As someone who has read Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles more times than I care to admit, and who harbors a streak of deep and abiding corniness, will confess to being happy at the news that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are expecting their first child together. But it’s not just the Royals-watcher in me that’s curious to see how Kate Middleton’s pregnancy plays out. Here are three things I’m thinking of as the media frenzy commences:

1. How will her pregnancy affect the ongoing debate over British press laws? When Princess Diana was pregnant, Queen Elizabeth made a special appeal to the press to consider how they treated the Princess of Wales, given how badly she was suffering from morning sickness, an affliction that also appears to plague her daughter-in law. This time, Kate Middleton’s pregnancy comes in the middle of an event that could put even more pressure on British publications: the release of the Leveson Report into the phone hacking scandal that proposed a much more rigorous regulation scheme for the British press. How British tabloids pursue the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge could end up affecting public sentiment about the Leveson recommendations.

2. It’s crazy-retro to have your job be getting pregnant, but at least that recognizes that pregnancy is work: Usually, we’re uncomfortable discussing the extent to which being pregnant is hard work until it comes to giving birth: then, we call the process labor. Some informal rituals have sprung up to acknowledge the physical work that goes into carrying a child, like the idea of so-called push presents for a partner who’s given birth (the all-time best of those? The biker boots Tim Burton gave Helen Bonham Carter after the birth of their fourth child.). We’re comfortable with the idea that surrogates should be compensated (and we don’t treat them like insane throwbacks, in part because surrogacy isn’t usually a full-time job). But all of these conversations still shy away from the nine-plus months of work that happens before a woman goes into labor, and for state support for women whose pregnancies aren’t as high-profile affairs as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s. The United States is the only Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member country that doesn’t mandate paid parental leave schemes for new parents. It may be insanely old-fashioned for a woman to have as her career goals having two children. But at least when she does, everyone recognizes that she should get totally comprehensive, affordable health care coverage.

3. Boys are no longer the prize: I wrote about this earlier today, but for the first time, a Royal pregnancy doesn’t have to produce a boy to be successful. If Kate has a girl, she gets to be Queen, period, without any worry that she’ll be leapfrogged by a younger brother. That’s awesome, and shockingly overdue.

It seems like the leaking of nude photos of famous women has become a routine occurrence, a perhaps-inevitable consequence of the social media age and human error. But the publications of two sets of topless photographs of celebrities this week, a phone camera photo actress Alison Pill intended for her fiance, Jay Baruchel but accidentally tweeted publicly, and a set of paparazzi shots of the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, illustrate that while we may have come to expect to see women in public life naked, we’re a long way for establishing where the zones of privacy lie—and how far we should go to enforce them.

When Pill accidentally Tweeted out a playful picture of herself topless in bed, she apologized, but didn’t agonize. “Yep. That picture happened,” she tweeted. “Ugh. My tech issues have now reached new heights, apparently.” Baruchel added “My fiancee is an hilarious dork. #imustjgladitdidnthappentomefirst…Smartphones will get ya.” Pill may be embarrassed, but both she and Baruchel seem to have accepted that her mistake is the kind of inevitable risk people take when they distribute intimate shots of themselves on pieces of technology that are perhaps too powerful for our own good. Nobody’s suing. Nobody’s outraged. It may not have been tasteful for news outlets to publish the picture after Pill released it, but no one suggested it was a gross violation of privacy for them to do so, or that the photograph itself tarnished her reputation.

By contrast, the pictures of Kate Middleton sunbathing that the French magazine Closer published weren’t taken by her and leaked, or hacked, accidentally tweeted, or as was the case with pictures of her brother-in-law, Prince Harry, naked after a game of strip pool, taken by so-called friends and sold. They were taken by paparazzi photographers. Closer maintains that Prince William and his wife were on a balcony that was visible from the street, though “full view of a public road” may mean rather different things to the naked eye and to one enhanced by an extremely long-range telephoto lens.

While strict British press laws have generally protected the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge from the publication of photos of them in private moments at home, Closer apparently felt secure enough in its interpretation of French privacy laws to print the pictures, though it may face a suit from the royal family. But individual countries’ speech, publication, and privacy laws mean much less in the age of the internet, and while Afghanistan may demand that YouTube be blocked in response to the anti-Islam video that’s contributed to protests in a number of Middle Eastern countries, privacy violations are hardly likely to spark similar complains. It’s not just the internet—camera technology, be it embedded in smartphones or available to enhance a DSLR body, makes the terms of existing law up for debate.

That gets at a larger issue. Press and privacy laws, whether we think they’re desirable or not, function less to prevent the publication of the images of famous people than to help establish the market for them. When celebrities sue magazines and newspapers that print images like the ones of Middleton, the speed with which they act and the damages they request set precedents that help publications calculate whether it’s worth it to run the pictures, whether they can sell enough copies and garner enough clicks to make the cost of the pictures and the cost of the damages worth it. But those laws don’t, and never have, curbed the efforts of professionals to get pictures of famous women or of amateurs to sell them, and they certainly can’t protect us from mistakes in handling the photos we take of ourselves. Alison Pill will probably take better care with her camera phone in the future, and the leak may dispel whatever curiosity existed about what she looks like naked. But Kate Middleton has a bigger problem: it’s one thing to try to affect the supply of pictures of her, when the conversation about demand is the one that we’ve always needed, and that we’ll never meaningfully be able to have.

You have to pity Katie Couric, sort of: she voiced what everyone else has been thinking and now has to defend herself for simply saying it first. Last week after a taping of her new talk show “Katie,” the perk-tastic former newsanchor and morning show host fielded questions from the audience in a Q&A. But a softball question about how Kate Middleton would be her “dream guest” became something else entirely when Couric added off-the cuff, “I think she needs to eat more because she’s so thin.”

That siren you hear? It’s the body police.  Read more