What concerns me is that people around the world seem even more vested in this anachronistic institution today than they were when William’s parents, Prince Charles and Lady Diana, got married 30 years ago (on July 29, 1981).
I have long maintained that royalty is anathema to the universal principle that all people are created equal. Moreover, that any democracy that institutionalizes royalty in the twenty-first century is almost as cancerous (and oxymoronic) as any that institutionalized slavery in the nineteenth.
(“The Problem Is Not Kate’s Weight, It’s William’s Title,” The iPINIONS Journal, February 16, 2011)
Given the above, it should come as no surprise that I was not among those who hailed the announcement (on September 8) that, like Princess Diana, Duchess Kate is well on the way to fulfilling her most important royal duty: providing an heir and a spare … or two.
E
xcept that I am truly concerned about the physical trauma her pregnancies are exacting on her rail-thin body; to say nothing of the psychological trauma on her royally lobotomized mind:
Earlier this month Kate Middleton was forced to cancel her visit to Malta, her first solo royal tour, because, due to her second pregnancy, she is again suffering from the condition [hyperemesis gravidarum]. For those of you who haven’t been briefed yet: no, it is not just ‘morning sickness’ and no, ‘drinking flat coke or eating a ginger biscuit’ won’t make it stop…
The comparison of hyperemesis to morning sickness is like breaking your arm in several places and then being told you’ve just knocked your funny bone.
(London Guardian, September 27, 2014)
More to the point, though, I took a lot of flak for predicting that Kate’s royal life would be no bed of roses:
I wish this couple all the best – especially Kate. For, as Lady Di found out in so many tragic ways, marrying a prince and future king does not guarantee living a charmed life.
Indeed, William proposing to her with his mother’s engagement ring might be another bad omen in this respect. Not to mention that she already seems afflicted with the anorexia nervosa that the anxieties of joining ‘the firm’ caused Diana to develop….
(“Prince William to Kate: Enough of the Wait,” The iPINIONS Journal, November 17, 2010)
Yet here is how no less an authority than Germaine Greer, author of such feminist tomes as The Female Eunuch (1970) and Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), is echoing not just my concerns for Kate’s health but my calls for British republicanism as well:
The girl is too thin … vomiting her guts up…
Kate is not even allowed to decorate her own houses… The whole thing is a mad anachronism. The ‘firm’ tell us that the first born will now become the monarch regardless of sex. Well, big fucking deal!
(Newsweek Europe, September 25, 2014)
In this same report, Newsweek Europe also quoted “award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel, who in 2013 provoked controversy when she delivered a lecture, ‘Royal Bodies,’ to the London Review of Books.” Here is how she echoed my sentiments and concerns:
[The Duchess of Cambridge is a] plastic princess born to breed… as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character… Her only point and purpose being to give birth.
No doubt the disillusioning fact that this was “her only point and purpose” in life contributed as much as anything to the breakdown of Princess Diana’s mind and marriage. I fear a similar fate may await Kate; well, her mind even if not her marriage.
Related commentaries:
The problem…
Prince William to Kate…