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For the Royals, Kate Topless Is Child's Play

This family's privacy has survived a princely pater familias reputed to have enjoyed rather frequent romps with ladies who were neither his sovereign nor his wife and a promiscuous princess married to the heir to the throne among other things. After such a history, a little blurry bare breastedness, shot from a great distance, really shouldn't qualify to right-thinking people as either "grotesque" or "totally unjustifiable."
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Tim Knight writes the regular media column Watching the Watchdog, for HuffPost Canada.

I'm not shocked.

Not shocked at all, I tell you.

In fact, I'm delighted.

It's precisely the way the French have behaved ever since they did those extremely nasty things to their own royalty some 300 years ago.

They chopped off Marie Antoinette's head back then, and if it had occurred to the notoriously bad-tempered Committee of Public Safety, they would doubtless have shown pictures of her royal breasts to any unwashed, frog-leg-chewing sans-culottes who asked to see them.

So it's entirely in character for the French magazine Closer to publish pictures of the British breasts -- including, god help us all, the nipples -- of Catherine, known affectionately to those who care about such things as Her Royal Highness Princess William, Duchess of Cambridge, Countess of Strathearn, Baroness Carrickfergus.

We know her as Kate, very own future Canadian queen.

The royal couple are said to be "hugely saddened" (translation: really, really pissed off) that Closer has:

"...invaded their privacy in such a grotesque and totally unjustifiable manner."

Can't really see why. This family's privacy has survived a princely pater familias reputed to have enjoyed rather frequent romps with ladies who were neither his sovereign nor his wife; a promiscuous princess married to the heir to the throne; serial royal divorces following mutual sexual shenanigans, and a couple of princelings who seemed intent on surpassing the sexual exploits of even such stalwart royal predecessors as Henry Vlll and Charles ll.

After such a history, a little blurry bare breastedness, shot from a great distance, really shouldn't qualify to right-thinking people as either "grotesque" or "totally unjustifiable." Not even if said bare breasts belong to a newly promoted British Princess-Duchess-Countess-Baroness with an MA in the history of art.

Britain's tabloids are even more pissed off about the pictures than the Palace. Until the recent brouhaha over that Australian publisher cad Rupert Murdoch hacking the phones of damn near everyone of importance in the known world (as well as a murdered girl), it's been their job to publish nipple pictures.

Particularly when said nipples are attached to Very Important People of the female variety.

But not a single British publication has so far dared publish pictures of these royal nipples. Can you imagine the weeping, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth, the beating of (forgive me) breasts in those anguished tabloid newsrooms?

What, they must be asking, is the world coming to when a newspaper can't double its profits by putting a couple of rather nice royal nipples on its front page?

All in the public interest, of course.

(Full disclosure: A quick search in Huffington Post archives for "Kate nipple" came up with endless stories about Kate and the Palace fury but no actual Kately nipples. A Google search for "Huffington Post Nipple" got lots of plunging necklines and vaguely salacious stories about "nip slips." But the few actual nipples [of the female variety] I could find were strategically guarded by gauzy stuff. A touch disappointing for such a daring, avant-garde publication. Will have to do more research.)

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