Tea at Trianon: Your Wife Is Not Your Personal Porn Star

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, November 7, 2025

Your Wife Is Not Your Personal Porn Star

A Christian wife is an embodiment of the Church, the Bride of Christ, and thus possesses a mystical role in addition to her human and Christian dignity. From Elisabeth Stone at Of Home and Womanhood:

The idea that the beauty of intimacy depends upon sin’s creativity is both naïve and blasphemous. It assumes that what God created was incomplete, that we must borrow from depravity to make it interesting. That holiness, on its own, is not enough. But pornography was never neutral. It isn’t simply an aesthetic or an exaggerated version of reality. It is the deliberate inversion of everything sacred about the body. It takes what was meant to express communion and turns it into a theater of consumption. It transforms a human being into an object, and the act of love into a form of use. It preaches that the meaning of the body is pleasure, not gift. Pornography is not just the distortion of sex, it is the desecration of it.
And yet, that desecration has become the unconscious standard for how even Christians think about marital intimacy. The pornographic imagination has seeped into the Church: its aesthetics, its language, its expectations. What was once the realm of shame and secrecy is now smuggled in under the language of “keeping your marriage alive.” The tragic irony is that in trying to fight against infidelity, many have simply replaced it with another form of it, the mental kind.
To imitate pornography, even within marriage, is not to sanctify it, it is to validate its vision of the world. God did not design sex to be a performance. He designed it to be a union. The entire form and rhythm of intimacy reflect intention, gift, belonging. (Read more.)