Day 23: Hashtag Royal Baby!

Yesterday afternoon, right around the time that the rest of the world was obsessing about whether England's future heir would be a boy or a girl, my phone started convulsing violently as texts from my best friend began pouring in. It turned out that as hard as he tried, he couldn't seem to get as psyched up about the imminent birth of the Royal baby as the rest of the world and he couldn't for the life of him understand why people were so interested.

"I think you should do a blog about why a lot of people get so caught up in stuff like the Royal wedding or Royal Baby. It's fascinating me" He wrote, his messages reverberating like tiny, angry machine gun blasts, illuminating his genuine confusion. "These people are so excited for people that they don't know to have a future king for a country that isn't theirs. Why?"

Why indeed. Well, I have a few theories.

First, we can look at it from a scientific, demographic point of view (don't worry, I only took one sociology class, but I got an A in it, so I know what I'm doing). It seems to me that the people who are the most Royal-obsessed all fit rather neatly into the 25-55 age demographic. Essentially what that means is that all of the women who loved Diana (the o.g. commoner turned princess) have, over the years, remained relatively invested in the lives of Diana's children because they not only liked her, but remember Diana's big, glitzy Royal wedding so many years ago. The other group consists of women in my generation, who feel that they grew up with Prince William in a small, weird way, who were all equal parts in love with him and dismissive of freckly little Harry (how were we supposed to know he'd turn out to be the hot one?? I, for one, did not see that coming). We (yes we, I am definitely in this group) feel that because we're basically the same age as the Prince, we lived parallel lives, as crazy as that might sound. In other words, even though I like to joke that every girl and her mother love Prince Freakin' William, but it looks like every girl and her mother really DO love Prince Freakin' William. Demographically speaking. 

Amateur sociological studies aside, I think that we're also fascinated by the Royal couple because we are so  accustomed to a completely different kind of celebrity in America. Our celebrities throw bongs out windows, punch out the paparazzi, and have Kanye's baby. While there are a lot of very normal celebrities out there, a majority of America's most famous are straight up nut jobs who are engaged in a vicious cycle of "What came first, the crazy or the demand for the crazy". For us, the Royal couple represents something drastically different: Two attractive people (seriously, go Google Kate Middleton and try to tell me she's taken a bad picture in her life because she hasn't), who genuinely seem to enjoy each other, who fell in love, got married, and had a child. There's not a scandalous arrest, failed clothing line, or botched boob job in sight. Actually, it would probably be a relatively chaste and unremarkable story if they weren't so...Royal.

And maybe that's all any of this is really about: Royalty. Let's face it, the only thing that red-blooded Americans love more than a Honey Boo-Boo marathon is classic Disney-esque princess story. Think about it: Handsome Prince meets a beautiful, graceful commoner and after a few "will they or won't they" years, they finally get married (in a castle!). And after a pregnancy where the Princess actually glowed in that mythical stereotypical pregnant lady way that I refused to believe actually existed when I was pregnant myself and roughly the size and consistency of a jelly doughnut, an equally beautiful baby was born. And now they'll all live happily ever after. There's even a dead mom and a questionable step-mother in this story, all that's missing is talking candlesticks or people randomly breaking into song.  In fact, f I didn't know better I'd think that someone cryogenically unfroze Walt Disney so that he could write it himself. It's textbook fairy tale. And frankly, as much as we might hate to admit it, we love all that fairy tale crap. We eat it up.

I guess in the end that I can't really answer my friend's question, at least not definitively. Maybe we all just really love royalty, normalcy, and happily-ever-afters. Does any of that mean that I want to know the intimate details of how quickly Kate dilated or whether her placenta was dark or light red? No. No, it absolutely doesn't. Does it mean that I'm happy that two seemingly nice people (who happen to be the future leaders of a country that my country emancipated itself from like an angry little Macaulay Culkin) had a baby? Absolutely. Even if I can't exactly nail down why.