So So Gay
As is fairly standard for me, I woke up this morning and logged onto Twitter. I like feeling I’m not alone in being dragged out of sleep and, on those occasions I’m not in bed with someone else, Twitter usually lets me know who else is rising bleary eyed and belligerent.
This morning though, pretty much the first thing I saw emblazoned upon my timeline was a pissed-up naked Prince Harry, which, let me tell you, is guaranteed to wake you up no matter how little you might want to.
After a frantic Google search and a fair amount of thumping my phone for not loading websites correctly, it became clear Prince Harry had been partying in Vegas over the weekend and one evening he had a little too much to drink, even by my standards. After visiting the hotel bar to pick up some friendly blonde ladies, they played a game of Strip Billiards – which is apparently a thing now – and one of Harry’s pals took a couple of photos of him in what the national papers tend to refer to as a ‘compromising position.’ Gossip osmosis then happened, probably with at least one of the Prince’s mates sending the photo to a friend back in the UK with the message ‘LOL Vegas bants!’, and three days later the nation saw the third in line to the throne wearing less than we’ve ever seen a royal wearing before.
Prince Harry has always been something of a PR liability to the Royal Family; in much the same way as Prince Philip is prone to being horribly racist, Harry has always misjudged what he can get away with doing. While William has been appropriately groomed for the throne and has avoided any embarrassing scenes, Harry has somehow managed to get himself into trouble over and over again. Between having his art teacher doing his A-levels for him and dressing up as a Nazi, you have to wonder who even lets him out of Buckingham Palace at all anymore. Maybe after he stood in for the Queen at the Olympic Closing Ceremony he went on the run? It’s the only reasonable explanation I can think of for this young man being allowed to Vegas by the notoriously scandal-phobic Windsor family.
Historically, the British have always been fairly prudish when it comes to getting your bits out – the only country in the world seen as more uptight about nudity than us is America, a land populated primarily by the descendants of ultra-puritanical Christians. Back in the 50s, if Europe was the strip-club-slash-brothel of the world, Britain was the nervous looking guy in the corner who thought a Ping-Pong show was a spectacle for table-based-sports enthusiasts. That’s changing somewhat, though. The more we liberal up, the more comfortable we are about discussing sex and showing our bodies off. Between the run of freaky looking genitals on Embarrassing Bodies and the mass popularity of Fifty Shades Of Grey, even with its awful prose and misleading representation of a healthy BDSM relationship, the British are getting to the point where most of us see nakedness as acceptable, if not pretty enjoyable – particularly if done with a partner or eight.
In addition, our relationship with the monarchy has always been unusual in anthropological terms. There aren’t many other nations in the world who overthrew their king, then quietly put his son back on the throne eleven years later. During the First World War, posters of Lord Kitchener drew hundreds of thousands of young British men to fight for their country and the German king who ruled it. In 1997 Princess Diana’s death, along with the various theories surrounding it and the Royal Family’s involvement, dropped the approval rating of the monarchy to 48%, but the Queen has almost singlehandedly turned that around. Her approval rating is currently over 80% and, while this may be because she looks a lot like everyone’s gran, it could also be a testament to the opinion held by the majority of British people that the Windsors are an important, impressive and most of all current part of our culture. Those of us who like the Royals like them because they seem modern, like they know how the world works at the moment. They don’t take themselves as seriously as they could be doing, and it works wonders for them.
With Prince Harry getting his arse out playing strip billiards, we’re finally seeing these two sides to our culture coming together in a way some publicists could only dream of engineering. Perhaps the Windsors have already figured this out and this is actually yet another piece of genius subtlety in upping the monarchy’s public image. No one didn’t already expect it of Harry, a fair few of us quite wanted to see him undressed anyway and most of us have had those nights out when we’ve woken up to a dry mouth and a text informing us we need to untag some photos on Facebook ‘or else no-one will ever employ you ever’ (an actual quote from my mother after a trip I made to Spain).
The simple fact is, Harry looks human, he looks like he’s having a laugh, and it’s adorably unstaged. If the leaked photos had been like those awful self-promotional Chris Brown photo-in-the-mirror shots, it might be a different story, but as it stands the world looks at these pictures and sees a guy who isn’t showing off. The worst response anyone seems to have had has been ‘at the age of 27 he should know better.’ Well, if I’m honest, I hope I still don’t know better at 27 – if we were all having as much of a laugh as Harry’s doing, we’d be a very lucky group of people.
