News, if you could call it that, that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and Prince Harry will not reveal the location of or plans surrounding the birth of their first child. This will no doubt frustrate the swarms of paparazzi accustomed to camping out outside the Lindo wing of St Mary’s hospital in anticipation of the now familiar sight of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, groomed, trussed up and probably still bleeding in a pair of high heels, performing the whole Simba routine to the nation. The strangeness of the sight has never been lost on women; last year, when Prince Louis was born, women took to social media to share snaps of how they looked after giving birth: ecstatic, yes, but also exhausted, dazed, clammy, reeling. Trauma aside, these postnatal photos end up resembling a kind of freedom when put side-by-side with the stage-managed spectacle of the duchess.

Some of the press coverage of Meghan's pregnancy has been appalling, tinged with sexism and racism

It’s the price you pay, so the line of thinking goes. We put up with the flagrant unfairness of a monarchy, you give us your pound of flesh. The royals are, according to tabloid philosophy, fair game when it comes to scrutiny and invasion of privacy. The attitude of some of the public is proprietary, perhaps reflected in the subconscious knowledge that as a nation we are paying for them, not just financially but in more subtle ways than that: philosophically and politically. And yet, you can be an anti-royalist, as I am – even think that they are the country’s biggest benefit scroungers – and find the spectacle of their dehumanisation disturbing. Twenty-two years after Diana’s death, it continues. And the women always get it the worst.

This is what Hilary Mantel was getting at in her 2013 lecture about the monarchy, which was widely misinterpreted by the press and turned from some startlingly astute comments about the institution into, essentially, a catfight. Her comments about the Duchess of Cambridge (“I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung”) were what made headlines, but what I always found more interesting was her description of seeing the Queen in the flesh. “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones,” Mantel said. “… for a moment she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.”

Last week, the actor Scarlett Johansson warned of the paparazzi’s behaviour, calling it “a waiting game before another person gets seriously injured or killed, like Princess Diana”. She emphasised the gender politics at play, referring to them as stalkers of women. It is true that most paparazzi are aggressive men, and now that celebrities are able to control their own narratives via social media, it must be even harder to get a story in which the public will be interested. Could this drive them to more extreme tactics to get what they need? Who wants to look at a long-lens shot of a celebrity on a beach, when that celebrity has already posted their own bikini shot? Meghan deleted her old social media accounts on marrying into the monarchy – her new ones are part of the royal PR machine – and thus doesn’t have this option in the same way. Some of the press coverage of her pregnancy has been appalling, tinged with sexism and racism. Among the things for which she has been criticised is the crime of “constant bump-holding”.

There appears to have been little reflection from the tabloid press since Diana’s death. There was some soul-searching in the immediate aftermath, by both media and public, and I remain convinced that the outpouring of grief came on some level from a feeling of complicity. This especially from the female readers who empathised with her marital problems while enjoying the coverage at the same time (it has to be said that much celebrity journalism is consumed by women, who are encouraged to tear down the female subjects of their gaze at the same time as envying them). Who, after all, bought the newspapers, pored over the details of Diana’s destruction, and relished watching her marriage fall apart. There was the cult of her virginity, sleazily playing out in the newspapers, with her own uncle telling them: “Purity seems to be at a premium when it comes to discussing a possible bride for Prince Charles at the moment ... Diana, I can assure you, has never had a lover.”

To quote Mantel again, Diana’s death was “that dislocating time, when the skin came off the surface of the world, and our inner vision cleared, and we saw the archetypes clear and plain”. Two decades on, the archetypes remain the same. Which is why I can’t help but be impressed by the decision taken by Meghan to refuse to allow the world’s media into the private, charged moment of the birth of her first child.

In doing so, she is rejecting the feminine role she is under pressure to play, of a sacrificial mannequin. It is a reflection of her feminism and her sense of modernity. So are rumours that they want to raise their baby without gender stereotyping. Even the hardened cynics who will say that the change of tack is PR-related because the royals look desperately anachronistic will surely see some positives: little girls (and boys, too, of course) will grow up with a different idea of what it means to be a princess. And yet, the tabloid media does not take kindly to being excluded. I suspect there will be a price.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author