It’s the twerk seen round the world — and regrettably, there is no unseeing it.
What could be more royal or fitting for an American woman who joined the nobility and frequently reminds us of her duchess status than sharing a home video of herself lifting her dress, spreading her legs, and moving rhythmically just before childbirth?
Meanwhile, Meghan’s hapless husband Harry, reduced to her handbag, shimmies back and forth while making lame, floppy hand gestures.
His head, his face, is cut off — out of frame.
Is there is a better metaphor for Harry’s reputational, cultural and royal erasure?
As it happens, the second-hand embarrassment we all felt watching this spectacularly bad video, its release and public disgust has now been ratified.
For in a remarkable development, the twerking video is a grotesquerie that has been acknowledged in Royal circles.
A well-placed Royal source shared this exclusively: ‘There is a general sense [in the Palace] that they have lost it.’
What could be more regal or suitable for an American woman who married into the elite and constantly highlights her duchess position than releasing a home film of herself lifting her dress, spreading her legs, and moving vigorously just before having a baby?
Wow. That’s downright American in its straightforwardness. The flowery, decorous days of ‘recollections may vary’ are done.
According to a source, the video has led to ‘a lot of raised eyebrows,’ with the royals viewing this display as inappropriate and finding Harry and Meghan’s complete lack of elegance ‘lamentable.’
TRAGIC!!!!!
Oh, that is a deep cut — one that will wound and leave scars.
At least we’ve been spared a repeat of Harry’s performance the first time Meghan gave birth. As he recounted in his dismal memoir, he took ‘several slow, penetrating hits’ of Meghan’s laughing gas as she was in labor with Archie, their firstborn.
What a child Harry is.
He continues in this most self-pitying book: ‘Meg, bouncing on a giant purple ball, a proven way of giving Nature a push, laughed and rolled her eyes.’
Well, at least we know she suffers. Marrying a man-baby does, indeed, come with steep costs.
Harry goes on: ‘I took several more hits and now I was bouncing too.’
How whimsical! How cheeky!
Yes, it was all fun and games until Meghan’s contractions came quicker and more intensely and, Harry writes, ‘a nurse came and tried to give her some laughing gas’, but — whoops — ‘there was none left’.
That’s Harry for you. Utterly selfish.
You have to wonder if Meghan even told him she was posting the twerking video to Instagram. It does seem like she makes all the executive decisions, doesn’t it?
But as with every crime — be it against good taste, dignity, or in this case, humanity — we must look to motive.
And there are two great theories of the case.
Meanwhile, Meghan’s hapless husband Harry, reduced to her handbag, shimmies back and forth while making lame, amphibious hand gestures. (Pictured: Meghan and Harry twerking in hospital ahead of Princess Lilibet’s birth).
Number One: Meghan dropped a final, bonus episode of her forgettable podcast, ‘Confessions of a Female Founder’, on Tuesday. And, despite having none other than Beyoncé’s mom as a guest — quite the brain trust at work, Meghan Markle and Tina Knowles — the episode generated very few headlines.
And Lemonada, the company that produces ‘Confessions’, has yet to announce a second season.
Typically, a renewal would have come before the airing of a final episode — and, as I’ve previously said, podcasts don’t usually have ‘seasons’.
They just run on: Weekly, biweekly, monthly — without self-imposed season endings.
So, things don’t seem great on the professional front, even as reports surface of a third season for Meghan’s Netflix show, ‘With Love, Meghan’.
Theory Number Two, meanwhile, goes to another apparent humiliation.
A second bombshell came the same day as the twerking video, when Brooke Shields talked a little well-deserved smack about Meghan on the podcast hosted by India Hicks — second cousin and goddaughter to King Charles, bridesmaid to Princess Diana.
In other words, unlike our duchess, India is the real deal.
The burn. The rage Meghan must have felt at this podcast, Shields dishing about how excruciating she found Meghan’s utterances during an International Women’s Day panel discussion in Austin, Texas, last year.
‘Katie [Couric, the panel host] asks the first question to Meghan,’ Shields said, ‘and she talks about how, at a young age, she was already advocating for women.
‘She starts telling a story about how when she was 11 — and she keeps saying, ‘Well, when I was 11, I saw this commercial and they were talking about how washing dishes was for women,’ and she said, ‘I didn’t think only women wash dishes. It wasn’t fair, so I wrote to the company’.’
WE KNOW. We have heard this story so many times our ears collectively bleed.
‘It was just too precious,’ Shields said of the whole oration, noting that Meghan ‘kept saying she was 11!’
Shields couldn’t take it and knew the audience couldn’t either.
‘I was like, “They’re not going to want to sit here for 45 minutes and listen to anybody be precious or serious”,’ Shields said.
So she interrupted the duchess.
Please, President Trump: Give Brooke Shields a medal of valor. A Presidential Medal of Freedom.
A second bombshell came the same day as the twerking video, when Brooke Shields (pictured) talked a little well-deserved smack about Meghan on the podcast hosted by India Hicks, second cousin and goddaughter to King Charles, bridesmaid to Princess Diana.
‘I go, “Excuse me, I’m so sorry, I’ve got to interrupt you there for one minute”,’ Shields continued. ‘I was trying not to be rude, but I wanted to be funny because it was so serious.’
Shields then cracked a joke at her own expense — something Meghan, in my opinion, lacks the sense of self to do — noting that when she was a child actress, starring in the movie Pretty Baby at age 11, ‘I was playing a prostitute!’
The crowd went wild, Shields said. Meghan must have been incensed.
The twerking video, seen in this light, does make a bit of sense, however warped: Perhaps Meghan thinks it makes her relatable, makes her seem not so elevated, above us all.
Funny and fun.
The world, indeed, laughs. Just not as Meghan intended.
