Aren’t the rich and privileged allowed to be upset?

[Untailored]

Prince Harry, Brooklyn Beckham, Liz Hurley…..I could go on.

There’s an attitude on MN that seems to be if you’re rich and privileged you’re not allowed to complain about anything. You’re not allowed to be upset or angry or hurt. You’re just ‘spoiled’, ‘whining’ or ‘playing the victim’.

It’s really unpleasant and I can’t help wonder if there’s an undercurrent of jealousy behind it.

yes, people who think privileged people should get upset need to look up the Fallacy of Relative Privation.

On the other hand, rich people wanging on about how their diamond shoes are too tight get the criticism such complaints deserve.

ETA: OH GOD can MN ban the word "jealousy" it is fucking tedious.

It definitely isn't specific to MN. I see them mocked a lot more on other social media.

It’s weird, so many posters saying Brooklyn should shut up because his parents are rich.

I think some people think there's an element of hypocrisy or trying to have your cake and eat it. So for example Harry and Meghan being deeply critical of the RF and the press and demanding their privacy, and yet also courting the press in their own way and publishing revealing 'tell-all' memoirs including some very embarrassing revelations and potentially damaging allegations.

Obviously that's not a very nuanced take, but I think that's how a lot of people see it. My view fwiw is that we are going to see a lot of similar cases in the coming years, as children who have been growing up in the public eye come of age and begin the process of reckoning with their parents.

Of course they are. But why share it with the world?

Presumably you mean envy rather than jealousy?

Who can blame people in a deeply unequal society feeling envious of people who have more money than they know what to do with?

Of course rich people can feel upset but nobody's forcing them to share it with the world and if they do then it's up to people how they respond to it.

Because Harry and Brooklyn have been forced into the world’s view since birth through no choice of their own?

If I felt that lies had been told about me to the media, I would want to set the record straight.

ETA: OH GOD can MN ban the word "jealousy" it is fucking tedious

Fair point and it’s maybe not the word I was looking for. It’s more that these people have a lifestyle that a lot of people would like (or think they would) and that massively gets in the way of their ability to be objective and/or sympathetic.

Rich, privileged people can absolutely be upset about anything they want. They have every right to complain too but they don't have a right to expect everybody to be sympathetic or care.

I'm baffled by the idea on MN and elsewhere that if your parents were rich, you couldn't have had an unhappy childhood and must be lying.

I also think they would both say that they tried to keep it private but the leaks and planted stories kept on coming.

H and B have had no choice but someone like Liz Hurley actively courts publicity so have no sympathy for her.

My mum was brought up in a rich household and sent off to boarding school aged eight. Where she absolutely hated it.But anyone met her would think she was posh and privileged. Where is my mother-in-law Was brought up in a council house in the north of England in a very poor town. But in a house filled with absolute love. I would say my mother in law had the more "privileged" upbringing.

You have no sympathy that her landline was tapped and her house bugged?

(Let’s just assume that that did happen for the purposes of this discussion, I know it’s under dispute)

thanks. It drives me bonkers.

We can all criticise people, and it doesn't mean that we want what they have. It gets used on MN all the time, and i find it a completely childish way to try to shut down a conversation.

🙂

I agree. I read the most awful comments when princess Catherine was going through cancer treatment 'oh it's alright for her she's loaded and has help'. And? Does that make her cancer any less awful, harrowing, painful? Does it make her deserving of cancer or less deserving of sympathy?

So if they hated it so much (and I absolutely would) why continue to put themselves out there? Surely the answer is to enjoy having privacy at last, once they're free of the family.

I get that Harry's court case can't be private, but the rest of the publicity is unnecessary. I also get that it must be difficult to see gossip out there. But it's no good, in Brooklyn's case, to complain about being forced into the media by his family, and then initiate a huge media storm with his statement.

So if they hated it so much (and I absolutely would) why continue to put themselves out there? Surely the answer is to enjoy having privacy at last, once they're free of the family

Because it’s not a simple as that if you don’t know any different.

They both had the option to walk away but the money was probably a big incentive not to. Harry is now realising that his only currency is the RF and hes run out of ways to slag them off.
But.....they are human and they bleed, just like the rest of us.
Im pretty sure Harry and William would give up anything and everything to have their mum back,, but they cant x

There’s definitely a lot of schadenfreude.

Sometimes people like to tell their side if the story or fight back against abuse by going public? I mean—that happens in ordinary abusive families so why should the children of the rich and famous feel any different? For someone who has lived in the public eye telling your side to the press isn’t as strange or as shocking as mumsnet pretends. Its more like telling distant family or neighbors why the ambulance came around that Christmas—it took you to the hospital after drunken dad threw you down the stairs instead of just there for someone else.

There is a very unpleasant side of mumsnet in which they side implicitly with the more powerful or familiar person in a public spat. And they see every attempt by the child/interloper to set the record straight as noisy/rude/OTT(dreaded mn insult). The press literally paid Meghan Markle’s father to shame her publicly before and after the wedding but she is the one who did wrong by pushing back? Why should one half of the news story be silenced? Why this insistence that people stand snd accept false stories about themselves, defamation of character, and controlling or abusive family treatment?

‘they don't have a right to expect everybody to be sympathetic or care.’

Does anyone have that right?

It happens in real life as well

Not long after my father died, someone made a horrible comment to my mum exposing that he knew about dad's pension arrangements (and that mum would be getting a portion of it). This guy literally said "well you've got nothing to worry about" to a woman who was mourning her husband, the man she'd been with since she was 16.

i'm coming up to 50 and I've heard younger people at work express jealousy because my generation had lower house prices.

Actually, if you go back further, my cousin is a few years older so managed to buy in the 90s recession - that's the territory where property prices were even lower.

What can you do? They're jealous of me because I'm older. < shrug.>

see comments like that about boomers on here.

oh God, I've forgotten about those. It was awful. I hope I don't know anyone like that in real life.