«Spare», the new revelation about Prince Harry’s frozen penis

You may have already heard of the memoir of the prince Harry, Shoot. The content of his pages has seeped into the water table, osmotically seeped into your brain. The words of the book will be engraved in the deepest grooves of your memory: one day, when you are old, you may forget the names of your children, but the progeny of King Charles III will remain standing and you will go back to what entered your mind in an earlier time, shouting at the reluctant stranger who changes your pan: “Kate and Wills were big fans of Suits before meeting Meghan Markle!» or “Prince William broke Prince Harry’s necklace when William grabbed his brother by the neck.”

Sorry for the tone, but during the week we have been really inundated with a torrent of news leaked from Shoot and it was hard to keep track of everything. But as far as I’m concerned, the most surprising things were those derived from the “bodily sincerity” with which Prince Harry wrote the book. Like when he wrote about something I don’t remember ever reading before: Princess Diana didn’t want boys to be circumcised. Because instead it turns out that they are. And let’s just say it’s a pretty stark departure from the Windsor clan’s unwavering commitment to propriety.

It’s not like the Duke of Sussex pulled this detail about his most intimate parts out of the blue, there’s a context in which this revelation was made. The background was that prior to his brother’s wedding to Kate Middleton in April 2011, Harry had gone on a charity expedition to the North Pole, where he’d hiked 200 miles across the arctic landscape alongside comrades who’d served in Afghanistan. When you walk 200 miles through an arctic landscape, your extremities may ache, and so did he. Harry’s ears, cheeks and penis froze. And here he specifies it: “His penis is circumcised”. Before continuing, it’s good to clarify that “Willy” (as boys usually call their penis) is how he calls his brother and “todger” (child) is the polite term he uses to refer to his phallus .

“There have been countless stories in books and newspapers (even on the New York Times) about the fact that Willy and I were not circumcised”, writes in the memoir, “Mother was said to have forbidden it. And while it is absolutely true that the chance of having penile freezing is much higher if you are uncircumcised, I can assure you that all the stories were false. I was circumcised as a child.”

The frostbite lifted when the duke returned to England’s warmer climes, but still as he walked down the aisle at Westminster to support the new chapter in his brother’s life, his ‘todger’ was still in shambles.

I don’t know exactly what’s the point of sharing all this, but now you can google “Prince Harry penis” and have a number of articles and details about it (I assume!)

Freezing isn’t the only body horror that made headlines in this memoir. The other, the one that is deeply funny and sad at the same time, and that has been bouncing around in my brain since yesterday, is the moment after their grandfather’s funeral, Prince Philip, when the boys and their father, the future King Charles III, gathered in the family cemetery to talk about Harry and Meghan’s decision to leave America. It was a moment where Harry felt misunderstood, worse still, as if no one was trying to understand him at all.

And so Harry writes : «I looked at Willy, I really looked at him, perhaps for the first time since we were little, catching every detail (…). William was bald, Note Harry, and it was more advanced than mine.’ And then Harry adds that with the baldness William’s resemblance to their late mother was gone.

In short, his brother had become, in a certain sense, unrecognizable. And what could be more horrific? The person who perhaps most of all has been close to you, with whom you have shared your life – the struggles of the monarchy, having that father and those expectations, the tragedy of having lost your mother – vanishes, changes, goes bald. William has aged, he no longer has hair, as if it weren’t him anymore, as if there was no continuity with what he was before.

These steps of Shootfirst the freezing and then the hairline, are perplexing and these parts where the book seems more like an exorcism, especially when associated with the Sussexes’ interview in Oprah and their documentary on Netflix. Whether this is the intention or not, the duke has invaded the Internet, television and publications with his stories on every single aspect of himself, right down to the most personal and physical matters.

To some these bodily details might appear horrendous, but if this is useful for him, if he can find peace in this way, then let’s try to figure it out. Sometimes letting go of all the discomfort is the only relief you can find.