Queens, Virgins, and Sluts

(I hope to post more parts of this is anyone’s interested in reading it. And let me clarify I’m an American and I don’t actually dislike the monarchy or think it should be abolished, I just don’t like some of the sexism that comes with it)

The monarchy in Great Britain is one of the few monarchies in Europe that still has male-preference primogeniture. For the unfamiliar, basically that means that when the throne is vacant, it goes to the oldest son. Only if there are no sons can it go to a daughter. If there are no children at all, it goes back through the line of the next son back a generation. For example, if a King had a girl first, and then a boy, the boy would get the throne even though he’s younger than his sister. If he has no sons and one daughter, she gets the throne. If he has no children at all, it would go to his younger brother or his brother’s descendants. 

Getting passed the general unfairness of getting anything simply because you were born to the right family at the right time, it’s also unfair in another sense. It’s astonishingly outdated and sexist. That’s the reason the monarchies in Sweden, Norway, and Belgium, among other places, changed it to absolute primogeniture, which is where the eldest child, regardless of gender, takes the throne. One of the main reasons Britain hasn’t changed like those other countries is that it just hasn’t come up since Queen Victoria’s children. Every monarch since Queen Victoria has either had a sons first, or hasn’t had sons at all. If the current Queen had had a younger brother, she would not be reigning right now unless the law had been changed in her favor. 

There’s plenty of other fun sexism in the monarchy, but most of that is based on tradition, not law. Like that fun tradition where the heir to the throne should marry a virgin, if he’s a man and she’s a woman, that is. He doesn’t have to be a virgin, of course, because boys will be boys. And even though Queen Elizabeth was the heir to the throne when she married Prince Philip, I doubt he was a virgin and I doubt anyone bothered to ask either way. That’s one of the main reasons Prince Charles married Princess Diana. He needed a well-born suitable virgin to marry, to maintain tradition, and he figured he could also keep up another royal tradition and keep a mistress on the side. 

That’s another tradition I’m not crazy about. Men can cheat, women can’t. Princess Margaret became a black sheep when her marriage ended because of her affair, even though her husband had been having one too. Princess Diana faced the same issue years later. She was already an outsider, and according to her version of events, the Queen refused to help her when Charles started wandering and said that sort of thing was expected. But when she herself had an affair she was criticized and ostracized by the establishment. Charles himself told her he “didn’t want to be the only Prince of Wales who didn’t have a mistress”, and discounting Princes who died really young, that’s actually pretty true. 

A by-product of the “men can cheat, women can’t” rule, is the delightful tradition of slut-bashing. From almost five centuries ago with Henry VIII’s wives to today, if you don’t like a royal woman, you call her a slut. What was wrong with Wallis Simpson that made them hate her so much they refused to ever meet her to give her a chance to prove them wrong? Slut. Why was Princess Margaret the “bad sister”? Slut. What was wrong in Charles and Diana’s marriage? Slut(both Diana and Camilla fit this one). In order to be a slut you don’t necessarily have to sleep around a lot, you’re just not virgin or a faithful wife who looks the other way with dignity when she finds out her husband’s screwing his ex-girlfriend.

Hopefully within the next generation, Prince William and Prince Harry will be able to marry the women they love, virgin or not. Hopefully, they’ll be able to stay faithful to these women despite the long-standing tradition of “getting some on the side”. And hopefully girls and boys will have an equal shot at the throne, so once this issue does come up, they’ll be no conflicts. And hopefully in future generations they’ll start to realize that women are more than virgins and sluts and that a woman’s worth is not in what’s between her legs or what she chooses to do with it.