Tea at Trianon: No Taboo Is Safe

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

Friday, September 20, 2024

No Taboo Is Safe

From Mary Harrington:

Though pornographic art of course predates the sexual revolution, its large-scale form is a direct byproduct of that revolution. Central to this, as I’ve often noted in these pages, was the technological de-risking of real-life sexual intimacy through contraception. Though, again, the sex industry existed before the Pill, it was only with the advent of fairly reliable contraception that it became possible to imagine that who you have sex with, when, and how, is a purely private matter. And as night follows day, the privatisation of sex produced libertarian defences of buying and selling sex, including to produce porn.

Did the overall benefits of the sexual revolution outweigh the tradeoff of a mushrooming sex industry? Reasonable people may differ. But wherever you stand on this, it’s not a coincidence that after the Pill was legalised in the 1960s, it took barely a decade for the porn industry to explode to a scale that triggered feminist protest - and, in due course, also libertarian feminist support. The feminist ‘sex wars’ of that era are complex and merit a post or three on their own, but turned in essence on a conflict between those who saw women’s interests as best served by a defence of sexual freedom, including to make or consume porn, and those who argued that porn was structurally misogynistic and both enacted and legitimised violence against women. In the end, the libertarians won.

But the radical feminists were onto something. For the central mechanism of porn is the transgression of taboo. The most obvious of these is seeing people have sex, at all: even today, in our now very sexually liberal culture, everyone understands that it’s forbidden to rut in public. Porn makes money out of breaching this basic omertá, in a dynamic where the thrill of seeing forbidden things is at least as much part of the stimulus as the stimulating effect of watching or imagining the acts themselves. In turn, this interacts paradoxically with the ongoing drive behind the sexual revolution: the liberation of sexual expression and desire from social constraint. For, having uncoupled sex from procreation, there is no theoretical reason save perhaps the force of habit for any normative boundaries to be placed on sexual expression whatsoever. Given that sex is a private matter you should, in this view, be free to do literally anything you want, our post-revolutionary consensus asserts, provided it’s safe, sane, and consensual. (Read more.)