++Curse words shift a lot over time. They’re in the middle of a big shift right now. +
++One may as well begin with all the “cunts.” +
++Over the past few years, my social media feeds have gradually filled up with people (largely American cis white women in their 30s) congratulating themselves on “serving cunt.” Cunty little librarian glasses are all the rage. “Can a historian tell me why, as a society, we got less cunt?” demanded a viral TikTok in February that compared candy-colored Y2K technology with sleek post-iPhone contemporary tech. “QUIZ: Are They Really Serving Cunt or Do You Just Like Saying That?” asked Reductress in December. “Cunty (cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt),” sings Beyoncé in “PURE/HONEY.” +
++Yet about a decade ago, most of the people I knew considered the word to be nearly unspeakable outside of ribald British cinema. It was so offensive, so shocking, that we called it “the c-word.” We suggested it was one of the most offensive words in American English. +
++“Cunt” is only the latest in a series of previously unspeakable words that have over time become trendy to say. “Fuck” is now in such widespread use that it’s come to seem a little antiquated that you still can’t say it on network television. (Remember those “what the fork?” ads for The Good Place?) And TV long ago gave up on trying to ban phrases like “ass” and “pissed off,” although they were once considered so obscene Lenny Bruce was arrested for using them. +
++In the face of all these dirty words, a person might be forgiven for asking: Why the fuck are people swearing so goddamn much these days? +
++It’s hard to prove, says Michael Adams, author of In Praise of Profanity, that people actually are swearing more than they used to. “That’s for a number of methodological reasons,” he explains. For one thing, while people swear a lot on social media, it’s hard to show that social media users are a representative sample of the population. For another, we don’t have a real sense of how much people swore 50 years ago, as they unforesightfully failed to keep detailed records. +
++But if people aren’t swearing more than they used to, it does seem to be the case that they are swearing differently than they used to. “The specific words that are judged to be profane change over time,” says Benjamin Bergen, a professor of cognitive science and the author of What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. “We’re currently experiencing a lot of flux in exactly how offensive particular words are judged to be.” +
++To understand how swear words change over time, it’s time for a brief history lesson. +
++One of the harshest medieval swears you could say was “zounds.” +
++In medieval England, lots of the four-letter words we use to talk about bodies and sex were considered normal descriptive language. In her book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, Melissa Mohr notes that both London and Oxford boasted medieval streets called Grope-cunt Lane (where the brothels were). By a medieval country pond, Mohr writes, “There would’ve been a shiterow in there fishing, a windfucker flying above, arse-smart and cuntehoare hugging the edges of the pond, and pissabed amongst the grass.” (Those are, in today’s sadly unvivid terminology, the birds heron and kestrel; and the plants water pepper, horehound, and dandelions.) +
++“They were kind of direct words for certain things that you wouldn’t necessarily say if you had an audience with the king, but they didn’t have any extraordinary power,” Mohr told Vox. “They appeared in schoolbooks.” +
++What people considered obscene in medieval England was religious swearing. A word like “zounds,” from “Christ’s wounds,” could be genuinely shocking, which is why even today, our vocabulary for talking about profanity is religiously inflected. We talk about oaths and swearing and cursing because in the Middle Ages, to invoke God out loud meant that God was going to pay attention to whatever you were promising. When you said, “God damnit,” you were swearing before God, and he might damn you to hell if you didn’t deliver. +
++Mohr argues that bodily words were unremarkable in the Middle Ages because we had so little privacy from one another’s bodies. In a time of shared bedrooms and no indoor plumbing, defecation and sex happened more or less openly, and there was little point in being delicate about it with your language. +
++As the world grew more private, however, starting in the 15th century, bodily words grew steadily more taboo. By the 19th century, Victorians had begun to describe pants as “unmentionables.” Religious oaths were losing their edge in the post-Enlightenment age, but “fuck” and its ilk were by now plenty shocking enough to fill the vacuum. +
++Now, “fuck” seems to have become a lot less shocking than it used to be. +
++Over the past few decades, the f-word has grown steadily less offensive +
++Bergen thinks that we’re seeing a generational shift in what kinds of words are considered offensive. “Folks who are maybe 40 or older tend to think of profanity as including words that describe bodily functions and sex,” he says. “In more recent survey data, younger Americans tend to judge those words as far less offensive than older Americans do, to the point where the word ‘shit’ shows up for most people as not even in the top 50 most offensive words. For folks 25 and younger, ‘fuck’ is not in the top 20.” +
++Bergen says the “grandmother” of these surveys is one performed by Kristin Janschewitz at UCLA in 2008. Janschewitz gave her subjects a list of 460 words and asked them to rate each one for taboo and offense, along with a few other factors. In the final tally, “fuck” is fifth on the list of most taboo words, but it doesn’t appear in the top 10 list of most offensive. In other words, it’s a word college students know you’re not supposed to say, but that most of them aren’t particularly bothered by hearing. Bergen gives a version of the same survey to 100 undergraduates every year, and he says “fuck” is only trending more and more strongly out of the offensive category over time. +
++Profanity as we know it today evolves, spreads, and flourishes within subcultures, especially the subcultures of minority groups. “They are places where you have very clear in–versus-out group relations, and oftentimes where you find close social bonds and high degrees of emotionality,” says Berger. “That’s where you get the most interestingly creative profanity, and it’s the most profanity overall.” +
++You can signal your membership within a marginalized subgroup by using the profanity people within that group have reclaimed for themselves (which is why, as Fox News is always pointing out with deep outrage, it is okay for Black people to use the n-word but not white people). Most of the exciting and interesting slang in American English comes from subcultures, and profanity is no exception. Even the military, which gave us “SNAFU” and “clusterfuck,” can function as a linguistic subculture with its own colorful innovations on the f-word. +
++The queer community has historically tended to play with profanity with particular abandon, dirty words about sex and bodies being of particular interest to a group marginalized for their sexual preferences. “Serving cunt,” that fashionable phrase, comes from the drag scene, and gradually made its way toward the mainstream from there. +
++“What was once restricted to the drag community and understood to be a marker of that community’s identity now ends up seeping into mainstream culture through media like RuPaul’s Drag Race,” says Adams. “And then before you know it, people are using words they don’t know where they come from. They don’t know what they signify to the people who they mattered to first. They develop meanings or people start using them in ways that don’t really correspond to their subgroup origins. In some ways, that’s just the history of language.” +
++A lot has to happen, though, for “serving cunt” to go from Paris Is Burning to the Twitter account of a cis straight white woman. There are a few different theories as to why sex and body words have become less taboo over time. One possible factor is the rise of social media, where people write for a wide audience as informally as they talk to their close friends in private. +
++“It used to be that the only media you could consume was highly edited,” says Bergen. “With social media, all of a sudden now we have direct access to people’s informal language. If we have access to people’s informal communication and it includes more profanity, that just means we’re going to be exposed to more of it and that’s going to normalize it, and so people have become inured.” +
++Covid has its role to play, too. In the post-lockdown work-from-home era, swearing in the workplace seems to have begun trending up. In 2022, the office software company Sentieo reported that from 2020 to 2021, the incidence of expletives in conference call transcripts jumped from 104 to 166. (Their sample size is limited to calls made using their software, so let’s not consider this a formal study.) “Business formality,” Sentieo noted in its analysis of the trend, “is on its way out.” It seems to be harder for people to keep their language office-friendly when they’re dialing into Zoom meetings from their couches — and as public profanity becomes more common, the division between office language and private language comes to seem more and more artificial. +
++There’s also the issue of the rise of Donald Trump, who the New York Times once dubbed “the profanity president.” Trump swears frequently, publicly, and gleefully (“shithole countries,” “I fired his ass,” “grab ’em by the pussy,” etc.) and his supporters love him for it. They consider Trump’s swearing to be part of his authenticity, proof that he really is one of them. +
++In apparent answer, rank-and-file politicians have begun to swear with public abandon. A 2019 analysis from GovPredict found that politicians posted curse words on Twitter fewer than 200 times in 2016. In 2018, however, politicians tweeted curses over 2,500 times. +
++“They realized that there was some power in the electorate that Trump had identified,” says Adams of the rise of political swearing. “It made these politicians seem more normal.” +
++The swearing politicians included those who at the time were actively seeking the Democratic nomination for president. After a mass shooting in 2019, Beto O’Rourke released a campaign T-shirt that said “This is fcked up. This is fcked up. This is fcked up. This is fcked up. This is fcked up. This is fcked up,” and then, in smaller type, “End gun violence now.” He began a press conference with the line, “Members of the press: What the fuck?” +
++“Profanity is not the f-bomb,” O’Rourke said on MSNBC of his frequent campaign trail swearing. “What’s profane is a 17-month-old baby being shot in the face.” +
++O’Rourke’s line here points to one of the big cultural shifts that has accompanied the fall of “fuck” as a word of great obscenity. As a country, we have gone through decades of social change centered around the idea of making our sexual culture less shame-based. We have birth control now. The sexual revolution has come and gone. The whole shift has been so successful that we’re now seeing the beginnings of a backlash to the pro-casual sex culture, with the right having successfully taken down Roe and freely admitting they plan to come for contraceptives next. In some ways, it’s easier to say “fuck” than it is to actually do the deed in the US right now — but the changes the sexual revolution made to our culture are still there in the language. By now, we have all read lots of books and heard speeches about how bodies and sex aren’t filthy, and what’s really filthy is violence. +
++Which perhaps is why today, the words in the English language that are considered truly unspeakable are words that are held to enact or symbolize violence. +
++The unspeakable words of today are the slurs +
++“Fuck” isn’t that offensive to millennials and Gen Z, but slurs are. In Janschewitz’s study, the n-word is found to be the most offensive and most taboo of all the words on her list. It’s so taboo that it’s against Vox style to spell the word out under most circumstances. +
++“I think you see a lot of intentional education of kids describing the ways in which slurs and other terms of abuse can be harmful, and I don’t think that’s a thing that really was discussed in the ’80s or ’90s around kids,” says Bergen. “You see it internalized by younger folks and Gen Z and so on, to the point where they take it on themselves to educate older people about their attitudes towards slurs.” +
++Mohr points out that when religious and sexual swears were still shocking, racial epithets mostly weren’t. “When they made Gone With the Wind in 1939, they made such a big deal about putting ‘damn’ in there,” she says. “But the n-word was just going to be in there like it was totally fine until some of the Black actors objected. Societal consciousness of that as a potential slur only happened quite recently in the bigger scheme of things.” +
++In this context, the oddity of “cunt” becomes a little clearer. “Cunt” is unusual because it is both a bodily expletive and a gendered slur. After decades evolving in the drag ball scene, it’s ripe for reclamation, but it’s also almost unspeakable, ranked six on Janschewitz’s list of taboo words. That makes it potentially hurtful, but it also makes it exceptionally exciting to say. It is that rare thing: a word about sex and bodies that still has the power to shock. +
++A new kind of masculinity is dominating music — leaving little room for yesterday’s pop idol. +
++In the year 2024, the name Justin Timberlake comes with a lot of baggage. +
++His Super Bowl halftime show performance six years ago — which coincided with the release of his last album, Man of the Woods — kicked off a serious round of discourse about his 2004 halftime show performance and the wardrobe malfunction that tanked Janet Jackson’s career while leaving Timberlake unscathed. +
++Then there was the way he handled his highly publicized 2002 breakup with Britney Spears, feeding into the sexist commentary surrounding her — the details of which resurfaced in the 2021 documentary Framing Britney Spears. In Spears’s 2023 memoir, The Woman In Me, she revealed more embarrassing revelations about Timberlake, further igniting fiery discussions about his privilege as a white man in an industry that unfairly punishes his Black and female counterparts. There have been cries of appropriation and of infidelity. +
++Now, after years away from the spotlight (and one Instagram apology), Timberlake is releasing a new album titled Everything I Thought It Was. So far, its lead single (“Selfish”) and promotional track (“Drown”) point to a more mellow, R&B-lite direction for the singer — with the exception of the gospel-flavored song “Sanctified,” which previewed on Saturday Night Live. And the album’s artwork, influenced by 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Federico Fellini’s masterpiece 8 ½, hints at an emphasis on visuals. +
++It seems as though Timberlake is ready to reclaim his title as the millennial king of pop. But in a culture that is now seeking to reckon with the sins of the ’90s and early aughts, can he rise above being viewed as a cultural misstep? Or is a decline in relevance the only natural trajectory for an objectionable, 43-year-old white dude in our current pop landscape where “sensitive” male artists like Bad Bunny and Harry Styles reign supreme? +
++Justin Timberlake’s “bad boy” image always had an expiration date +
++Justin Timberlake’s current image — dancing on stage in khakis and promoting songs for the Trolls soundtrack — is a far cry from the version the singer put forth after breaking out of NSYNC. +
++By the time of his 2002 solo debut, Justified, Timberlake had begun to shed his boy-band identity and embrace an edgier posture in his music and romantic life. Like many white pop stars in the early aughts, he also experimented with street fashion, cornrows, and other Black aesthetics. In The Woman in Me, Spears alleged a cringey interaction between Timberlake and R&B singer Ginuwine that signaled a desire for Blackness. Ultimately, his iteration of a “bad boy” read as manufactured and relatively safe. As Pitchfork contributor Julianne Escobedo Shepherd explains, “His masculinity was couched in a nonthreatening, boy-next-door persona that relied immensely on his whiteness, even as he was drawing on Black music and collaborating with Black musicians.” +
++Timberlake’s affinity for Black music and soulful vocal styling is often attributed to his Southern Baptist roots — he performed in his church choir — or his upbringing in Memphis, Tennessee, a breeding ground for soul and rock ’n’ roll. As a member of NSYNC, he dabbled in a commercialized form of pseudo-R&B. But his work on Justified was the start of his gaining acceptance in Black spaces and establishing decades-long relationships with producers like Timbaland and Pharrell Williams. Unlike the marginalized artists he was often trying to emulate, his whiteness afforded him an appearance of innocence and goodwill in the public eye that could easily be weaponized. +
++“He was very effective at using his boy-band past and white, blond, blue-eyed looks to shore up the general victim narrative that was central to his early career,” Escobedo Shepherd says. It was the tactic he used in the 2002 video for his hit single “Cry Me a River,” in which he not-so-subtly indicts Spears as a cheater while placing himself in the role of a guy who has revenge sex in his ex’s home and continues to stalk her afterward. +
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Kevin Mazur/WireImage
++“Justin Timberlake was the man in the early 2000s,” says Kelli Williams, co-host of the podcast Beyond the Blinds. “He broke up with Britney. He’s dating Alyssa Milano. He’s [rumored to be] dating Scarlett Johansson. But it’s like what Jennifer Aniston said about Brad Pitt: There’s a sensitivity chip missing.” +
++That lack of sensitivity would only really be interrogated years later. Many critical analyses at the time were focused on Timberlake’s unique stardom in an era otherwise flooded with rappers and aging male rockstars. Some music writers were excited to name him the heir to Michael Jackson and Prince for his impressive vocal range, slick dance moves, and proficiency performing Black music, while others were still figuring out whether he was a hack. +
++Following the Grammy-winning Justified and a detour into acting, he amped up his persona as a sex symbol with the more experimental 2006 album FutureSex/LoveSounds. The record saw Timberlake play with structure — incorporating reprises and interludes — as well as different genres, including funk and techno, and some annoying beatboxing. Critics were impressed, or at least awed, by his boldness and what they saw as his ingenuity as an artist. +
++Timberlake would retreat to Hollywood again after his sophomore album. In the early 2010s, he booked roles in a series of buzzy movies. In The Social Network, he gave a deliciously dirtbaggy portrayal of Napster founder Sean Parker; in Friends With Benefits and In Time, he was positioned as the sexy leading man. He also appeared on Saturday Night Live numerous times, showcasing himself as a charismatic, well-rounded talent. When he returned to music in 2013 with the first half of the double album The 20/20 Experience, he seemed to have attained some self-awareness about the unsavory reputation he had gained as a younger man. “I don’t want people to think I’m a self-obsessed sex machine,” he told British GQ in 2012. +
++His third record saw a softer, more romantic side of Timberlake, with sultry serenades that reflected his personal life, including his marriage to actress Jessica Biel. His newfound maturity was best represented in the album’s blockbuster single “Mirrors,” which — despite its arguably narcissistic lyrics — signified his commitment to monogamy. +
++Unfortunately for Timberlake, he would experience a significant fall from grace in the following years, both as an artist and as a wife guy. +
++In the 2010s, Timberlake’s complicated relationship with Black culture finally caught up to him +
++Timberlake’s relationship to Black music has long been polarizing, an object of criticism for some and a sign of credibility to others. Throughout his career, Black organizations like the BET Networks and the NAACP have nominated him for awards and welcomed him at ceremonies. He’s gotten props from legendary Black artists, including Stevie Wonder, who praised him for having “absorbed a lot of different kinds of music” in a Time 100 tribute. Despite being embraced by the rap and R&B worlds, though, he’s found himself at the center of heated discussions about cultural appropriation. +
++The strange landscape of pop music in the 2010s generated many of these online conversations. At the time, white rappers like Macklemore and Iggy Azalea were dominating the charts, and singers like Katy Perry and Madonna were donning hood aesthetics, which some labeled as appropriation. During and following his 20/20 Experience era, Timberlake was receiving that criticism, too — and some critics, including rapper Vic Mensa, called out his silence around the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2016, Timberlake drew more heat after he responded condescendingly on Twitter to a Black journalist who accused him of “appropriating [Black] culture.” +
++Just a year and a half later, Timberlake caused a stir with the announcement of his country-inspired fifth album, Man of the Woods. At first glance, it appeared that Timberlake was abandoning his signature urban sound to appeal to a broader (and whiter) fanbase. Ultimately, as Northwestern University professor and author Lauren Michele Jackson wrote for Vulture in 2018, the frenzy over his perceived genre switch wasn’t really warranted. In an interview with Vox, Jackson says the eclectic album was “very in line with Timberlake’s amalgamative tendencies.” +
++She says that his aesthetic pivot felt pointed in the eyes of critics due to our tense political climate: “The charge [against Timberlake] was inauthenticity. Funny enough, that is the same charge belatedly brought against his performing in the genre that yielded his fame in the first place.” +
++Nevertheless, the critical reception to Man of the Woods was mixed at best, and the album lacked the inescapable bangers he had produced in the past. Timberlake’s title as pop’s reigning king suddenly felt dubious. At one time, his pushing of racial boundaries in his music had made him a virtuoso. But in hindsight, it made him seem like a fraud. The year after he released Man of the Woods, Timberlake’s marriage also saw trouble after he was caught holding hands with his co-star in the film Palmer, Alisha Wainwright, leading him to release an apology. Meanwhile, the reappraisals of his relationships to both Jackson and Spears added extra precarity to his crumbling reputation. Could he ever return to music in an acceptable form? +
++Is Justin Timberlake irrelevant in 2024, or does his stardom just look different? +
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Mike Coppola/Getty Images for MTV
++In June 2022, a viral video of Timberlake doing the Beat Ya Feet dance — some fast and fancy footwork created by Black Washington, DC, teens in the ’90s — at Pharrell Williams’s Something in the Water Festival seemed to indicate that his next music venture would be an uphill battle for several reasons. Not only were the once-revered dancer’s moves labeled awkward, but social media also got a kick out of his paternal appearance — his khakis and patterned button-up made him look like a middle-aged dad at a cookout. +
++The sex appeal that felt so crucial to Timberlake’s image in the early 2000s seemed to have entirely dissipated in his post-Trolls era. The reaction was less about his actual looks and more about how expectations for the way male pop musicians present themselves have changed. In a New York Times piece, writer Lindsay Zoladz pointed to a trend of younger male pop stars like Bad Bunny, Harry Styles, Lil Nas X, and even rapper Jack Harlow embracing a gender-bending, “softboi” brand of masculinity — something Timberlake hasn’t attempted. On the red carpet, he sticks to his refined, GQ-in-2012 style; onstage, well, you saw those khakis. +
++Most important, though, is Timberlake’s new music. “Selfish,” the lead single from Everything I Thought It Was, had a lukewarm reception, debuting at No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song itself was ultimately overshadowed by Britney Spears’s fan army, which trolled Timberlake by streaming her 2011 song of the same name — at one point, Spears’s “Selfish” beat Timberlake’s on the iTunes charts. Fab drama aside, the midtempo, R&B-tinged single, which drew comparisons to Nick Jonas’s “Jealous,” sounded shockingly generic. +
++The lyrical content of “Selfish” felt bland and distanced as well, given the turmoil that has defined his career and personal life recently. Host of the Pop Pantheon podcast DJ Louie XIV says that the singer struggles to balance his showmanship with younger listeners’ desire for intimacy. He points to Timberlake’s contemporary Beyoncé as someone who’s married their theatricality with a “sense of deep, personal revelation that speaks to the demands of the moment.” +
++“Everything is much more driven by intimacy and relatability, a feeling that you know your stars of choice and that they are accessible to you and share your concerns,” he says. +
++It’s probably not a coincidence then that one of the biggest male artists at the moment, Drake, built off a chart-topping career by lamenting his love life and anxieties — no matter how childish — as a public figure. Pop superstars Styles and Ed Sheeran have also found success using diaristic lyrics. And the latest male sensation in the pop sphere, indie-folk singer Noah Kahan, has seemingly captivated Gen Z, in part, by singing about and advocating mental health. +
++Still, the announcement of Timberlake’s Forget Tomorrow World Tour has been met with high demand, selling out in multiple venues and requiring additional dates. A search of the artist’s name on TikTok still shows accounts that are thirsting over the musician and fans who are responding eagerly to his latest Saturday Night Live performance and reunion with NSYNC. Timberlake can still count on the collaboration with his former boy band for engagement. +
++“Nostalgia is the best drug out there right now,” says Williams. “I think the only way for Justin to really get into the public’s good graces is to work with NSYNC. I don’t think NSYNC is beneath him, but it makes him look humble that, after all these years, he can go back to his roots.” +
++Whether or not Timberlake can compete on the charts with the Harry Styleses of the world may not be a concern for his die-hard fans. For listeners who grew up alongside him, there’s a level of amusement in watching someone mature and navigate a new stage of their life, even if it’s a little awkward. While Timberlake’s “dad” era may be cringe to some, it’s offered him an air of innocence that he’s struggled to maintain publicly — and ultimately may never fully get back. +
++Kategate, briefly explained. +
++Have you heard the news? Princess Catherine of Wales, formerly Kate Middleton, seems to be missing. +
++Kate hasn’t been seen in public since several weeks before she reportedly underwent abdominal surgery, a fact that first made the internet alarmed and then, later, very amused. +
++Over the past week, a series of highly questionable photos of Kate have made their way to the public, culminating in one picture that was so heavily and amateurishly Photoshopped that multiple photo agencies, including the AP and Reuters, issued a kill notice for it. +
++The Palace appears to be trying in a very hamfisted way to cover something up. Instead, they only fueled the internet’s appetite for gossip. The story has crossed from the group chats of royal watchers into the mainstream media. Even Colbert’s on it as of Tuesday night. +
++That’s because this surreal saga is about more than any one illness, any one photograph, or even any one princess. +
+ ++The British royal family theoretically has a sophisticated apparatus in place to manage their reputations and the reputation of the throne. So for them to bungle a story as badly as they have bungled this one is fascinating. +
++What’s perhaps most fascinating about it is that they seem to have messed up in the first place in an attempt to protect Kate and her privacy — which raises all sorts of questions about whom the British throne is willing to protect, and whom they throw to the wolves instead. +
++A brief timeline of what we know about Kate’s whereabouts +
++The last time Kate was seen in public was on Christmas, attending church with her family. Here’s what has happened since — and how each move has in turn kicked off more conspiracy theorizing: +
+-
+
- +January 17: Kensington Palace announces that Kate entered the hospital the day before for planned abdominal surgery. The statement adds that she is “unlikely” to resume her public duties until Easter, which falls this year on March 31. + +
- +January 27: Kensington Palace announces that Kate has returned home to finish recovering. No photos exist of her leaving the hospital or heading home. Royal watchers begin to take note, pointing out that Kate historically has posed for photos in full makeup and heels within hours of giving birth to all three of her children. + +
- +March 4: A paparazzi agency publishes a grainy photo of Kate and her mother, Carol Middleton, driving around Windsor Castle. Watchers begin speculating about Kate Middleton body doubles. + +
- +March 10: On Mother’s Day in the UK, Kensington Palace releases a photograph of Kate with her arms around her children. Within hours, international photo agencies conclude that the photo has been manipulated and issue a kill notice for it. + +
- +March 11: Kate and Prince William’s X account posts an apology for the doctored image, signing it C for Catherine and saying, “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.” The same day, paparazzi publish a photo in which the hair and ear of a brunette woman can be seen in a car with Prince William. The photo agency identifies the woman as Kate; royal watchers are skeptical. + +
+This whole controversy says a lot about the monarchy’s priorities +
++The royal family appears to be trying very clumsily to cover up something that has to do with Kate and her medical condition. Part of why the story has gone viral in the first place is that in the past, that’s reportedly not something they were willing to do for Meghan Markle. +
++Since Meghan and Harry’s engagement in 2017, Kate and Meghan have been used as each other’s foils in the press. Meghan tends to be positioned as either more progressive, glamorous, and exciting; or more whiny, demanding, and attention-seeking. Kate tends to be positioned as either more conservative, dowdy, and traditional; or more respectable, royal, and maternal. Neither of them is ever quite allowed to exist outside the shadow of the other. +
++So, Meghan fans demanded as Kate’s disappearance began to extend toward scandal, why is the royal family ready to make sacrifices for Kate that they would not make for Meghan? +
++In their Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, the Sussexes discuss all the ways in which Meghan asked for help and privacy with her health care and all the ways the royal family declined to assist her. +
++According to Meghan, she wanted to choose the hospital where she would give birth to her child and do the customary photoshoot at the castle rather than just outside the hospital, immediately postpartum. William reportedly considered the move a “prima donna maneuver,” and the British press covered the news with outrage. When Meghan began to struggle with suicidal ideation, she says she was told that she could not go to a therapist, as doing so would bring scandal to the family. +
++It’s tempting to see this situation through a US lens and conclude that the discrepancy exists because Kate is whiter and better behaved than Meghan is. And it’s certainly fair to say that those factors play a role here. +
++But with the royals, it’s all about precedence. If the royal family is really treating Kate with more forbearance than they did Meghan, that’s because Kate is next in line to be Queen of England, and she’s married to the future King. Meghan, married to the proverbial spare, was most likely not afforded such courtesies because the family had decided she wasn’t close enough to the crown to bother. +
++Like all stories about British royalty, this is a story about power and how power protects itself. +
++This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions. +