Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

The Ins and Outs of Sex

Posted on September 15, 2026 by Abigail

Today I’m getting back to The Philosophy of Sex, the collection of essays we’ve visited before. It’s the volume where philosophers wade hip deep into the dark waters of sex and how to think about it. This time I’ll start with the essay by Thomas A. Mappes, “Sexual Morality and the Concept of Using Another Person.”

His question is, When is sex wrong? What kinds of moral restrictions should operate in sexual relations? Referencing Kant, he assumes that any human interaction that uses other persons without at the same time recognizing their “authority … to conduct their individual lives as they see fit” must be morally wrong. So, on the face of it, it’s wrong to interact sexually with people who are drugged or drunk or to interact sexually with children. The drugged, the drunk and children all lack the requisite authority. They are not and cannot be making the choice to be intimate.

When else is sex wrong? It’s wrong to engage in sex under false pretenses. For instance, it’s wrong to pretend love to get sexual advantage when you don’t love. Pretending you’re not married when you are is wrong. Likewise pretending that you don’t have herpes when you do. Also pretending you’ve had a vasectomy and can’t get a woman pregnant, when you haven’t (had one) and you can (impregnate her). And it’s wrong to withhold information that‘s relevant to intimacy (such as not telling the desired woman that you’ve already slept with her sister).

Well, no pun intended but Mappes is here helping to map the rocks and shoals of our current, not-so-free “free love.”

And of course coercion is wrong. Here he goes into degrees and types of coercion – also look-alikes that aren’t clear cases. Obviously, rape that uses or threatens force, is coercive – “occurrent” if force is used and “dispositional” if it’s only threatened. But coercion can occur in more subtle ways, via overt or implied threats to reputation, or the withholding of benefits to which the targeted person would be otherwise entitled.

Mappes also provides some fine distinctions that further illuminate the terrain of sexual wrongdoing. Offers of benefits in return for sex, like an undeserved higher grade or a chance to star in a film, don’t qualify as threats if they can be safely refused – however unprofessional or morally questionable such offers may otherwise be. At the same time, Mappes is aware of subtleties such as implied threats.

Finally, Mappes adds that it is wrong to coerce sex (or any human response) by taking advantage of people who find themselves in desperate situations where choice is still available but almost-prohibitively costly.

This essay is modestly instructive in that it describes the don’ts of sexual activity – without pretending to offer any more encompassing theory of the do’s.

*. *. *

Now on to the essay by Seiriol Morgan, which bears the ominous title of “Dark Desires.” His rather arresting (and perhaps atypical) view is that mere noncoerciveness or mutual consent is (while necessary) not sufficient to establish the moral permissibility of a sexual act. Desires themselves can be “dark.” That it feels good is not reason enough to do it. A trait he terms “ethical sensitivity” is also required.

Sexual desire cannot be adequately seen as a simple, unadorned animal appetite. (Morgan doesn’t go into it, but in fact many animal species engage in elaborate courtship rituals prior to their physical consummations.) In our human lives, “mental operations” involving both “self-consciousness and … immersion in society” affect “the character of the pleasure …” And, when the sex is “meaningful … pleasure is taken in an act experienced as being pleasurable for both partners.”

Morgan’s emphasis on the pleasure of the person you care about (which he offers as the corrective to egocentric, me-centered pleasure), still strikes me as abstract and irrelevant to the main event. So what main event am I thinking about?

Passionate merging.

Morgan’s main point is not just that sex is not motivated by pleasurable sensations abstracted from context, but also that sex life admits of a wide range of motivations, including “dark desires.” Thus Liaisons Dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th century novel of cynicism, portrays the aristocratic Vicomte de Valmont seducing a virtuous matron, Madame de Tourvel, for the satisfaction he gets from defeating her virtue!

In addition, Morgan traces some of the subtleties that shadow the new erotic freedoms. Thus it can be a moral mistake to give in to another’s love and desire if that love is unrequited. Or, in a different case: “Sometimes it can be perfectly obvious that someone’s ignorance or inexperience … is leading them to ruin, and that aiding them in their self-destructive project is not the kind thing to do.”

At the close of his essay, we find a change of tone. Morgan is suddenly at pains to counter any impression he may have inadvertently given of himself as a narrow-minded puritan. By way of underscoring this last concern, he lists “consensual practices and relationships” which “demonstrate [his] liberal credentials.” By my count, he lists twenty-four of them, some quite unknown to me.

If it’s not pornographic to ask, isn’t he bending over backwards?

*. *. *

Last, I looked at an essay with a completely different theme: “Asexuality” by Luke Brunning and Natasha McKeever. Their points seem worth making, though the essay’s tortuous struggles over definitions, with charts, shed little light on what look to me to be the actual concerns of these authors.

What do they want to point out? I guess it’s that asexuality is not per se a pathology, sexuality is not necessarily “central to human life,” nor is sexuality “the only respect in which we can be attracted to people.” Nor should asexuality be mistaken for “lack of concern for others.”

So it follows that, whether or not one’s life energies find sexual expression,

an erotic life –

the life of desire –

remains available.

___________

The Three-Tiered Real World

Posted on September 8, 2026 by Abigail

The Three Tiers: The Everyday, The Moral and The Spiritual

As of last night, we’re back from the Eric Voegelin Society meetings in Boston, where Jerry and I each gave talks. The late Eric Voegelin is not widely known among philosophers, religionists or political scientists, though he worked in all three sectors of those contemporary thought-worlds. Among contemporary thinkers about political reality, he may be unique in that (1) he takes in everyday experience, (2) he does not pretend neutrality about the moral dimensions of human experience, and (3) he recognizes that there are spiritual dimensions embedded in human reality.

Of course, anthropologists, sociologists and other academically respectable students of the human panorama do in fact observe and record the styles of life considered good or bad in the cultures they study – which is where those practices do get rewarded or punished. But Western academics would feel obligated by their respective disciplines to steer clear of any evaluative judgment of their own that could be considered “moral.” And the same goes for any rating of a practice within a society in terms of criteria purportedly “spiritual.” The tendency would be to treat any such judgment as an intercultural usurpation where the standards of the observer’s culture were being applied – disrespectfully and out of context – to the culture of the people being observed.

Well, aside from the present requirements of academic protocol, what’s the fact of the matter? Are the moral/spiritual dimensions of human life in society entirely relative – culturally and personally? Is there no fact of the matter? Do the relativists, cultural and subjective, have the last word?

I don’t think so. Here’s a case study from Abigail’s life. Having been originally endorsed by my senior colleagues for promotion, I was fired – then fired again and yet again over seven consecutive years – by the same senior colleagues who had originally voted for my promotion. These firings began at the first opportunity to do so, right after my dissenting vote in a Departmental election for the post of Philosophy Department Head.

In the course of my fight to get my job back, an Arbitration hearing was held. There I testified under oath for five hours. The senior professors who had fired me also testified under oath. When you’re telling the truth, you’re unlikely to get floored by leading questions. By contrast, when you’ve fired a colleague whom previously you had found meritorious – acting not on the merits but because of the way that colleague had voted – you just have to lie more. At some point, one lie under oath or another can get exposed. And that’s why I won the Arbitration.

So the moral dimension is not merely a “matter of opinion.” But what about the spiritual dimension? Certainly academic inquirers into cultures around the world have discovered that there are many approaches to the divine – approaches that differ in accordance with the tastes and talents of different cultures.

So, does it follow that – with regard to the spiritual dimension of human existence – “who is to say” who is right about God, or about whatever really is divine?

Well, that can follow, but only up to a point. Up to what point? Look, life on the spiritual level is not life in one-big-single-happy-but-blurry dimension. Spirituality contains and includes a scale with – I’m sorry but let’s face it – the demonic at the lower end of the spiritual scale and the saintly at the upper end.

All this is background framing our several days at the Boston meetings of the Eric Voegelin Society – Voegelin being the bold modern thinker who did recognize the moral and the spiritual dimensions in his studies of different civilizations in history. I found it refreshing – soothing even – to be in the company of people who were intellectually trained, highly intelligent and honest – whose thinking about human life took in all three dimensions of reality: (1) the ground-level experiential, but also (2) the moral and (3) the spiritual dimensions.

Eric Voegelin

I won’t try to recap the conference papers, which took in many areas of contemporary life – such as the American Bill of Rights, theology in relation to political life, concepts of leadership in ancient and modern life, academic freedom, the political insights available in literature, political trauma, and so on. But I will share a couple of personal anecdotes.

Two of the speakers at the EVS meetings were young Lithuanians, Simas Čelutka and Aistė Noreikaitė, both from Vilnius University. After their session, “Person and Play as the Path of Literature,” I got into conversation with them and mentioned that I had an 18th century ancestor on my mother’s side who was a rabbi known in the more rationalist (as opposed to Hassidic) school of rabbinic study as the Gaon (or Sage) of Vilna.

The Gaon of Vilna

Of course, had he lived and taught in the twentieth century, my ancestor would have been murdered along with the other Jews of Lithuania. But much to my surprise, not only had these two young academics heard of the Gaon, they told me that today – in post-Nazi, post-Soviet Lithuania – he is celebrated! I’m not sure, but I think they said that there is a statue of him in Vilna. Or at least something commemorative. So my ancestor is well known! Anyway, these two young contemporary academics wanted their pictures taken with me, to show their friends that they had met a real-life descendant of the Vilna Gaon!

There were other, meaningful encounters, but the one I’ll share was with James Greenaway. He gave a fine paper but here I’ll single out the brief conversation we had after his session. He told me that, for him, the whole world changed after October 7 and 8, 2023.

As you may recall, that year on October 7th, jihadi invaders of peaceful kibbutzim and a music festival attended by young people, came over the border of Israel – on hang gliders and other unexpected conveyances – to torture, rape and murder the old, the young, the pregnant, babes in utero, grandparents – using modes of torture new even in the long history of atrocity. They photographed these nightmares-they-had-made-actual, bragging about them to their families and to the world at large. Whereas the Nazis and the Soviets hid their crimes, showing some sense of shame or else aware that their public might not like what they did, these jihadis publicized their atrocities.

But there was more. By October 8th, the demonic villainies of Hamas were being celebrated all over our planet, but most saliently by faculty and students in universities worldwide!

These two-fold events assaulted the fundaments of meaning in my world. Their effects, physical and psychological, won’t be described here. Despite what some people claim to believe, atrocities are not interesting.

By contrast real life is interesting. And by real life, I mean the kind of human life that is not demonic. However, I have not typically met with academics – people who live on the intellectual, moral and spiritual proceeds of The House that Plato Built – taking me aside to volunteer that they shared my sense of unassimilable shock. For Greenaway, as for me, the events of those days have divided the knowable world into the contours that it had prior to October 7th and 8th on the one side and, on the other side, an unrecognizable world thereafter.

*. *. *

Such unexpected and varied moments – each characterized by its own empirical, moral or spiritual accuracy – combined to make this Voegelin conference well worth our long drive to Boston.

_________

Related Content: How Can We Know If It’s God?

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Authenticity Adios

Posted on September 1, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie is away this week giving a talk at the Eric Voegelin Society. This column was originally posted on Aril 11, 2023, and continues to be timely. She’ll be back at her post next week.

______________________

The philosopher who first brought “authenticity” to public notice was, I believe, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). According to a recent book, Tyranny and Revolution by Waller Newell, Heidegger’s notion went like this: you and I are to be grasped as localizations of Being – hence Heidegger’s term for us, Dasein – being there. In case you expected that so vast a foundation would give us depth and stability, think again! Being itself is shot through and through with temporality (time’s passage).

To get to the point about authenticity: it’s only reached when our very fleetingness is faced square on, along with awareness that we’re headed toward the end of ourselves (Being-Toward-Death).

So what’s inauthentic, for Heidegger? It would be any assumption that we live in an environment that’s stable and solid. Gossip relies on such an assumption. So do conventional opinions. Ordinary obituaries and condolences carry that implication. They convert the uncanniness at the bottom of human existence into “news” – something seeming familiar and commonplace.

All this sounds pretty deep, does it not? Many people take it that way. Whether or not they like him, Heidegger is widely conceded to be gifted, original and – in his own special way – authentic.

The fact that he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 – telling all the students in his class who were Jewish to get out, sending a termination of status notice to Edmund Husserl (his former teacher who’d got him the professorship at Freiburg) and backing Nazi policies that would have got Husserl murdered together with Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s former student and lover (if the first had not died and the second escaped) – did not strike him as deleting anything from his authenticity.

I recall mentioning some of these awkward details during a seminar I taught on existentialism and being scolded by a student for my “judgmentalism.” Judgmentalism? Since I’d never slept with any student, nor with my professors, nor tried to get any murdered, this student had a point. Don’t judge someone if you haven’t walked a mile in his moccasins. Or his lederhosen.

Be that as it may, we still have to reckon with the notion of authenticity. Ideas travel. This one crosses into France, where Jean-Paul Sartre makes it his own. Sartre puts more emphasis on its contrary: bad faith (mauvaise foi). Though each of us has recognizable traits of character and style, for Sartre these depend entirely on our own free choice, which we can change at any time. So the waiter who brings our coffee, at our usual hangout on St. Germain des Pres, is in bad faith insofar as he believes he really is – the waiter – at which he plays.

Likewise, in another example from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the appealing young woman who has joined someone like Sartre at his café table – he having meanwhile placed his hand on hers – will be in bad faith if she pretends to ignore this little transaction rather than frankly admit her own lusts.

Hmm. I’ve never waited tables but the other incident is as recognizable as it is embarrassing. I can tell you that her main concern will focus on how to slide her hand out from under the hand of a celebrated French intellectual without showing up in a book about bad faith.

Wait a minute! Anecdotes like these can’t possibly add up to all there is to say about authenticity, can they?

Lionel Trilling, one of the leading opinion-shapers of the twentieth century, wrote a book called Sincerity and Authenticity. In it he describes authenticity as a power to resist the opinions of others and instead steer one’s own singular course in life. Citing Sartre’s play, No Exit (Huis Clos), in which a character says, “Hell is other people,” Trilling finds “the infernal outcome of modern social existence” to lie in the fact that “the sentiment of individual being depends upon other people.”

Hey, get real! Without other people, we can’t learn to walk on two legs, we can’t acquire language, we’ll fail to acquire the use of the prehensile thumb and … need I go on? At some point along the road of adulthood, we might well find that our integrity requires us to go against the grain of other peoples’ opinions. We’d prefer to do it quietly and not have to pay too much for it. It’s not fun or enviable to have to do it. Inevitably, it’s a choice between greater and lesser evils.

Back to “authenticity.” In my experience, it doesn’t wear well. At one time, the counter-culture descended on the little town in Maine where my parents had a summer home. It was the era of authenticity. The young men worked on their great, abstract, metal sculptures; the young women taught school to pay for the raw materials. One time, visiting one of these rather beautiful young couples, I asked, feeling thirsty, “Do you have running water?”

“Charge you a nickel if I run,” came the wry response, which to me had the very sound – alike dashing and earthy – of authenticity!

A few decades later, I ran into the same couple at a summer art fair. His pony tail had turned grey, the art was no better, and they were looking remarkably like the bourgeois types that long ago they had so attractively repudiated.

I can’t remember ever wanting to be authentic. I just wanted to find out what belonged to me to do in life,

whether or not

it resembled

what other people did.

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Bad Faith at Sartre’s Cafe

Posted on August 25, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie is away this week getting treatments in California. This column was originally posted on December 7, 2021, and continues to be timely.

______________________

It may be of interest to note that post-World War II feminism (the “second wave”) was written-into-being by Simone de Beauvoir, a gifted French philosopher, in The Second Sex (1949). It was conscientiously researched and replete with examples that showed how unfair and arbitrary were the predicaments it cited. Beyond its vivid illustrations, the book had a theoretical framework taken over from Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was the man she loved till his death and beyond. From the start, their relationship was conceived as nonmonogamous. How they got through that is not something I want to deal with here.

Sartre’s magnum opus was Being and Nothingness (1943), where he developed his own version of existentialism. His was a theory of how to live a truthful life — how not to be a phony. To phoniness, he gave the name of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi).

That turns out a rather tricky concept to get hold of, so Sartre explains it with several illustrative types of bad faith. The first type is shown by an imaginary young woman who has agreed to meet a young man for the first time. At a café.

The fictional young people set out to get acquainted. Their conversation starts on a fairly lofty level. Sartre doesn’t say what they are talking about but perhaps it’s some ideals they share. Of the young woman, Sartre says, “she does not quite know what she wants.” Respect? “She would find no charm in a respect which would be only respect.” On the other hand, sexual desire, candid and unadorned, “would humiliate and horrify her.”

Suddenly the young man takes her hand between both of his. Now she has to decide what to do about that. Sartre describes her as dodging the decision. She continues to talk about high-level topics, meanwhile treating her hand as a passive physical object, disconnected from her high-sounding words.

In his bad faith museum, she is Sartre’s exhibit A, though I don’t think he explains what he’d like her to do instead. There’s an implication that she should own up to her own frank desires and let her new acquaintance lead her down the garden path to his place. It seems to me that one thing she would desire is that he not spoil their first date. There’s a rhythm in getting to know someone. He’s getting pretty far ahead of that rhythm.

Be that as it may, his courtship blunders are not what Sartre is spotlighting here. The focus will be on hers. It’s dishonest, in Sartre’s view, to treat oneself (or one’s hand) as an object that is merely physical. Why is that? Because, while we do have bodies and do live surrounded by physical things of all kinds, the attitudes we take toward such things lie within our power. We are metaphysically free. Our consciousness is devoid of infrastructures that could narrow or shape our freedom to interpret ourselves and our situations. On the other hand, it’s equally dishonest to treat oneself as wholly extra-physical – as pure spirit — since social and material contexts can’t be dodged. They are the occasions for our freely choosing how to relate to the contexts that we’re in.

So the young woman is wrong to treat her hand in his on the table as a thing for which she bears no responsibility – but equally dishonest to treat her consciousness as capable of soaring above its circumstances — as if uncontaminated by them.

Okay, got it? She’s in “bad faith.” Now, mind if I join the table? Let’s suppose our young man is Sartre himself (actually not an unrealistic supposition). He’s a formidable talker and intricate cogitator – a Walking Intellect, it would seem. Let’s imagine that, by the time the waiter has brought three coffees, he’s been able to convey his notions of “bad faith” to the girl.

Nobody asked me, but here I might chime in that it’s quite an old-fashioned womanly trait to want to gain approval from a powerfully influential man. No girl would want to be dismissed as Exhibit A for this philosopher’s concept of bad faith. Lord, he might even portray her in a book!

As long as I’m at the table, I might also remark that there was a time when women didn’t go out alone to meet young men at cafés. The youth came to call and be vetted by her parents and guardians. In those days, an uninvited hand at a garden table would be pushed away unceremoniously. A woman would have to do that, so as not to forfeit social approval. Whereas nowadays, she might feel equally obligated to leave her hand clasped in his two hands, for the same reason.

How many situations like Sartre’s case study of “bad faith,” orchestrated by theories-convenient-for-predators, have made their way into women’s short secret history of embarrassments?

De Beauvoir’s Second Sex, which has continued to define feminism into the current century, is framed by Sartre’s view that femininity is a choice that can be discarded at will. Hers was one application of the Sartrean view that the psyche itself has no internal structures and can be given its entire aim by acts of free choice. Also, the Sartrean psyche can be changed, in character and direction, just as freely from one instant to the next. If you believe that, as they say in Brooklyn, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.

So, if I’m so smart, how would I handle the encounter? Let’s picture me as the young woman at the café table, and Sartre as the man I was there to meet. Between worrying about French grammar, hoping to appear philosophically sophisticated and artfully up-on-the-latest, fearing to be nailed as an exemplar of bad faith but feeling not the faintest tug toward the Walking Intellect with the Hands – how would Abbie manage the situation?

With the utmost clumsiness, I can assure you.

In the days I was in Paris, when Sartre and de Beauvoir were to be found at their cafe, it wouldn’t have been hard for me to walk a few blocks over to St Germain des Pres. I’m beginning to see why I never did.

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Philosophy in a Frenched* Bed

Posted on August 18, 2026 by Abigail

Brassaï, Picasso’s studio, Paris, June 16, 1944. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Lacan standing far left, Beauvoir standing far right, Sartre seated at left, Camus kneeling at center, Picasso standing at center with arms crossed.

Years ago I lived in Australia for a couple of academic terms, my first husband having been hired to teach logic at Sydney University. Under the title of Research Affiliate, I enjoyed freedom to use the library and to join philosophical colleagues at the spirited Staff Club luncheons.

At that time, there were in fact two philosophy departments at Sydney University. We were housed in the Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy, which emphasized Anglo-American philosophy, bounded by what could be extrapolated from sense experience and the natural sciences. The “other department” was General Philosophy, focused on feminism and Marxism – especially as practiced in France.

The women philosophers were in General Philosophy, where I gave a paper with the in-your-face title, “Getting Past Marx and Freud.” Subsequently, I went out to lunch with one of the women who had inspired the original breakaway into a second philosophy department. As we talked, woman to woman, she told me that she was being targeted in quite a nasty, gangup fashion by a male colleague. He was a former lover and had earlier teamed with her to bring about the original schism.

I had no trouble believing her. These avant garde revolutionaries were not celebrated for their gallantry. What should she do? Well, based on my own experience, I suggested she consider the possibility of moving over to the notoriously male chauvinist precincts of Trad and Mod. “They’re not feminists,” I said, “but they can be chivalrous.”

A few years later, a few of the feminists in General Philosophy did apply for asylum at Trad and Mod. I can’t take credit for those decisions. Other circumstances precipitated them. But what I said at the luncheon might have “shot an arrow into the air”- suggesting a possibility previously unimaginable in that encompassingly French-influenced Department.

*. *. *

The question of the French influence in the field of philosophy is intelligently surveyed in a book I am now reading, The Frenchmen, or my life in theory by Emily Eakin. There are about eight contenders who are deemed philosophers, though they didn’t all get degrees or teaching jobs in philosophy. There is one entry lane to philosophy jobs in France: you have to pass the great exams given by the College de France. Not everybody of philosophical influence tried, and not everybody succeeded. There are also earlier intellectual strands: Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and André Breton, also Structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure. These also influenced intellectual culture in the arts and literature on the Continent and they count as part of this lineage.

So far, the chapters I have read are mainly concerned with Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Here’s my super-thumbnail sketch of the boundaries and character of this world. Although perhaps provoked and set in orbit by the combined effects of Darwinian reductionism and World War One’s shattering of faith in progress – these movements seem to me to start “in the middle of the air.” What do I mean by that?

Well, they don’t seem to be theoretical responses to the shortcomings of previous theories, as philosophies have been traditionally. “Plato is great, but truth is greater,” said Aristotle about his immortal teacher – to whom Aristotelian thought took shape as a response. Ever since, philosophers have continued to pick up the shortcomings in the thinking of their predecessors and fill them in. But in The Frenchmen, the Q & A of philosophy, where a proposed hypothesis meets a response, looks either ultra-compressed (so that I am missing it) or else it’s really missing.

What is more – and perhaps worse, in philosophies that claim to explain or explain-away the assumptions of everyday life – some of these thinkers are endlessly busy with sexual seductions of their protégées, or else making a sensation by daring or shocking moves, or else navigating the pathway between actual mental asylums and their own apodictic claims. They compete with each other for ascendancy in intellectual bravado, where bravado partly exempts the competitors from the dialectical criteria of consistency or adequacy to the relevant evidence. They don’t try concretely to explain or illuminate the problems of lived experience. They tend to mistake cruel criminality for creativity.

One early example: the grotesque double murder of a lawyer’s wife and his daughter by their maids, Christine and Lea Papin. The crime drew excited empathy – even glorification – from Parisian “leftist intellectuals” like Lacan and Simone de Beauvoir. The intellectuals were quick to attribute the entire grisly horror to working class grievances. And so it would continue. The intellectuals were busy shocking the bourgeoisie, while the bourgeoisie – to keep up with the latest – got equally busy learning not to be shocked at anything. Depravity would become the new norm.

Overall one feels the thick spirit of disillusionment. It begins grim and it gets grimmer. I would ask, what were the illusions that you personally had before you got so disillusioned – and so self-important about it? Why did you give them up? What do you think might have prevented your disillusionment? “Philosophy,” Aristotle said, “begins in wonder.”

Go back to the beginning!

__________________

*A harmless prank where the bottom sheet is folded up to look like the top so the user can’t stretch out legs full-length.

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Beyond ‘Beyond Good and Evil’

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Abigail

Vicious Circle by Jacek Malczewski, 1895

Recently, I finished reading a novel, The Far Pavilions, by M.M. Kaye, set in 19th century India. Its hero is a young British officer with a dual identity. He’s been raised as an Indian child after his English parents died – but then reappropriated by his own people and educated in England. Anyway, at a certain point in the saga, he confronts the villainous man whose earlier murders of innocent characters he has finally figured out. In their face to face, the hero iterates the crimes that the culprit has committed. The villain offers one distracting explanation after another for what he claims are “misunderstandings.” Our young hero rebuts all the excuses one by one. Till the villain’s exposure stands uncontested.

Though the plot is complicated, the story’s denouement is neither obscure nor subtle. Hey, how ‘bout that? The bad guy is a bad guy!

By contrast, one of the beliefs of the 20th and 21st centuries has been that – when you get beyond good and evil – you’ve reached a deeper level, closer to authenticity. But why would I even suggest that there’s some mistake in that outlook? Wouldn’t it accord with being modern and post-modern? And isn’t it less hypocritical and more liberated than a posture weighted down by “judgmentalism”?

A lot of growing up, of coming to adulthood, involves learning the ropes, acquiring the adaptive skills that can smooth one’s path and harmonize with the needs and expectations of others in shared situations. Ordinarily, these kinds of know-how have little to do with good and evil, right and wrong or any judgments about such matters. Whatever goes into those judgments – it doesn’t seem to be the stuff of everyday life. So judgments of good and evil appear to interrupt the rhythms of normality.

There’s another cause for concern occasioned by moral judgment. Children often suffer from adult condemnations – raining down from those cloudy heights that only grownups can see. So childhood often gets recalled not as a time of innocence but as the season of reproof, belittling comparisons, and hopeless condemnations. If that’s the background, childhood will live in memory as the age when one was beset by guilt, with adulthood the redemptive season of relative innocence – or at least freedom from unfair accusations.

So these are cases where appeals to moral judgment appear either irrelevant or manipulative. Nevertheless, despite these well-taken objections, there are situations that call for judgments operative in the realm of good and evil. To be sure, it’s a different realm. And here’s an illustrative case or two.

One time I was giving a talk in Brooklyn College’s Philosophy Department about my then recently-published book, A Good Look at Evil. A young woman whom I’d never seen before – not one of my students and not one of our philosophy majors – took a seat smack in the middle of the front row. And there she sat, gazing directly at me with a look of such gleaming malevolence that I had to avoid looking her way if I was to carry on with my talk. I didn’t think she constituted a physical threat so it wasn’t a matter for Security. But I sure wished my audience had included a competent exorcist.

Another case. It concerns a person whom I had known since childhood. She was troubled by a sense of failure – of being jeopardized both in her career and her romantic life. These troubles she often confided in me. There was nothing unusual about her troubles. The competitions of real life are not necessarily rigged but all the same not everybody wins every round. That said, in her relatively ordinary situation – something had shifted – in a way that was not ordinary.

What I was beginning to perceive was that she had decided to opt for a third way – neither ordinary success nor ordinary failure – but the way of evil. This was a different way entirely.

You could succeed at evil

even when you’d failed at everything else.

In addition, I knew that I was the only person in her life who was both aware of the terrible choice she was making and also cared.

I was not neutral. I remember walking the streets in anguish, literally wringing my hands, beset by this realization and helpless to reverse or cure the outcome of what I felt to be her consequential – nay fateful – moral decision.

Such memories are coming to mind these days as I’ve been reading an excellent biography, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux. I’ve known a number of people who took Friedrich Nietzsche seriously. They regarded him as a philosopher who provided an opening to a freer life, a life unfettered by social constraints. They saw him as inviting the reader to enter the realm to which he gave the title, “beyond good and evil.” Here, from the Prideaux biography, is Nietzsche in early adolescence but looking ahead:

“When I was twelve years old, I conjured up for myself a marvelous trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My deduction was that God, thinking himself, created the second person of the godhead, but that to be able to think himself he had to think his opposite, and thus had to create it.—That is how I began to philosophize.”

What shall I say? People suppose – in the line of intellectual descent and influence including Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger – that you can play with evil and still retain your autonomy.

But no. The so-called freedom that you get when you’ve done your utmost actually to climb up or to climb down to an imagined realm beyond good and evil is not a freedom from moral constraints. It’s the condition obtaining when you’ve given evil free access – to enter and take control.

What follows? I mean, aside from all the funny stuff and not-so-funny stuff that you may then actually do. What also follows are all the excuses, rationalizings, and self-promotings of a life that has denatured itself –

and cannot find its own way back.

____________________

Related Content: A Good Look at Evil (book) | Understanding Evil

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The Decline and Fall of Sex

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Abigail

Still concerned as I am to discern the ways and means by which the trained philosophers among us have been thinking about sex, I’m going to dig deeper.

From the collection, The Philosophy of Sex, I’m picking out the essay by Alan Goldman, the one whose hopeful title is “Plain Sex.” To see it plain, he’ll want to lift sex out of its “layers of cultural, moral and superstitious superstructure.”

He wants to get at the thing itself, sex itself. And thus to strip away all that is extraneous: the “cultural layers,” as he calls them.

As a woman, I’ve already tensed up. What’s left after all the layers of meaning are lifted? What’s he gonna say in the morning? “Slam, bam, thank you ma’am?”

Parenthetical note: Aristotle distinguished four ways in which anything becomes real: material cause (what it’s made of), efficient cause (what sets it going), formal cause (what constitutes its structure) and final cause (what purpose or aim it serves). Here Goldman seems to be stripping away the formal and final causes of human sexual relations, leaving only material and efficient causes – thus, our bodies and their prompts. He calls the other two layers “cultural,” as if those layers were extraneous or unnatural for that reason. However human beings are not the only species whose life is supported by their cultures – by the surround of assumptions and signals, from which the young learn from their elders how to behave.

Anyway, Goldman proposes to strip away any “external goal or purpose to sexual activity” – purposes such as love, communication, awareness or reproduction – and get down to the sexual desire plain and unadorned: this would be the “desire for contact with another person’s body and for the pleasure which such contact produces … .” Happily, that desire is quite fulfillable – by “sexual activity.”

He then spends some time disposing of other contenders for a definition of human sexuality. In the days before contraception, it was possible to confuse the definition of normative sex with its reproductive purpose. However, although questions about child rearing and parental responsibility remain consequential, these, he believes, no longer come attached to any values that pertain to the sexual activity per se.

With reproduction disposed of as the raison d’être for sex, the author next turns his analytical hose on love. Although love can benefit a marriage, just as monogamy can, love can also be responsible for “disastrous marriages” prompted by “adolescent confusion.” It can also produce “damaging jealousies.”

What is more, invoking love has been associated with the “double standard which has curtailed the freedom of woman” and has led (by some pathway obscure to me) to "using sex as a political weapon." As for tying sex to “intimacy,” the embarrassment that intimacy can include is “too often the result of artificial sexual ethics and taboos.”

Huh? What’s going on here? Obviously any human activity can be done badly, from painting the side of a barn to riding a bicycle. The danger of doing it wrong does not by itself discredit the activity! To assert that it does commits what logicians call the slippery slope fallacy. As for “the double standard,” that’s never needed “love” to be invoked. Re “sex as a political weapon”? I’ve known of sex used for social or professional advancement. I’ve never heard of it being used as a weapon. Not in literature and not in real life.

What’s he thinking of? The whole peculiar rundown finally ends on a denunciation of “artificial sexual ethics and taboos.” Which ones would he like to get rid of? Show your cards, Alan!

Anyway, although any norms applicable to human activities generally would also cover sexual activities, the author identifies no sexual acts as abnormal or perverted as such. The sometimes fascinated unease which people may feel about acts socially forbidden may come from “latent desires we are loathe to admit.” But no act can be labeled perverted on exclusively sexual grounds.

So finally, at the beginning and the windup of this essay, sex is still about “the satisfaction of desire and the pleasure it brings.” No more and no less.

So what do I think of all this? Well, I don’t like it. But why not? Well, for Aristotelian reasons, funnily enough. Pleasure, that ancient philosopher defines as “the bloom on the rose” of any activity, not the reason to do it.

It’s a side effect, inherently. This would probably be true for our species as well as for any other. Pleasure doesn’t define the action; it’s an abstraction from the entire context and purpose of the action. You could never write a novel in which your lead character does whatever he does just for the sake of pleasure.

Pleasure – in the context where Goldman takes it to explain and justify the sexual action – does have a partner. From his account, we don’t know who she is, or what she thinks, whether before or after. Has this activity affected their relationship with each other? Or with others whom they know or who know of them? Goldman assures us that any requirements otherwise obtaining between decent human beings would still be in force. However, the participants and other people close to them would not be affected by the sexual connection between them.

They’ve just done the most intimate thing that two people can do with each other and it adds no new quality to their relationship? With regard to the sexual connection – and with regard to the people involved in it – all I can say is,

I’m sorry to hear that.

*. *. *

What does the second of our three philosophers have to say on The Big Subject? She’s Elizabeth Brake, with an essay that asks the question, “Is ‘Loving More’ Better? The Values of Polyamory.”

Her notion of polyamory is flexible as to the number of participants in such relationships, also whether those she considers would be exclusively heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual or any mix of these options.

As to objections, on the grounds that these plural partners might occasion jealousy, or – to avert that – secrecy and subterfuge, she stipulates certain virtues as required by polyamorous relationships: honesty, mutual consent, open discussion, nonpossessiveness, and so on.

And she’s expecting to find these outstanding traits among people committed to forming and mutually agreeing to novel and original sexual combinations? And these arrangements will stay in place for as long as any children (from these or previous group comings-together) will need them?

Okay. You believe this and – as they say in Brooklyn –

I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.

*. *. *

We come now to our third philosophic contributor, Robin Dembroff, with an essay that asks the searching question, “What Is Sexual Orientation?”

Dembroff is concerned to resist presumptions that the man/woman attraction “should be privileged within society.” Any new categories she supplies should “reduce or eliminate” that presumption, be in line with “relevant social scientific research” on sex and gender, support legal and social protection for “queer sexual orientations” and help to bring about a new “taxonomic schema of sexual orientation.”

So her aims are avowedly political. They are about transforming society. Her particular concern is to protect those disposed to act along queer, transgender or “gender nonconforming” lines.

Since “someone may be attracted only to transgender men who have not had gender-confirmation surgery, or only to cisgender men and women,” she wants concepts broad enough to take in all the conceivable variations. Nor can her concepts be based solely on behaviors, since social factors might lead individuals to behavior that conceals their actual preferences. So ascription of sexual orientation should be restricted to circumstances where sexual behavior can be engaged in, or not engaged in, willingly. The object of such a preference (not the person acting on the preference) should be what determines one’s classification.

The most flexible concept Dembroff can find is one of her devising: “Bidimensional Dispositionalism.” This gets rid of heterosexuality as the norm, allowing for all kinds and degrees of sexual orientation, and for changes in an individual’s choices. Sexuality is expressed along a continuum. Sexual choice is not irrevocable.

So, what do I think of Dembroff’s solutions to the problems of sexual orientation? Several objections come to mind.

Sexual desire is competitive. Not everybody wins. It includes losers, frustrated people, heartbroken people. This is true within a category such as man/woman sexuality, and also between categories. I recall a young brother and sister whom I knew in Australia complaining to me that the then-new fashion of homosexuality had created an atmosphere at social gatherings unfavorable to heterosexual flirting and courtship. Could it be that Dembroff doesn’t stand above the intricate game of desire? Rather, she is simply loading the dice?

When men claim to have become women, or to be “transgender,” they can spoil women’s competitive chances in sports previously restricted to biological women. They can also intrude on women’s privacy in locker rooms and bathrooms. Finally, they can constitute a physical threat to women when housed with them in prison cells. The scientific basis for changing biological sex surgically and chemically seems unclear.

It may work well in some cases. But I know of two instances where such surgery was performed with tragic results. In one case, the girl who decided to become a boy had been the victim of incest. Needless to say, her condition was not cured by mutilating surgery. In the other case, the young man was disvalued on account of his race, and of course surgery did nothing to heal that social problem. Eventually, both of these traumatized and surgically wounded young people committed suicide.

In her essay, Dembroff presents all her social and biological distinctions as capable of being redrawn free from all harmful consequences – with a mere stroke of her computerized pen.

That’s not true. Her proposed changes are profoundly consequential and certainly not harm-free.

*. *. *

Meanwhile, the eros of human relationships – the eros of loving purpose animating our society as such – that fundamental and profound desire is neglected and forgotten. No one remembers

what sex is and can be.

____________

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Getting Sex All Wrong

Posted on July 28, 2026 by Abigail

Satyr and Girl
by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1615

There are some who believe that “You are what you eat.” Differing from those people, I believe that “You are what you think.” And about The Big Subject, what philosophers think and write about sex can trickle down to the assumptions and rationales that affect attitudes and actions in the wider population. With such concerns in mind, I return to The Philosophy of Sex that we looked at last week, to consider three more essays.

The opening essay is by Greta Christina and bears the title, “Are We Having Sex or What?” Christina begins by recalling the bygone time when she “used to like to count” each new partner, it having been “a source of pride” for her to keep this tally. Eventually that practice grew harder to maintain as the numbers began to mount up. At the same time, it was getting to be less clear to her whether or not to include those who’d “almost” become sex partners. Her reckonings got blurrier still when the class of eligible partners widened to include women. All of which has led her finally to ask a question concerning definitions:

“What counts as having sex with someone?”

She’s a freelance writer, not an academic philosopher, so it may be that this conceptual question is what explains the inclusion of Christina’s essay in the present volume.

That there must be some reality to define or demarcate is evident to her since she’s believed (rightly or wrongly) that sex changes a relationship. Rape can be excluded since, “if there’s no consent, it ain’t sex.” On the other hand, it counts as sex, in her view, even if you didn’t really want it. So there’s a pretty wide territory that wants defining.

The territory gets wider still, and its edges blurrier when she includes an “all-girl sex party” where, as she recalls, many varieties and gradations of interactions were enjoyed all round. Yet, despite all the differences in degree and kind, she reports feeling that she’d “been sexual with all the women there.”

As her essay draws to a close, we get treated to a parting (how shall I put this?), uh, shockeroo. It seems our essayist has been employed “as a nude dancer at a peep show.” Permit me to draw a veil over her interactions with a particular customer whom she perceived through a “dingy black box” – a box like an old-fashioned telephone booth – but furnished with a viewing window.

Finally, her essay concludes with the question, Was it sex, or not? to which the writer admits to having no answer.

I’ve got a different question. Was this an essay that belongs in a philosophical collection? She references no philosophic text nor uses any of the philosophic ways of framing a question. Or is the very topic of sex so weird – so far out – for Anglo-American philosophers, that anybody with sexual experience can be deemed eligible to get a foot in the door and to shoulder in thereafter?

I have a second sort of puzzlement. It’s prompted by her remarkably tall tally of intimate partners – none marred by the fear of pregnancy, abortions legal or illegal, sexually-transmitted diseases, getting hurt physically or wounded psychologically or by getting branded by others in unflattering ways – all those invulnerabilities rendering her, so far as I know, atypical for a woman. Am I to understand that Christina has never found herself disillusioned, scorned, disgusted, offended or threatened?

I can testify that I personally have never met a woman like this essayist. I don’t know that any part of her story is fabricated – or else misleadingly described – in whole or in part. But I am sure that she is far from being a typical woman. So her placement in the opening chapter, as scene-setter for this collection, has the effect of disorienting the reader. Henceforth, we are being urged to go forward – to read on – all the while suspending disbelief!

*. *. *

We turn now to the essay by Micah Newman. He is an independent scholar whose essay, “A Realist Sexual Ethics,” is here reproduced with permission from Ratio 28:2. His essay lies at the other end of the spectrum from Christina’s. Newman defends what he terms a traditional view as the norm. His aim is to defend such a view on philosophical rather than religious grounds. To do that, he will draw on the evidence of evolution.

Seen from an evolutionary standpoint, Newman finds that sex must be a biologically-grounded activity with reproduction as its defining essence. Although not every sexual act has this baby-making effect, any other effects (such as felt pleasure or expressed love) would be derivative and – where consistent with sex’s essence and therefore allowable – no more than contributory.

Since human babies need continuous care, their parents ought to be in an exclusive and committal relationship “inviolate for a lifetime … .” So the parents ought to be married. Although romantic love is desirable from the evolutionary standpoint, feelings such as “the subjective high” cannot be “themselves foundational.”

Even if his evolutionary starting point sufficiently accounted for the above exclusions, it does not explain how Newman can proceed at one bound to his announced goal of human “flourishing.” To bring about that flourishing, he adds moral and cultural refinements that don’t appear to follow with any necessity from his evolutionary starting point, and might even be inconsistent with it.

For instance, among the cultural refinements that assist flourishing he includes the Kantian requirement that we treat others as ends, never solely as a means. But doesn’t the continuous baby-making function previously assigned to women treat them precisely as the means to a biological end? Also, why choose Kant to illustrate moral refinement rather than say Aristotle? The classical philosopher would seem better able than Kant to offer guidelines about how appropriately to treat people in different contexts. So Newman’s examples of “flourishing” seem to be offered without backing other than his personal preferences.

The examples he approves get hedged about with exclusions that (he claims) go back to his evolutionary starting point. On that basis, the following are ruled out: homosexual practices (though not inclinations), masturbation, in vitro fertilization – as an “attempt to change the nature of reproduction to make it not sexual” – and even contraception! What’s wrong with contraception? It carries on “as if sex had no essential connection to reproduction.”

I imagine that Newman would feel quite different about his account of human flourishing were he suddenly transformed into a woman. In addition to the prima facie unfairness of the society he advocates, his argument is marred by an account of what is authorized and disallowed by evolution that appears empty of the requisite biological evidence. From what I understand, species other than our own have mores and preferences considerably more nuanced and complex than can be explained by Newman’s bare bones account of the reproductive requirement. We are much more than the creatures he describes and so for that matter are the rest of the living things on planet earth. And if we are more, wouldn’t our sexuality have more going for it than can be sufficiently encompassed by so reductive a justification?

*. *. *

Perhaps our third essay, David Benatar’s “Two Views of Sexual Ethics: Promiscuity, Pedophilia, and Rape,” can provide a dialectical synthesis between the extremes of the first two. As he sees it, because of the sexual revolution, more acts are permitted and fewer condemned than used to be the case. However, the landscape of sexual permissions and exclusions is really more differentiated than at first it seems to be.

If sexual acts are thought of as significant, and justified by loving attachment, the permissions and exclusions fall one way. If on the contrary sexual connections are deemed casual, exclusions will take a different route.

The “loving significance” outlook can’t make a place for promiscuity. In his view, that’s a defect. The “casual” view does make a place for promiscuity but somehow can’t confine it to consenting adults. Therefore he can’t exclude pedophilia (sex with children) and also fails to explain the harm of rape.

Benatar believes that each of the two approaches has some part of the truth but believes too that they are mutually contradictory. And with this impasse, he leaves the whole question – of which option is better – ultimately unresolved. In fact, he also sees nothing against just ending one’s life!

Let me step in and help out here. The least harm and the most fulfillment seems to lie with viewing sex (at its best) as having loving significance. But what about the rights of the promiscuous? Are they to be disrespected?

Personally, I have never known a promiscuous person who claimed that pursuing nonstop sex made him happy. At most, the claim was that this was an addiction against which all resistance had been unavailing. Without here specifying what treatments are available for addictions, I can agree with Benatar that the promiscuous ought not to be shunned or socially penalized for their condition. But isn’t it sad to regard the promiscuous as people whose condition is regrettable? Yes, it’s sad. In my experience, and despite the testimony of Christina, the promiscuous do tend to be rather sad. (Their sadness can also be put to work by them as a seductive operator in social life.) So the somewhat manipulative sadness abides, but still seems morally better than allowing child molestation or rape, both of which Benatar finds to be logical extensions of the casual view.

What conclusion can we draw from these three essays? The first is unbelievable, the second is unlivable, and the third fails to draw the conclusion that obviously follows from the evidence it has been at pains to gather.

So the first doesn’t know why we live. The second doesn’t know how to live. And the third can’t seem to step forward and start living!

Okay guys.

Thank you for sharing.

_______________

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philosophizing re sex, The Big Subject, The Philosophy of Sex 2023, the sexual revolution, traditional view of the role of sex, treating women as a means, Was it sex or not?, What counts as having sex?, What makes an essay philosophical?, When is an essay on sex philosophical?, women and getting threatened, women as means to biological end, women being disgusted, women being offended, women being scorned, women’s erotic vulnerability, women’s vulnerability, You are what you eat, you are what you think | 1 Comment

Getting Philosophical about Sex

Posted on July 21, 2026 by Abigail

The Kiss, Auguste Rodin, 1882. Photo by Caeciliusinhorto.

Philosophers debate many things, but do they talk about what makes the world go round? As it happens, a number of philosophical colleagues have been contributing to The Philosophy of Sex (Rowman & Littlefield 2023, eds. Raja Halwani, Jacob Held, Natasha McKeever and Alan Soble)! What is more, this is the eighth edition under that title, with some contributions new, others held over from earlier editions. Since I’ve already read three of the latest edition’s 25 essays, I’ll bring you up to date on those three.

First, in hopes it would put me up to speed on the latest, I read “How to be a Pluralist about Gender Categories” by Katharine Jenkins. Her essay draws on a distinction (that’s had currency for some time) between sex, the biologic fact, and gender, the social fact. Here’s what I take to be her key sentences: “People’s sense of their own social location is also critical for thinking about resistance to oppression. Plausibly, we may need to resist gender oppression by finding new ways to interpret and inhabit the identities of men, women, genderqueer, agender, and so on.” Jenkins, kindly help me out here. Show me how to “interpret and inhabit” all four of the identities you list, and let me know whether you mean to do both – the interpreting and the inhabiting – simultaneously or in succession.

Okay, apart from the vice of writing in a meaningless (albeit avant garde) style, it remains true that few women escape efforts to exploit a female vulnerability that hasn’t vanished, despite all the changes in law and social comportment. But this essay, preoccupied with issues of in-group taxonomy, contributes precisely nothing that I could see to the understanding – much less the handling – of power imbalances. So let’s move right along.

*. *. *

An essay by Alan Soble, “Sexual Gifts and Sexual Duties,” concludes the volume. In it he tells a story from his own earlier life, one that has haunted him for years. As a young graduate student, walking on campus, Soble was accosted by a young woman he did not know who – apparently without ceremony – propositioned him. About that campus encounter, he provides no details. Except one, that he found her notably unattractive. Yet, Soble felt it his duty, his moral obligation, to agree to her invitation. They repair to her room, get in gear for the sexual connection, and he avoids intercourse but performs on her a nonreciprocal act of cunnilingus.

In the years since, he has continued to reflect on that incident, debating in his own mind whether and to what degree the act he performed qualifies as morally right, even as right-beyond-the-call-of-duty (“supererogatory”) or on the other hand compromised by the tiny threads of self-interest that, despite appearances, he can nonetheless detect introspectively.

I won’t go into all the hypothetical cases over which Soble extends his principle of sexual supererogation. We’ll just cut to the chase. Here’s what I think about Soble’s unresolved recollection. First, it’s ungallant. If the girl, by now a woman getting on in years, had read this essay or heard about it, she would have reason to feel utterly stung. His story is deeply, deeply insulting to the woman in the story.

Why do I say that? Look folks, sex is not a commodity in mass production. As the French say, “The most beautiful woman in the world cannot give more than she has.”

But isn’t it unliberal, unemancipated and unliberated to talk like that? Shouldn’t sex be regarded as one of the pleasures on the banquet table of the world? One more note struck in the great concert of life? One vivid dab of color on the wide canvass of human experience?

No. I can’t speak for men, who are somewhat differently put together, but for women, these encounters put rings on the tree, not notches on the gun.

But hey, didn’t the woman Soble writes about “start it”? That doesn’t diminish the insult of telling the whole world about the time you agreed to an act of sexual intimacy with a woman out of pity! But “she asked for it,” Soble might still argue. Maybe if he’d said no, he would have given her time and space to think again – before she asked anyone else for it.

*. *. *

Now let’s revisit Thomas Nagel’s “Sexual Perversion,” the essay that may have launched the enterprise of philosophizing seriously about sex in our contemporary setting and time. The essay’s title carries the implication that there is such a thing as normality in sex. For that reason, much of Nagel’s essay is given over to explicating the sexual norm. Unlike Sartre, whom he first discusses, Nagel believes that sex can fulfill its norm. Desire can be satisfied.

What follows is an intricately abstract account of what hypothetically would happen in the optimal case. Across a mirrored room, a man and a woman perceive each other and they sense attraction. Insofar as the attraction is mutual, the desired one feels something that’s reciprocal with what the desirer feels. As the desire of each is mirrored in the other, each enters into greater identification with his or her own body. Eventually, they come together sexually. When that happens, each desired person merges with the desirer’s image of what he or she wants to possess. At the climactic moment, each becomes precisely what the other longed for.

I’m afraid I can’t agree with this account of the optimal sex act. To me, it appears to describe a delusion from which a rude awakening – or at least a letdown – can be expected.

*. *. *

So, if I’ve disagreed with the two philosophers who discussed the topic substantively, what do I think happens with sex in the optimal case? Look, to begin with, I’m not an atheist. For me, common sense atheism is cold tea.

Something comes into play, in desire at the deep level, where we find love trying to do something about the depth of its desire. Love’s trying is not aimed at the satisfaction of an appetite. Rather, it’s the enacting of a desire with which one’s whole sense of being is bound up. And there is also an open skylight, one might say, above that enacting. The lover is participating in a very large drama. One is carried by that drama. One is not the owner, the master or the mistress of it. It's a concrete case where –

you gain your life

by losing it.

_______________

Related Content: The Desecration of Desire | Here Be Dragons

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The Dance of Desire

Posted on July 14, 2026 by Abigail

"Blindman's Bluff" Francisco Goya, 1789

“Are you still looking for Mister Right?” Lorraine – a well-regarded feminist as well as a stalwart friend – once put that question to me. It was some years ago that this conversation took place.

I avowed as how I was.

“If you find him, I’ll believe in God,” Lorraine responded sincerely. I had known her since prefeminist days, when she’d had what was then considered an enviable job working for a TV personality who gave upbeat advice to other women calling or writing to confide their troubles.

When feminism came on scene in New York, Lorraine pitched into that quite as competently, writing a book warning women of the dangers of a then widely-used contraceptive. Lorraine’s husband, a psychiatrist whom I’d known since way back – my childhood and his boyhood – appeared wonderfully supportive of his wife in her new public role. So Lorraine seemed to have it all: a successful career, motherhood, a public role in the new movement to liberate women – plus a supportive husband!

But actually, not so much. The husband conducted his practice at their spacious West Side apartment inside a room with a separate entrance set aside for an office. Though this layout seemed convenient, it turned out not as private as it looked. Some of what went on in his office became quite audible. So Lorraine could not help hearing the sounds of a woman patient who was being brought to sexual climax while repeatedly yelling, “Kill Lorraine!”

The marriage broke up, as did her second marriage, although that one had looked more hopeful. Why he left her – after appearing to celebrate her feminist achievements at a dinner to which All New York was invited – is less clear. But I suppose, in the end, it was for the same reason that the first husband had betrayed their marriage: she was too damn successful.

Although I am at this writing (with God’s help) happily married to a man who appears more than capable of accommodating any pinnacle I might still happen to climb, I can certainly recognize the syndrome that Lorraine had lived through twice.

*. *. *

Here’s an example from my own professional life. When I was first hired as an Assistant Professor at the Brooklyn College Philosophy Department, my male colleagues were congenial and respectful. I was used to dealing with men in academe, since my father had been a professor, so I saw no need to tiptoe around the men.

However, once I and all the other young colleagues got fired (having voted for the loser in a Departmental election) my collegial fellow sufferers became markedly less respectful where I was concerned – and much more inclined to uncalled for mockery. It wasn’t uniform. There were exceptions. But overall the tone changed for the worse.

So, did I fight back? Did I draw the line telling my fellows in the fraternity-of-the-fired how to treat Abigail while we joined forces to try to get our jobs back?

So far as I can recall, I did not. Pretty much I understood what had happened. They felt demeaned – unmanned as it were – and needed to assert their masculine ascendency. I felt that you can’t fight every fight at the same time. If your ship is sinking, that may not be the best time to claim your rank in the navy. Rather, it might be the time to bail water or else start swimming. Hey, real life ain’t the movies.

In her Feminism Unmodified, legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon cites evidence that “only 7.8 percent of women have not been sexually assaulted or harassed.” Assaulted or harassed? That takes in a pretty wide array of potential big city encounters.

To be able to walk down all the downtown Manhattan streets without attracting unwelcome looks or remarks is, in my experience, a rare and rather specific skill. At one time, I actually had that skill. But now, given my walking handicap, I’d be more vulnerable. As to MacKinnon’s data, I have no professional competence to evaluate them. Her extremely broad claim is referenced in extensive endnotes. Therefore, given what everybody knows – the asymmetry in bodily strength, the limits of the law’s reach and the elasticity of her two categories – her high numbers are credible though not particularly useful.

But there is another kind of datum that belongs to the stories of women – and to the love of women. All the stories here lifted from my experience are about Desire thwarted or Hope disappointed. Thus, Lorraine hoped that the two men she had successively trusted would gallantly champion her success, rather than feel unmanned by it. I’d hoped the noble heroes alongside whom I’d got fired would continue to act the hero’s part with me also – not show diminished gallantry where the woman in the case was concerned. I say this knowing that heroism, gallantry and nobility are just what public feminists pretend to have given up hoping for.

What do women want (Freud is reported to have asked)? Thank you for asking or pretending to ask, Herr Doktor. I’ll be glad to tell you what I believe women want:

Gallantry and Nobility

If I’m right about that, then for a woman to give up that natural hope might be a greater hazard than that presented by all the bad guys, separately and together. Among the different kinds of success that life offers, there is such a thing as a woman who is a success as a woman. It’s not like winning a Nobel Prize, but every woman can recognize the difference between these two types of success. Women who, despite their disappointments, continue to live in harmony with – and deserving of – legitimate high hopes are living successfully.

I can be said to love women in the sense of having an instinctive and intuitive sympathy for others of my sex. Also, and perhaps equally consequential, I find women’s life stories interesting and at times fascinating. Because, regarding the challenges that belong to being a woman, really …

it's a subtle and precarious dance.

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