This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
I, for one, can’t hear enough about Prince Harry’s penis.
Wait! I don’t mean that how it sounds! (Well, I mean, I do, but...) If you are a human who has been alive in the last two weeks have been following the news and conversation following Harry’s explosive memoir, Spare,, then you know that Harry’s own Duke of Sussex has been a major early-2023 newsmaker.
A pre-release leak from Spare revealed that Harry experienced frostbite on his penis while on an expedition to Antarctica in 2011. It’s not something you hear about a lot, frostbite on a penis—let alone anything about a royal’s penis, for that matter. But Harry didn’t just offhand mention this as some sort of battle scar from his adventures. He went into detail. He went full Herman Melville on his icy todger. His mother, Princess Diana, was evoked.
To me, this was a skies parting, heavenly rays of sunshine beaming down on me, ecstatic turning point of celebrity confession. Everyone should be this candid. Are you famous and have at one point suffered a bizarre penile injury? Tell! Us! About it! So many public figures purport to “tell all,” yet whisper nothing. Give us the juice. Give us the gossip. Give us the frozen dick.
Yet Harry’s frostbite revelation has been blasted as a “nightmare.” How dare anyone malign such an outlandishly blunt and forthtelling, jarringly specific story?
It’s come to my attention that there are many people, however, who are actually aghast at what they consider to be Harry’s “oversharing.” It’s unbefitting someone of his stature. It’s inappropriate. It’s gross. Even more confusing: It’s uninteresting. I’m sorry, the man who may be responsible for the end of the British monarchy as we know it is talking at length about his little prince and there is possibly anything in the world that you would find more interesting???
We have been creeping steadily towards the Era of the Overshare, but I reject that notion. Let’s call it the Age of Sharing Just Enough, Which Is to Say, “Everything.”
Every time I blink, another celebrity is releasing a new memoir. My morning meditative ritual has become pulling up whatever incredibly emotional, personal story about her life Drew Barrymore told at length on her talk show the day before. There appears to be a celebrity’s arms race these days to see who can tell the most self-deprecating anecdote in the most gratuitous detail in order to appear relatable.
The breakout digital star of the last several years has been the Instagram account Deuxmoi, which posts occasional gossip, but mostly things like, “Emily Ratajkowski spotted at baggage claim wearing a mask,” or, “Zachary Quinto pictured eating at Via Carota, and he ordered the spaghetti.” It’s utterly innocuous information, but people are craven for it. If there’s that much of an appetite for the mundane, we should be feasting at the glut of intimate details Harry reveals in his book. A buffet of overshare! I want more.
Quote the woman who is both my North Star and my broken compass, Bethenny Frankel: “Mention it all!”
Granted, it’s a lot to take in. (No innuendo intended.) We should be grateful! When was the last time a person as famous as Prince Harry gave us “a lot”? (Again, no innuendo.)
“My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized,” he writes in Spare. (Or, if you want a real treat, says in his audiobook.) He describes how he applied Elizabeth Arden cream to his royal scepter, which, as it happens, is the same cream his mom used on her lips. “As soon as I opened it, I was transported in time. I felt as if my mother was right there in the room. Then I took a smidge and I applied it…down there.”
Folks, this is content. Freudian content, sure, but glorious nonetheless. Who are the buzzkills who are upset about this?
I know that Harry doesn’t have the most dynamic presence when it comes to famous people. And a lot of what is revealed in Spare makes it seem like he has a vendetta against his family he attends to make good on—and that’s true. But the experience of reading the memoir is a wild one, just a conveyor belt of intimate stories and salacious play-by-plays of all the arguments that happened with his family behind palace walls. There’s so much coming so fast that it turns the reader into Lucy at the chocolate factory. (Which is to say Spare should be an instant classic.)
There’s gossipy stories about when he lost his virginity, his dating life, the drugs he’d taken, the time he peed his pants, his Instagram DMs with Meghan Markle, and all of the interactions he had with Camilla—plus how he felt about her. Then—I don’t know if Harry had a mentorship with the writers of General Hospital or what—he gives us full on soap opera scenes of all the vicious arguments he had with his father and, especially, with William. That’s not to mention detailed interactions he had with the Queen, even as she was complicit in sabotaging (in his perspective) his and Meghan’s exit from the institution.
Of course these are the stories we all want to hear. Let’s not pretend we’re above it. It would be grotesque to do the tabloid vulture thing of trying to procure the stories through leaks and vicious reporting. But if the man himself is going to share it…I’m gonna read it.
Maybe, though, I’m the target audience for this. I never had an opinion one way or another of singer Meghan Trainor, for example. Then she made the decision to tell the public that she and her husband use side-by-side toilets in their bathroom. It’s disgusting, yet the fact that she felt the need to let us know that made me instantly love her; cut to me spending three weeks trying to learn that damn “Made You Look” TikTok dance in my living room.
Did I need to know about the time Kristen Bell had a build-up of milk in her breast duct, and her husband, Dax Shepard, had to suck it out for her? No. But I’m strangely glad I do. There are entire listicles devoted to celebrities who have admitted to pooping or peeing their pants. I love them all. This is probably why I adore the Real Housewives so much.
When a new celebrity couple gets together, sure, I understand that they want to keep their relationship private. But I am also desperate to know which one farts in their sleep. What was the last dumb fight you got in because someone was hungry and escalated something out of proportion? Send me a transcript of all your banal text messages back and forth throughout the day.
Oversharing is art, and it’s been sorely underappreciated…until now. Forget that whole “stars, they’re just like us” nonsense. Long live this new, unexpected chapter: “Us, we’re just like the royal family.”
Keep obsessing! Sign up for the Daily Beast’s Obsessed newsletter and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
