Britain: GET OVER Prince Harry!
What happens in Vegas isn’t quite staying in Vegas.
If you’re born within a certain class, it’s likely that at some point or another, you’ll do some of the things your peers do for fun. It makes sense. And provided that your leisure time doesn’t cause injury, or violate the law, then no problems should arise from what you do with it.
Sadly, it seems necessary in Britain to restate the fact that ‘common’ people with social mores such as partying and getting their wang out exist. Such behaviour tends to offend the decorum of a very small, privileged, and impenetrable league of elites, who hover far from contact with ordinary British life, yet still have a significant influence on our culture.
The royal family have libidos. They even have sexy parts of the anatomy, as TMZ revealed to the world yesterday. They sometimes do things with those sexy parts of the anatomy, driven by the same sexy urges as other members of the human race.
And when, like other humans, they may get tired of oppressively boring work, such as upholding the rigid, dull rules of a narrow caste excited about the specific use of cutlery, they may like to “let their hair down,” as we’d put it in colloquial parlance.
This seems so obvious as to not need stating at all. However, our stuffy nation remains surprised, scorning, and tittle-tattling over pictures leaked over the internet of Prince Harry’s tomfoolery in a VIP lounge with a young woman. We need to remind ourselves that it’s OK to be a bit ‘base’ now and again; it’s the base of society that holds the rest of it up, after all.
Our fascination with Harry actually betrays what is often claimed; that it’s nice to see him acting like a normal young man, because our voyeurism makes a fetish of his boozy, lurid antics more so than it does of any other public figure. When a member of the aristocracy sidles up to common vice, the gag reflex in our society is to wonder what a cultivated young man could want from joining in, as if there were nothing is more lesser or wrong than the commoner’s form of fun.
‘Naughty’ Prince Harry captivates the public imagination precisely because there are still people who think there’s a spectacle in the royal family appearing ‘normal’; people who probably think that taking off your pants is abnormal, sinful and delinquent behaviour which should be wrung out of the present generation of failed English gents who need some correcting and straightening up.
Like it or not, on any one night in a student city such as Southampton, hundreds of students will be competing for the highest blood-alcohol levels, before falling in to bed with each other in a tangled, spangled mess. Anyone who thinks there’s anything new or controversial about this behaviour needs their head surgically removed from the rear end of the 1950s.
We really don’t need statements from the palace and a fierce public debate to follow Prince Harry’s ‘antics’. For as long as people enjoy reading about the royals, there will be a market for stories on Prince Harry wanging out. It’s odd that our media can’t get over such a regular, and actually rather boring, fact of life.