Woman who no-one had heard of until she married a royal “set out to prove that women don’t need men to give them status”. I mean I agree but she’s got her work cut out.
– Rob Fisher, commenting on this.
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Samizdata quote of the daySamizdata Illuminatus (Arkham, Massachusetts) · Hippos · Monarchy · Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs August 5th, 2019 |
 23 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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There is another aspect to this, which takes me into what can sometimes be very non-PC territory, and that is about what happens to men of a certain kind when they get married or become besotted with a woman. Prince Harry, the son of a Princess and heir to the throne, who trained as an Army helicoptor pilot, and who by all accounts is a nice sort of chap and who got up to the sort of nonsense that young guys do, has become increasingly “Beta”, adjusting his behaviour and interests to suit those of his wife. MM ticks all the boxes for a certain sort of Hollywood Left-liberal: superficial, earnest, a bit preachy, not particularly talented in her chosen profession (acting), very pretty, and fond of using certain causes to make her come across as “serious” and so on.
I give this marriage no more than 10 years.
I give the royal testicles three.
‘Woman who no-one had heard of until she married a royal “set out to prove that women don’t need men to give them status”… ‘
Presumably that is why she divorced her first husband whom nobody had heard of, and married a man everyone had heard of, to prove her point.
I think Brenda has decided to give this one a pass on the basis that it is Charles’ problem, not hers. The House of Windsor has been screwed over by one screechy American divorcée before and survived. Maybe one a century is the allowed minimum or something.
The monarchy itself seems pretty secure in the hands of the more sensible William and Catherine, so I doubt that Harry’s inevitable divorce will make much of an impression.
Still better than having Tony Blair or John Prescott as President.
* – Amusing that Googling “screechy American divorcée” brings up both Megan Markel and Wallis Simpson. Maybe Google is trying to tell us something?
I am reminded of a recent Q&A session give by Melinda Gates on Radio 5. It lasted two hours and many adoring young women asked Mrs Gates for advice on how they could become empowered and influential, just like her. Mr Gates was not mentioned throughout.
😆 😆 😆
That aside… interesting that “status” is the chosen word, not “meaning” or “purpose”, or many other, arguably more important things.
To: The People of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
From: The People of the United States of America
Re: Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, née Rachel Meghan Markle
Payback for burning the White House in 1814!
She’s your problem now. No backsies.
I think that Harold Wales has gone through the narrative of an ELO song, The Diary of Horace Wimp, in one day, his wedding day.
I can’t wait for Harry to ring up Stefan Molyneux to talk his issues through.
1. Dr Goodall’s books include her saying that she left her own infant son in a cage at home when doing her research, lest he be taken and eaten by chimps breaking into her house. Now there’s an opportunity for comment.
2. If children do not notice skin colour, how does she explain comments, to give an exemplum, of a bunch of schoolkids in Macau, exitedly calling me ‘Gweilo‘?
One of the things I often wonder about is this. Plainly the dude had his pick of almost any woman in the world. Why would he pick her? She is somewhat pretty, but hardly stunning. She seems somewhat smart and engaging, but is hardly Princess Diana. Her background is a minefield of unsuitability. And Harry never struck me as a pushover. For example, his insistence that he did a stint in Iraq (even if security demanded that it be brief) is something I admired about the guy.
My only conclusion, to use Sheldon Cooper’s phrase, is that she is especially skilled at coitus. FWIW, this does seem to be the reason Edward VIII threw away his throne for an unlikable, unsuitable and rather unattractive screeching American divorcee.
Which, quite frankly, tells you a lot more about him than about her.
And of course the real question is why does anyone care about her anyway? She is married to the dude who will never be king, and will consequently be defined his whole life by what he isn’t rather than what he is. This doesn’t seem to me to be much in the way of status. What status it does confer comes from very old fashioned ideas of aristocracy, something utterly anathema to the woke generation. The irony is biting really.
FWIW, she seems like a perfectly nice person to me, even if she is a typical actress with the usual lefty agenda. And I admire her far more for her success in the very challenging world of the entertainment business than that she managed to snag a prince.
Wasn’t there some bird, Hillary Rodham whatever, who was all set to prove that women could have their own career and rise to the top via their own abilities, “sisters are doin’ it for themselves”, none of this ‘woman needs a man’ sexist rubbish (certainly not to advise her where to campaign), but an evil orange bigot got in the way of her will-inspire-all-young-girls example?
Pete: You know how Bill and Melinda met, right? She was already a MS marketing manager when she met Bill(with an MBA and degrees in econ and comp sci), and rose to be an exec tghere before she retired to do foundation work. I don’t know how much of her exec career track was due to dating the boss, but she seems to be plenty competent in her own right, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she’d made it to the same place even without that relationship. (It might have taken longer, but knowing people frequently speeds things up regardless of details)
There’s some famous spouses where your snark is appropriate, but I don’t think she’s one of them.
Niall,
Far be it from me to pile on, but I think the boid has gotten the boid. 😈
So, Melinda…What first attracted you to Billionaire Bill Gates?
Yeah. No. She might not be a classic dumb blonde gold digger, but the suggestion that she would have been anything more than a well paid senior executive at some faceless corporation without becoming Mrs Bill Gates is amusing.
That’s interesting, because i got the same impression just by watching them shaking hands with Simona Halep and Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon last month.
FWIW.
In most marriages there is a leading partner and a led partner. In a happy and long-lived marriage both partners accept and enjoy their roles.
I give this marriage no more than 10 years.
Hard to say. It’s complicated (see Fraser Orr’s comment), but I don’t think so.
So, wistfully thinking about getting away from the missus?
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
And so Charles’s son has made the same mistake as his dad. Equating beauty with virtue, and ignoring the effect of what wanting to be liked does to women with influence but no actual power.
Alsadius, Melinda is obviously capable and talented, but she tells us she now meets heads of state and royalty via her work with a multi-billion dollar charity founded with money made by the company her husband started.
She is like Cherie Blair and Michelle Obama, high earning women in important jobs who we would never have heard of but for their husbands.
There are thousands of people in similar high powered jobs, many of them women, who we have never heard of because they are not married to someone famous.
Muriel Siebert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_Siebert
Hahaha. MM is all yours now. We have a strict no return policy.
You’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty good career move for a B-Grade sleb. Will look good on the CV when she returns to Hollyweird.
From her own party too, I think. Despite their public rhetoric, I sometimes wonder if the Dems feel the same way Trump does about losers.
Muriel Siebert had indeed the most irrefutable reason to say she achieved what she did without help from a husband, but, after reading the details of her undoubtedly successful career, I found the very last little sentence of the otherwise positively-phrased wiki article
actually read (unintentionally, I think) just a little bit sadly.
Back on-topic, one may hope that the healthier environment of the royal family, and the wisdom of her grandmother-in-law, will gradually deprogram Megan from the very worst of what she ‘learned’ while mixing with the Hollywood crowd but it will be wise not to expect too much progress too soon (or, indeed too much progress ever). Her husband achieved much with the Invictus games and hopefully will help find some focus where Meghan’s talents can be turned to effect and her follies do little harm.
As far as assertions from royalty that they could do well for themselves on their own go, Queen Elizabeth I (who could also say she achieved without aid from a husband, although in her case it is clear, despite occasional denials, that that was not a fact she entirely liked), once said,
(There are several versions of this quote recorded. Elizabeth is sometime quoted as saying she could live anywhere in Christendom or could prosper anywhere in Christendom.) She could make a good case for herself, and of course in those turbulent times the possibility of ending up in exile was one she’d had to think about (just as the possibility of going to the tower and emerging ‘shorter by the head’ was also one she’d had to think about).
Actually a brilliant piece of performance art.