Tea at Trianon: A World Without Women

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, January 4, 2015

A World Without Women

Joseph Sciambra, a former gay porn star, reflects upon his experiences. (Warning: graphic language.) To quote:

Every boy who is drawn into the world of all-male homosexuality goes there because he is seeking something; for the most part, he is pursuing a masculinity which he failed to achieve as a pubescent. This has been recently most demonstrably revealed by several off-the-cuff remarks made by gay male celebrities: model and fashion designer Colby Melvin said: “I struggled a lot. Especially when I came out, with masculinity and being butch and what it meant to be a man.” Gay soccer star Robbie Rogers mirrored much the same battle when it comes to homosexuality and masculinity while describing the actor he would preferably like to play him on film: “It’s gotta be someone funny, someone who doesn’t care and someone very masculine; someone you wanna grab a beer with.” In both of these men, masculinity is indelibly linked with images of how straight men appear and act; for, they define what masculinity is – even the first pop-culture gay icons, The Village People,” were amalgamated tropes of perceived heterosexual manliness: the cop, the construction worker, and the cowboy. To this day, gay dating internet sites are awash in the most commonly repeated phrases of: “no fems,” “no queens,” “st8-acting only.” As of late, gay theorist Niall Richardson from the University of Sussex, summed it up like this: “‘Straight-acting’ is, arguably, one of the most offensive terms of contemporary slang. To be ‘straight-acting’ is to be ‘masculine’ and the term therefore insists on essentialist ideas of gender in which masculinity is perceived as the inherent property of straight men while gay men can only ‘act’ or ‘pretend’ to be masculine.” (Read more.)