Found this when looking for phillip pulman related stuff in response to the massive amount of JK Rowling related stuff that’s being forced on me at the moment from all directions. This that is
On humanitarian grounds alone we ought to shut it down: it is quite simply too cruel to people to treat them like that - to say to a young man like Prince William ”No matter what your talents, your interests or your inclinations, you shall never have a career, you shall never be allowed to make a reputation or contribute to society as an engineer or a scholar or an architect or anything else except a stuffed dummy that opens hospitals and makes speeches that are written for you by someone else. You shall waste the most vigorous years of your life in hanging around making meaningless conversation with people who are desperately nervous in case they make some minor mistake in etiquette. No-one will ever relate to you simply as one human being to another, no-one will ever contradict you, no-one will ever tell you the truth about yourself. You will be flattered, lied to, crawled to from morning till night; your attention will be fought over by servants and courtiers, who will reward your disapproval with fawning apology to your face and poisonous bitterness behind your back. If you can persuade some unfortunate woman to marry you, her life will be a misery. Nothing she does will escape the sordid attention of the press, and if she deviates in the slightest degree from conventional ideas of beauty, every photograph of her will be as unflattering as possible, and her appearance, her dress sense, her weight, her very features will be mercilessly scorned. If you utter your opinions in public, you will set half the country against you; if you utter no opinions at all, you will be scoffed at as empty-headed. And so on, till you die.”
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