A small rant...
Feb. 20th, 2013 08:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sildil...and although it's a facebook matter, I do it here as if I do it 'over there' I know I will upset a lot of work colleagues (though actually I am considering a cull of most of them anyway).
My rant is actually about ill-informed, jumping on the bandwagon, 'I get all my inormation I need from the tabloids' type comments. Someone posted something along the lines of 'having just seen a photo of Hilary Mantel, I think that her comments about Kate..' (beloved and saintly wife of Prince William) '...are a touch of green eyed jealousy...'
I couldn't ignore that. I really hate people making judgements, however witty and flippant, about people's appearance like that. I left a comment pointing out that Hilary Mantel looks the way she does because of severe, undiagnosed endometriosis and often refers to it herself. Said colleague then asked me 'what that had to do with her being a bitch about Kate?'
And that's the whole point, she WASN'T being a bitch about Saint Kate, she was actually complaining about the prurient interest that the public and the press have in the bodies of royal women, and have had ever since the time of Henry the Eighth. 'Is she too thin, too fat, pregnant yet, not pregnant, going to have a son, a daughter and if so will it be in line to the throne?' and so on and so forth. She referred to a comment made about Diana, "when it was announced that Diana was to join the royal family, the Duke of Edinburgh is said to have given her his approval because she would ‘breed in some height’..."
She ended her talk with the following plea; "We don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago. History makes fools of us, makes puppets of us, often enough. But it doesn’t have to repeat itself. In the current case, much lies within our control. I’m not asking for censorship. I’m not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes."
But of course, it's not in the tabloids' interest to report THAT bit.
My rant is actually about ill-informed, jumping on the bandwagon, 'I get all my inormation I need from the tabloids' type comments. Someone posted something along the lines of 'having just seen a photo of Hilary Mantel, I think that her comments about Kate..' (beloved and saintly wife of Prince William) '...are a touch of green eyed jealousy...'
I couldn't ignore that. I really hate people making judgements, however witty and flippant, about people's appearance like that. I left a comment pointing out that Hilary Mantel looks the way she does because of severe, undiagnosed endometriosis and often refers to it herself. Said colleague then asked me 'what that had to do with her being a bitch about Kate?'
And that's the whole point, she WASN'T being a bitch about Saint Kate, she was actually complaining about the prurient interest that the public and the press have in the bodies of royal women, and have had ever since the time of Henry the Eighth. 'Is she too thin, too fat, pregnant yet, not pregnant, going to have a son, a daughter and if so will it be in line to the throne?' and so on and so forth. She referred to a comment made about Diana, "when it was announced that Diana was to join the royal family, the Duke of Edinburgh is said to have given her his approval because she would ‘breed in some height’..."
She ended her talk with the following plea; "We don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago. History makes fools of us, makes puppets of us, often enough. But it doesn’t have to repeat itself. In the current case, much lies within our control. I’m not asking for censorship. I’m not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes."
But of course, it's not in the tabloids' interest to report THAT bit.