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Sex Roles (2006) 54:347351 DOI 10.1007/s11199-006-9004-4
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Camillagate: Prince Charles and the Tampon Scandal
David Linton
Published online: 3 October 2006
C
Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006
Abstract In 1993 a magazine published the transcript of a telephone conversation between Prince Charles, heir to the British crown, and his lover in which the couple made joking references to tampons in an erotic context. The story quickly spread around the world and became a source of embarrassment for Charles and the Royal family. This article reviews the media coverage of the story and discusses what it suggests about attitudes toward menstruation and mens references to it.
Keywords Menstruation . Tampons . Prince Charles
Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand that I might touch that cheek!
Romeo, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
Mention the names Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles or, more specically, Camillagate or the Prince Charles tampon scandal, and those who remember anything about this 1993 piece of gossip will surely say something like, Oh yeah, thats the story about the Prince of Wales wanting to be a tampon. Thus the words tampon and Prince Charles have become inextricably linked in popular imagination and memory. In fact, if you list those two terms in a Google search, you will be told that there are more than 1,400 items to look at, though many are zany or weird personal web sites. Similarly, a Lexis/Nexis search will yield
D. Linton ([envelopeback])
Humanities Division, Marymount Manhattan College, 221 East 71st Street, New York, NY 10021e-mail: [email protected]
at least 200 hits, depending on whether you use the term tampon or Tampax.
Coverage of this story in the popular media went through twists and turns that offer a glimpse into one couples intimate fantasies regarding the menstrual transaction, as well as a full frontal view of the larger societys public attitudes and assumptions about appropriate behavior when it comes to the topic of menstruation. It also illustrates how deeply conicted menstrual values are and how the topic can be appropriated as a rhetorical weapon in social and political discourse. But before delving into the layered meanings of the story, it is necessary to review the details of the event itself.
Background
Even before the marriage of Charles,...