers and children being annihilated in Gaza - and in many of those cases (you all know who I’m talking about, and I could probably write word for word the nonsense she’ll be babble about it tomorrow) they’ve actively undermined that trauma and discredited it. If we’re going to talk about people - and MOTHERS in particular having the ‘right’ to privacy - then we cannot ignore the fact mothers in Gaza are being forced to share the most horrifying, traumatising and PRIVATE videos of their children’s final moments or unimaginable suffering just to try to get the fucking world to fucking sit up and care.

So no, I simply do not have the fucking energy to care about whether or not Kate Middleton’s been Done Wrong by the media, the public or the monarchy’s own clownish PR department. And while I’m aware writing something of this length seems to suggest the opposite, it really is just because the abject hypocrisy of it all is too enraging.

All people deserve dignity, respect and compassion as the basis of humanity. But there are scales of harm done to people on the basis of where humanity decides they sit in terms of value. Watching six months of a genocide be livestreamed to my phone while the institutional leeches responsible for the monarchy continue to either ignore it, condone it or actively fund it has sapped by ability to care about a single one of them. I hope Kate Middleton recovers. Beyond that, I couldn’t give a single fuck about this nonsense of privacy, sexism and What A Princess Deserves. It’s distraction - and everytime we get drawn into making these utterly inane conversations the focal point of our politics rather than get to work destroying classist systems of power and privilege, we place another brick in the wall that imprisons us all.

Free Palestine.

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