Niklas quoted Strangers and Intimates by Tiffany Jenkins
Tiffany Jenkins's groundbreaking new book describes the battles fought to achieve a private life in …
Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are not the most sympathetic of privacy advocates. ‘I am not going to take lectures on privacy invasion from Prince Harry,’ stormed the journalist Piers Morgan in 2023, amid allegations of his involvement in hacking the Prince’s phone during his tenure as editor of the Daily Mirror. Pointing to the revelations in Harry’s bestselling memoir, Spare, Morgan called him ‘the biggest invader of privacy in royal history’.
Harry’s 400-odd-page tome, published worldwide with great fanfare, is a tapestry of intimate detail. It covers everything from the loss of the Prince’s virginity when he was seventeen (in a field behind a pub, to an ‘older woman’ who treated him like a ‘young stallion’) to the discomfort of his ‘frostnipped penis’ during his brother William’s wedding to Kate Middleton. Harry also discloses personal text messages from his late mother, the Princess of Wales, as well as private conversations with his brother and his father during a fraught time for the family at his grandfather’s funeral.
Morgan could also have mentioned Oprah with Meghan and Harry, in which the celebrity couple bared their souls to the queen of confessional TV in March 2021; or the time Meghan wrote about her miscarriage in the Opinion section of The New York Times. She painted a vivid portrait of heartbreaking loss, recalling how she had clasped her husband’s ‘clammy’ hand in the hospital bed and kissed his knuckles, ‘wet from both our tears’. The ‘path to healing’, she counselled readers, begins with asking three simple words: ‘Are you OK?’. Speak your truth, she implored, to encourage those ‘silently suffering’ to do the same.
Such was their openness about their own private lives – while also calling for privacy – that the couple became a target of the satirical animated TV show South Park. ‘We just want to be normal people. All this attention is so hard,’ complains the cartoon duchess in an episode, swishing her long brown hair during a talk-show appearance. Her red-haired husband hangs banners above their house that read ‘We want privacy’ and ‘Stop looking at us’, while they host parties on their lawn illuminated with fireworks. They then board a private jet to embark on a ‘Worldwide Privacy Tour’.
Rupert Bell, TalkTV’s royal correspondent, spoke for many journalists when he advised, ‘If Prince Harry really wants his privacy, then he must shut up!’ Commentator and former tabloid journalist Dan Wootton called Harry ‘the prince of hypocrisy’, highlighting the apparent discrepancy between his words and actions.
But these critiques of Harry and Meghan risk missing the broader context, oversimplifying the complexities at play. Their contradictory statements and actions reflect the bewildering reality of how a great many people, from celebrities to everyday citizens, perceive privacy today.
When Oprah Winfrey defended Harry and Meghan’s desire for privacy, she clarified that it didn’t mean the couple must remain silent. ‘I, too, value privacy, but I talk constantly,’ she said on the Today show. ‘It’s about living a life without being hounded by photographers or people invading your space.’
Indeed, many non-journalists and especially younger observers have exhibited sympathy for the couple, whose conflicting demands hold up a mirror to our society’s deep confusion over the issue. We live in an era characterized by calls for transparency and demands for authentic revelation, in which boundaries – between public and private, personal and professional, personal and political, work and home, online and offline – are ever more indistinct. Expressing one’s inner feelings and troubles is culturally validated; keeping something private can elicit mistrust.
— Strangers and Intimates by Tiffany Jenkins (Page 1 - 3)
