- FRONT PAGE
-
BLOGS
-
Chrissie Hynde
: Don't Get Me Wrong: I Won't Stand For Cruelty to Geese
-
Ed Miliband
: A Distant and Distracted Cameron Cannot Tackle Tax Avoidance
-
Charles Moore
: Margaret Thatcher's First Visit to Washington of the Reagan Presidency
-
Natalie Bennett
: Jobs You Can Build a Life On: The British Economy Isn't Delivering
-
Seth Freedman
: We Don't Need No Regulation
-
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Let's coin a new term for the Royal Twins. Let's call them... The Pwins (Trademark pending). What if these twins happened to be a healthy little boy - and a healthy little girl... And now - the last and most wondrous step of all: What if the babies were delivered by Caesarean Section?
Monarchies codify the superiority of a man to a woman. A king always outranks a queen - a man always outranks a woman. The highest position in a royal house may never be occupied by a woman because the highest position is that of king, which is reserved for a man.
So ladies, if I can speak frankly, discovering you're pregnant by constantly throwing up your guts seems so unreasonable. It's an utter shock to both mind and body. Now I know that morning sickness is considered a common side effect to the early stages of pregnancy, but for some women it can be so much more debilitating than that. For a desperately unlucky few, it's potentially life threatening for the baby. My pregnancy experience was somewhere in the middle of the multi-coloured sickness spectrum.
As we enter seven or eight months of closely monitoring the Duchess of Cambridge's progress with her pregnancy, we should remember one vital thing: This pregnancy is happening to a father too.
Miserable though it may be to experience as a condition, in fact 'morning sickness' (if it's not of the rarer more severe kind), oddly enough, can be good news for a pregnancy. It's associated with lowered risk for miscarriage, pre-term birth, low birth weight, and perinatal death.
Does it matter - in the slightest - if our future King is not a dish? Does it matter if Prince William is not up there with the rest of the Euro-hunks like Prince Felipe of Spain or Prince Haakon of Norway?
Fertility rights are hugely important. But what's happening in (nee) Middleton's middle shouldn't be up for public discussion. It's fantastic that another royal is on the way but it would be even better if the press could stop the speculation on how it's gestating for the next half year.
You could be forgiven this week for thinking there was nothing more important going on in the world than the unveiling of semi-nude photos of the Duchess of Cambridge. On one side of the world, our future queen kept a never fading, gracious smile fixed for the cameras, as her nine-day tour of the Far East and South Pacific came to an end. On the other, her lawyers, magazine editors, media commentators and every one in-between had their say on the rights and wrongs of publishing the now infamous topless snaps.
Here's what's really at stake - these naked royalty photos are all about us "commoners" feeling the power. Just as much of the tabloids are filled with photos and stories of celebrities falling on their faces in some fashion - it makes us feel temporarily "better" than them.
Of course negative stories about women - their bodies and behaviour in particular - are the choice fodder of some sections of the British press.
Here in Paris, the most common reaction to the topless photos that I've seen has been a typically French squint. They furrow their brow, raise one side of their mouth as if to show off a newly capped incisor, and exhale noisily. The English-speaking equivalent of the expression would be "duh". The subtext is, what did you expect? The second a famous woman takes off her bikini top anywhere in France, she is going to hear the click of a camera and the patter of tiny fingers emailing the photo to a magazine editor.
Following the events of the recent weeks (Prince Harry's naked pictures in a Vegas hotel and Kate Middleton's topless pictures on holiday) some may be wondering whether it is possible for the royals to have it all. They have the titles, popularity and money, but it appears that they also want to live their lives like everyone else.
One such side-effect of the sickness of sharing and the ease with which the infection can be passed on is the resurrection online of the spirit of a TV show you never thought you'd see in the UK again. Smile, everybody, you're on Candid Camera, whether you like it or not - and you may never even find out.
But, what about the internet, I hear you cry? Kate's topless photos have shot around the world. Doesn't this make an utter nonsense of press regulation, statutory or non-statutory? And isn't it unfair to put newspapers, already in a dodgy financial state, at a commercial disadvantage by not being able to publish content widely available online? There are no easy answers. But, unless you want to dispense with regulation altogether, to give newspapers an automatic right to reproduce anything they fancy from the internet surely cannot be justified.
However, when the issue at stake is not immorally-accessed video footage of illegal drone strikes on civilians, but instead pictures of a famous person's floppy bits, then the philosophical momentum drains somewhat from the freedom of the press argument.
During the lead up to her Diamond Jubilee, our 86 year old monarch's dress sense has been the topic of many a fashion article. She apparently knows what suits her, has a distinctive style and always dresses appropriately.
