Tea at Trianon: Drive-Thru Intimacy

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

Monday, June 15, 2026

Drive-Thru Intimacy

From Of Home and Womanhood:

Fast food, we all know is crap nutrition for the most part, it fills you for a moment, satisfies a craving, scratches an itch, it is quick, it is cheap, it is accessible, engineered to be desirable, easy to consume, and it is everywhere.
But you can’t live on it, not really if you care about your long term wellbeing. You will be full but you’ll end up malnourished, and casual sex does the same thing to your soul.
It gives you the illusion of being wanted without any of the real substance that comes when you are actually loved. It gives warmth to the body, but it gives you no safety, it gives you attention, but it will never give you devotion, it can give you pleasure, but it will never give you sacrifice and meaning. It gives us the feeling of being chosen for a night only to wake up the next morning feeling like trash.
Sound familiar? Yeah. Sounds like all the fast food we eat out of convenience and hunger for something real, hoping it fills the need only to then feel even worse after.
This is the part that hurts to say, but women are hungry, and we are hungry because human being are hungry. As humans, we hunger to be known, to be desired, to be cherished, and loved. The problem is that our culture has taken this real hunger, this real desire, and handed women, and men, it has handed us the worst cheapest possible substitute. (Read more.)