Private Parts: Prince Harry, celebrity, and the public/private divide
Dr Andy Ruddock
by Dr Andy Ruddock
A serving soldier on leave in Las Vegas with his mates ends up in a naked mobile phone snap that does the social media rounds. The soldier happens to be third in line for the British throne, and so the picture, leaked to the world through a celebrity gossip website, raises a series of questions about how royals should conduct themselves as public figures, and how those tasked with protecting them should set about their business.
There’s more to Prince Harry’s latest imbroglio than this. We’ve seen him in compromising situations before, but this one’s a bit different. “Billiardsgate” took place in a private suite, and so the prurient images of the prince and his guest come from a place where, common sense dictates, Harry could have reasonably expected his actions were off record; or at least that someone being paid to have their wits about them would have quite literally watched his back. That neither was the case reminds of two of the media’s most fundamental effects.
First, Harry’s ‘Hangover’ moment underlines the capacity of celebrity culture to transform nothing into something.
Second, the violation of his privacy reminds us that the line between the public and the private is drawn where culture decides to put it, and media have constantly driven how this decision is made. In this sense, for all the Vegas glitz and glamour, Harry’s dilemma is about issues that affect ordinary young people on a daily basis. In fact, media scholars have been interested in what youths do in their bedrooms for a long time now.
Almost 40 years ago, a group of women academics in the UK decided the best way to understand shifts in post-war British culture was to ask a disarmingly simple question; why do teenage girls like reading teenage magazines at home, by themselves, in their own space? The answer was surprisingly sophisticated and complex. First, large numbers of girls spent large amounts of time poring over articles about clothes, boys, relationships and pop music because society had put them there. Social policies of the late 1940s explicitly encouraged women to focus on a future of work in the home, so teen mags like Jackie were partly popular because they fit into the sphere of limited leisure options that girls in the 1970s faced.
This put an important idea on the agenda: the things young people do with media in the ‘privacy’ of their bedrooms is a public matter that engages with history and politics. Recent research on youths and mobile phones has pursued the same themes. In a fascinating study on how Palestinian girls access and use mobile phones, Hiyam Hijazi-Omari and Rivka Ribak argued these simple pursuits swept girls into a highly politicised world of changing gender relations, even when they were all alone in their rooms.
This is because they were never truly alone; as people living in a society with an acute sensitivity to national and gendered identities, there was too much at stake in what these girls wanted to do and wanted to be to let them figure it out for themselves. Mobile phones became the lightning rods for debates about what it means to live under conditions where, practically speaking, there is no privacy if dominant interests don’t want us to have it.
So this isn’t just a story about spies, celebrities and a very naughty boy. Harry is facing a common youthful dilemma, because media intrusion isn’t just a concern for the famous. A few years ago, after the photo scandal over Harry’s dalliance with Nazism, a student in the class I teach on youth and media asked if it was possible to think about the prince as an ordinary young person.
The question was raised in the context of global media coverage about “Broken Britain”, where badly behaved young people were used as emblems of a general collapse in social values. I thought the answer was yes; he was, at that time, a young man emerging from a difficult childhood, facing an uncertain future (as debates raged about what a modern royal family should look like) full of limited career options (limited army duties or limited army duties).
This wasn’t a tongue-in-cheek answer. Harry’s always been worth talking about as a spectacular case of the media-related issues that most young people face. Indeed, the fact that he keeps finding himself in these predicaments poses a very serious question.
Where is the public/private divide in societies where many people spend huge amounts of time managing the image they project to society, and where commercial digital businesses take more and more interest in the data these images furnish? Who’s watching our back?
Dr Andy Ruddock is a senior lecturer for the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University.