A taste for Baroque extravagance

I keep looking at this and wondering ...



Consider this quote, for example:

If you were lucky enough to be beautiful, this was an age where you could use your beauty to acquire a generous lover, a good husband but also access to wealth and influence at court. But there was a risk attached. This was still a deeply misogynistic culture in many ways; you're whole life as a woman was circumscribed by the fact that you were, by definition, inferior to men, and if you pushed the envelope of acceptable behaviour too far, you risked ruining your reputation and being called a whore.

You might call this the use of feminism as magic. The incantatory phrases here are the following:

... still a deeply misogynistic culture in many ways; you're whole life as a woman was circumscribed by the fact that you were, by definition, inferior to men ...

Look what happens if we take them and the reference to the royal court out:

If you were lucky enough to be beautiful, this was an age where you could use your beauty to acquire a generous lover, a good husband but also access to wealth and influence. But there was a risk attached. If you pushed the envelope of acceptable behaviour too far, you risked ruining your reputation and being called a whore.

Now it sounds just like today.

If anything, here is the real difference: in the era of Charles II, only a tiny elite got to play these dangerous games, now just about everyone does.

Here is more,

Beauty was a virtue in this period. It's connected, on the outside, to your inner virtues.

Do you think there is a single woman between the ages of 15 and 50 who doesn't feel that same requirement is due from her today? Does anyone seriously believe that only "deeply misogynistic' cultures think that way? Only someone who is willing to condemn our culture as the same (as some feminists are willing to do) can make such a claim.

Every day I walk by women who dress in baroque extravagance and who flaunt their sexual virtue in ways that would make Nell Gwyn blush. (Or, more likely, make her jealous.)

You also have to wonder if this doesn't tell us more about how the British are stuck inside their own mythology—that they are, in modern jargon, stuck in the matrix. The Stuarts were not good leaders but they weren't any worse than those who preceded and followed them. And both "pretenders" had stronger claims to the throne than the Hanoverians did. No one should weep for the Stuarts but better to still be toasting the king over the water than believing a lot of foolish mythology.