The rollout of Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, suggests the Duke of Sussex is trying a new strategy when it comes to handling life in the public eye: tell everyone everything all at once. Among the heap of personal info shared in its pages and accompanying press interviews, Harry discloses experiences like losing his virginity behind a pub, watching Meghan Markle’s sex scenes on Suits, and doing shrooms at Courtney Cox’s house. Also described in detail: his lengthy journey with penile frostnip, which he got during a trip to the North Pole shortly before his brother’s wedding.
Here’s what happened, according to the book: Harry got frostnip — a pre-frostbite condition that doesn’t result in permanent skin damage — while trekking around the North Pole with some veterans during a 2011 charity expedition. During the trip, a confusing combination of insufficient layers and too much sweating led him to get frostnip on his ears and fingers and also, he discovered weeks later, his penis. The situation worsened during Prince William’s wedding, when he apparently attempted to remedy things at home without alerting the British public to the state of his penis. Here he is talking about putting his mother’s favorite face cream on his “borderline traumatized” penis:
Eventually, Harry consulted a doctor and found out he just needed to be patient and wait for his penis to properly thaw out. Hallelujah! But the Great Penis Freeze comes back to haunt the book several chapters later when, approaching his 29th birthday, Harry heads to Antarctica. In order to avoid another crisis, he commissioned a tailor-made mitten of sorts to steel his nether regions from the cold. Via a “very close mate,” he writes, he tasked a seamstress at the outdoor-gear company Helly Hansen with creating a “bespoke cock cushion” to house his dick. “Square, supportive, it was sewn from pieces of the softest fleece, and — enough said.” Too much said, perhaps.
In an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert that aired Tuesday, Harry claimed people had reacted to the leaked book excerpts regarding his penis without understanding the context, which he went on to provide, again relying heavily on use of the word todger. At one point, he provided a list of all the euphemisms he could possibly say instead of the actual anatomical word: “My man piece, my johnson, my wilson, my todger, my willy — all the things.” Anyway, here he is again, providing context:
The piece [again: penis] was against one layer of clothing or two very thin layers of clothing … and when you’re walking, you’re hot, and you’re trying not to sweat because the sweat freezes. And once it’s numb, you don’t know. The pain — it’s just numb.
He called the subsequent weeks a “slow, deteriorating situation,” which happens to be a great way to describe how my brain feels whenever he says “todger.” Maybe Princess Di’s face cream would help?
