Tea at Trianon: The War on Boys and Girls

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, May 14, 2023

The War on Boys and Girls

From American Greatness:

A report from the CDC in February found that teen girls are experiencing “record high levels of violence, sadness, and suicide risk.” The data show that 57 percent of U.S. teen girls felt “persistently sad or hopeless in 2021—double that of boys, representing a nearly 60% increase and the highest level reported over the past decade.” About 30 percent had seriously attempted suicide. These numbers are dramatically higher than they were 10 years ago.

Boys are suffering too. One of the main culprits for young males’ problems is the ongoing stress on so-called toxic masculinity, where feminists and the Left take normal male behavior, exaggerate it, and then vilify it.

Toxic masculinity is a counterproductive term, to say the least. Boys are unlikely to react well to the idea that there is something toxic inside them that needs to be exorcized, especially as most of them identify quite strongly with their masculinity. Almost half of men said their sex was “extremely important” to their identity.

As Brookings Institution fellow Richard Reeves reports, “Half of American men and almost a third of women (30%) now think that society ‘punishes men just for acting like men,’ according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. (Read more.)