I must have heard a hundred different opinions on what happened to Princess Catherine while she was gone — not one of them turned out to be true. We should be asking “why are we so attracted to gossip?”
Before this whole Kate saga, I thought I lived in the 21st Century. Turns out, I don’t. Not really. While our means of spreading rumors and make up conspiracy theories may have changed — we are fully digital these days courtesy of the unregulated X — the world seems to have gone backwards in the last fifty years. We no longer remember that war is bad — for all involved, even the winners — and we treat a well deserved absence as an excuse for gossiping and spreading rumors.
Catherine, Princess of Wales, underwent a traumatic operation, for any woman, just a couple of months ago. Abdominal surgery isn’t for the faint hearted and I know bigger men who have been wiped out by it. She wasn’t seen in public because, and this is my guess not a full fledged opinion, she felt bad. Sick and weak and just didn’t feel like facing the barrage of duties that a simple outing turns into for her Grace. When you and I go to the supermarket, or to a friend’s house, we dress, put on make up (if we’re women, or even if we aren’t, actually), we comb our hair, grab our keys and out the door we go. For a public figure, it’s a labor of organization and logistics and I don’t blame Kate for avoiding the ordeal all together.
But these last couple of months my X and Facebook feeds were swamped with conspiracy theories, including the idea that her husband Prince William, the future King of England, had beaten her or kept her hidden in a castle far far away under lock and key. While these could have been plausible explanations if we were all FIVE YEARS OLD! I can’t imagine an adult, intelligent human being over the age of 15 actually believing that. Have you ever seen how the two look at each other? Anyway, the theories escalated to a dizzying frenzy after her retouched Mother’s Day photograph was released. As if we didn’t live in the era of filters and manipulated images of ourselves on Instagram.
But the silliness wasn’t just reserved for social media. Nope, I heard it all around me, from people I admire who said they knew someone who knew the royals or treated someone in the royal family. It was a cacophony of insinuations, from the ridiculous to the absurdly rude, which involved Kate’s eating habits, her hubby’s lifestyle habits and everything in between. One even said to me, in a low whisper “William is supposed to be nice, Kate, not so much.” As if that mattered in the long run. I’m sure not many of the people I have told off in my life, because of their own shortcomings, think I’m nice. No woman should be nice. We should be respected. And respectable.
I nodded my head most of the time, upon hearing these opinions at times even masqueraded as truths, and tucked them away in my consciousness. I would bring some of them home to my Mom, a no-nonsense kind of woman who always sees through the BS. She and I pondered and wondered, mostly aloud but we weren’t convinced. We watched the news, but that would only confuse things further, as Mutabaruka said, and we waited for Kate’s voice to set us straight.
Often I wondered, during these last few weeks, if the same would have happened to a less attractive woman, or one who isn’t so slim. I recently noticed a link on Facebook from an established financial publication, pointing to the idea that women who are thin are paid more at work. When I googled it, the same publication — mostly run by male editors — has been peddling the same recycled idea for the past fifteen years. It’s one of the ways the world turns women against each other, by telling us that we can only get a certain piece of the pie and only if we steal it from another woman. It’s untrue. Whatever your shape, size or weight, you have the same chance at love, life and money. And it’s all luck of the draw anyway.
Then on Friday afternoon, the world got its Kate answer. The big “C”, a diagnosis that would frighten anyone, talked about in such a stoic, controlled way, by a lithe, beautiful woman who has clearly gone through the hardest time of her life. With more of the same to come. What a moving moment, bringing viewers and journalists to tears as if one of their relatives had been diagnosed with the disease. THAT, that right there was the best of humanity. And perhaps, I thought while watching it live, we do live in the 21st Century after all…
Until the Moscow blast was blamed on ISIS, that is. For those few minutes, between one announcement and the other, we actually lived in modern times.