The tabloids today are huffing and puffing and whipping their readers up into a frenzy over some comments Hilary Mantel made about the Duchess of Cambridge.
Even more amusingly the Prime Minister has jumped on the bandwagon to criticise what Mantel has said. You expect the tabloids to twist a few cherry picked phrases from a speech into some kind of scandal, but you don't expect the PM who has been educated at some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world to add a couple of misguided soundbites without, evidently, reading exactly what Mantel said.
I have read the speech, or at least the essay published in the London Review of Books. I suggest you do too. Not only is it a fantastic, interesting, intelligent essay, giving great feminist perspective on the role of royal women, past and present, but it is incredibly sympathetic towards the Duchess of Cambridge. She is in fact criticising the way we, manipulated by the media, are encouraged to consider royal women as nothing more than wombs, clothes hangers.
Her criticism is not directed at Kate at all, but at the very people who are jumping to her defence today, outraged on her behalf. Those newspapers who are combining their disgust at the speech they have not read and have quoted far out of context with the first pictures of the Duchess herself and her bump. Irony in action. It's beautiful. And as for Dave? He would have done well to just not get involved in this one, and to wait until he is better informed before making stupid comments.
Well said, couldn't have said it better myself. Including the points about the PM--what was he thinking? (answer: nothing)
ReplyDeleteI think what made me even more irritated than the idiocy of the press was the idiocy of some of the public's comments, citing Ms Mantel's age, gender and appearance as reasons why she didn't have a right to say anything bad about Kate, as being older, less attractive (in their opinion) and also a female (sisters unite) must mean she was simply motivated by jealousy because why else would anyone want to criticise Kate (which she wasn't, ugh!)?
So only young pretty men can say anything critical about pretty young women?
Anyway, great post.
Thank you. Pretty young men and mail journalists and columnists both have the right, I think.
DeleteI haven't read all the fuss because I think Kate Middleton is lovely! I also think Cameron is a knob and would be much better off living in a foreign country because he spends more time abroad sorting out 3rd world countries than he does our own. Out of touch with reality isn't the word.
ReplyDeleteCJ x
Sometimes our media are just deplorable. The poor quality of journalism astounds me. As a scientist, each word we publish must be referenced and able to stand up to scrutiny by our peers. Wish it were the same for journalists.
ReplyDelete