Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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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Death Frames the Story

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Abigail

Marble stele of a woman, Greek, mid-4th century B.C. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Death is But a Dream, the report of research by Christopher Kerr that I wrote about last week, the author’s interviews with the dying tell of reunions between the dying and those they cared about who had predeceased them. Assuming Kerr’s investigations conform methodologically to those used in more conventional research projects, his conclusions would certainly challenge modern and postmodern assumptions that death terminates your story and mine, full stop.

That said, Kerr’s descriptions of these last encounters had a sameness of tone – reflecting the singleness of their reporter, Kerr himself. Since the topic is not exactly a boring one – rather one of ultimate concern – I turned to another book, Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms by David Kessler. There, witnesses write their own first-hand reports. Of course, those authors cannot be the dying themselves. But they are people both concerned and close at hand, such as spouses, relatives or nurses and doctors who’ve been willing to tell what they saw and heard from the dying.

Should such reports be deemed credible? Kessler tells something I did not know, namely that a dying person’s declaration is admissible as evidence in courts of law. The decision goes back to English medieval jurisprudence which held that “a dying person is not presumed to lie.” Perhaps the credibility of the dying was reinforced by the belief, then shared, that the afterlife would be a domain of divine judgment. But even today, generally speaking, the dying person is no longer looking for gains in this present world. One can imagine a last spark of malice motivating a parting lie, but – though I do know of malicious lies – personally I know of no such lie being told by someone actually dying.

That view from the law is in marked contrast to the typical medical view where “deathbed visions are considered hallucinations” and most likely a “side effect of medication or lack of oxygen.” That still-established view, while surely correct in certain cases, is pretty downbeat. It’s prosaic – not poetic.

By contrast, among the experiences of the dying reported in Kessler’s collection are some that rekindle and verify romance. For example, Nina, a health-care attorney, found true love with Bill, her second husband. He “had become more of a parent to [her] children than their own birth father.” Some years later, when her children were grown, Bill started to complain of headaches. Eventually his symptoms were tracked to a spinal tumor which all the approved medical treatments failed to reverse.

Accepting the inevitable, Bill checked out of the last hospital and finally went home to die. A few days before the end, Nina “realized that our small, self-contained world had a visitor … . I heard him say, ‘Mom, I can’t believe you’re here.’ He told her about the kids and me, as if we were being introduced, with no regard as to whether we could hear him or not. … On the last day of his life, he talked to his mom again. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Come here.’ He gave me the most passionate kiss – the kind you have when you’re dating, not when you’re dying. Afterward, he told his mother, ‘I knew I loved her from the first kiss.’ And to me he said, ‘To the last kiss, I love you.’ He died peacefully that night.” So it seems that, when we die, romance doesn’t have to die.

The two deaths I have witnessed were those of my father and my mother. My father took just a week to die, proving that, as my mother said, he wouldn’t drag it out. To the young physician at the Maine Coast Memorial Hospital who asked him how he was feeling, he replied, “I feel real resuscitated” – with ambiguity and irony mixed together, as was his wont.

At the end, I watched him die, my hand on his heart. From his chest, a current of sensation ran up my arm until – like the conclusion of a wordless paragraph or sentence – the current had conveyed everything it had to tell me. Which was that Love underlies, encompasses and supplies substance to all the perturbations, refusals and reversals, losses and victories of our lives.

I was not with my mother at the end. She died in the hospice during the night. But the last expression I saw on her face – from which by then all the feminine coquetterie had fled – was of the sternest and profoundest Love.

*. *. *

What do they prove or show, these books by intelligent writers that are now going public with their evidences that death is not the end? What effect will such evidences have, if credited, and what changes might they work on the culture, now virtually worldwide, that we share?

Such findings would make everything we do, say, feel and think more consequential than up to now we’ve quite dared to believe. Our lives are carriers of meaning. They are

nonfiction stories.

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We Don’t Die When We Die

Posted on June 30, 2026 by Abigail

One thing is certain. When we talk, when we act, when we commit ourselves to any project – big or small – when we retire for the night or rise for the day: sooner or later our stories will come to an end.

That end-of-story windup might come suddenly and turn out a surprise, or be protracted and long expected, easy or pain-ridden, dreaded or welcomed. In any case, the kind of death we will have is not foreseeable. As to what follows or does not follow, that’s neither within our personal control nor in the hands of those whose pronouncements on that head have been most persuasively asserted.

And yet, for at least the past hundred years or more, the wise heads – who determine emotional style and the moral parameters – have shared the assumption that the life we’re living now will be the whole story. Long or short, lucky or unlucky, when the final curtain comes down, the play we’re in will be over. The background buzz has been of a jerky, syncopated, politely repressed nihilism.

These assumptions have provided the boundary conditions for modern life. Human life, moderns have assumed, is just for the living. The dead have no share in the challenges that now confront the living. And, although some achievements may be of a size to outlast those who did the actual work to produce them, sooner or later the entire human enterprise will likely be over. At the “it’s all over time,” there’ll be no intelligent survivors left to care about what someone in former times might have done. The people will have all died and the records will be all lost.

*. *. *

But suppose that’s wrong? Suppose we don’t actually go out the way a light bulb goes out when the switch has been flicked? Suppose, when we can’t stay in our bodies, for better or worse we still don’t get to take leave of ourselves! Suppose that in fact we’re all still alive, although no longer in these present time-and-space conditions in the way that we used to be.

In 2020, Christopher Kerr, M.D. Ph.D, and chief medical officer at Hospice Buffalo, published Death is But a Dream, a book about the research he’d conducted. His findings were recently publicized by reporter Caitlin Gibson in a June 19th article in The Washington Post, a highly regarded mainstream source.

So what’s the latest news, for us the living, about life’s end? The terminally ill – when interviewed by professionals trained to distinguish between hallucinations and reports that appear sane, clear and credible – report that patients have lively conversations with cherished friends long departed and visit places still held dear. They revisit scenes of combat and comrades killed who now stand ready at hand for reunions postponed a lifetime ago.

Sometimes, present experiences offer confirmation of past events previously unknown to surviving family. Or the confirmation can be of the moral kind. Experiences that were left jagged, broken off or misused, revisit the dying person – this time returning to be mended. For the patient who is not bluffing, but is in earnest about what needs to be faced, fixed or completed, the last days can provide a time for revisitings and repair.

Assuming that Kerr’s research has been as methodical and scrupulous as such investigations can be, what do findings of this kind tell me? For most of my working life in philosophy, I’ve not been an atheist, a philosophical materialist, or a reductionist for whom our humanly-lived complexities were to be construed as “nothing but” perturbations in and among subatomic particles. So the Kerr findings upset no worldview that I happen to hold. But they would overturn cultural assumptions that have been in ascendency among its most educated members for the past hundred years or more.

So what would have to change, in our culture, if the story published in The Washington Post should get around, and be taken seriously?

What would have to give way would be the belief that, in the end, “it doesn’t count.” But what if “the end” isn’t the end? Then, what we do, what we think and say, really does count, in this world and any other. We’re visible, we’re palpable, we’re memorable, and all of it makes a difference. Human lives are not absurd. Each of us affects and influences each other and has a say in the whole course of things. From the grass underfoot to the councils of power in the world, the tiniest gesture might count as much as the largest. We need to honor the narrative we’re in and do our best to make sense of it. This because –

it all counts.

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Dreams about Real Life

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Abigail

The night before we left for California, I had what may be the strangest dream I ever dreamed: I was in a passenger plane – flying who knows where – until the airplane was split in two by a lightning strike so fierce that it cleaved the sky itself. There was no salvaging the plane and I lost sight of the other passengers.

However, and despite all, it seems that I landed safely on an undiscovered island, situated somewhere in mid-Atlantic. The island wasn’t empty. It held one tree and one inhabitant. That individual used to be a man but was now identifiably a woman wearing red lipstick. But somehow this turnover-gendered person still continued precision-tooled for an ongoing assignment of Jew-hatred.

Clearly this was a dream that called for decoding. I believe that we as a culture have got past the point where we must pay an expert to decode our dreams. At an earlier era in my life, I had – like many of my fellow New Yorkers – a Freudian psychoanalyst. For him, involuntarily but obligingly, I produced the dreams to which Freud himself had given Latin names. Later, when I’d left the Freudian guy and was either reading Jung or else reading about him, I can recall at least one dream inhabited by Archetypes: with Norse gods who gave way to the Arthurian cycle. Anybody see a pattern here? Anyway at this point, for better or worse Abbie gets to decode her own dreams.

I think the stroke of lightning represents an event that was heaven-shattering. And the individual of flipped gender whom I encountered on the island exhibits the same anti-Jewish hatred – unchanged beneath any and all outward changes – and ever-ready to return to his/her/their unvarying work.

The phenomenon has been so continuous in the past 2000 years that one can characterize the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the time) by the kind of Jew-hatred that typified it. Thus:

(a) In the great age of Christendom, Jews were vilified for the newly-conceived crime of deicide, whereby they – collectively and in every generation – crucified God in the person of Jesus. (By contrast, Judaism lists no crime called “deicide” in its conceptual compendium, nor is rabbinic Judaism comfortable with the notion of hereditary guilt – either individual or collective.)

(b) In an age that celebrated universality (e.g. the 18^th century’s Age of Enlightenment) Jews were vilified for their stubborn particularity.

(c) In an age that celebrated particularity (e.g. the early nineteenth century’s Romantic period) Jews were vilified for their universality, often called rootless cosmopolitanism.

(d) In the Darwinian age that celebrated survival of the fittest, Jews were the only “race” deemed inherently unfit and yet a competitive threat to the master race.

(e) In the present “anti-colonial” era, Israeli Jews, and other Jews by extension, are deemed colonialists, even though they were returning to their ancient homeland. Nor does it make any difference that their sincere attempts to live as assimilated citizens in European lands had been answered by the Holocaust.

So it’s been a weird and wacky business – with every indication of worsening in its continuing weirdness. So let me make my own effort to explain the whole thing. There’s an incident in the New Testament that may help out here. Jesus is accosted by the devil who tries to tempt him in the following way:

“If you’re the son of God, prove it! Come over here to the edge of this cliff and cast yourself down. Jump off the cliff! If you are who you say you are, you won’t get hurt!”

Jesus replies by noting that it’s not a good idea to play “I dare you” games with God, no matter who you are.

Anyway, I see the underlying sameness of the hatred-of-Jews as expressing a somewhat similar offer:

“If you’re really the Chosen People, prove it! Show us all that you can survive the Newest Fashion in the Oldest Hatred. N’yah, n’yah, n’yah!”

So far, they haven’t yet managed to kill us all. There’s a tuneful hillbilly hymn with a refrain that says, “I know who holds tomorrow”:

So we’ll see, won’t we?

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Grief, Martha Nussbaum, and Me

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie is away this week getting treatments in California. This column was originally posted on February 13, 2024, and continues to be timely.

Recently, I’ve been reading a highly-regarded woman philosopher whose name is Martha C. Nussbaum. MCN is, along with other fields of her expertise, a scholar of ancient philosophers. She likes the Greek and Roman Epicureans and Stoics who wrote and taught at times when great empires controlled political action, leaving to their subjects just power enough to affect private and personal life. MCN wants to see what we in our time can learn from their therapeutic compositions.

One of her books, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, starts with her mother’s death as MCN experienced it. I read it with great interest since I too loved my mother and grieved at her death. Was MCN’s grief like mine?

MCN was preparing to give a lecture in Dublin, Ireland, when she learned that her mother, then in recovery from surgery, had suffered a sudden, life-threatening complication. Since she could not get an overnight flight home, she gave the lecture and then flew to Philadelphia the next morning. Deplaning, she called the ICU, only to learn that her mother had died just twenty minutes earlier. In the hospital, ushered in by a nurse, she saw her mother “as so often I had seen her lying asleep at home.” She “wept uncontrollably, while the nurses brought me glasses of water” and, for weeks thereafter, “had periods of agonized weeping, whole days of crushing fatigue; nightmares in which I felt altogether unprotected and alone, and seemed to feel a strange animal walking across my bed.”

Some of these emotions, like anger at the innocent smiles of the flight attendants, or at the medical team’s being unable to save her mother, she recognized as unreasonable. Other feelings – like anger at herself for having chosen a professional life that led her to miss the deathbed farewell – fell into juster proportion in the days that followed, when reunions, public ceremonies and related duties filled the times and spaces vacated by the loss.

I wondered how my memory of my mother’s death would look to me, in comparison. In my case, family circumstances did not fall into place so harmoniously. There had been a great many matters to attend to that still obscure my retrospective view of … Abigail in her pure and precise relation to her mother. Allowing for all that, what did I feel at the loss of her? Where did it leave me?

Unlike MCN, I didn’t feel anger or guilt or self-reproach – for all of which the hospice professionals advised me to forgive myself. Of course, I thanked them anyway. It was not the time to suggest that they consider a paradigm shift. They were doing their best to be supportive and I didn’t want to discourage them.

My whole heart was affected, but one emotion stays in my memory. In ordinary times, I don’t believe that death is the end, here differing from MCN. But at the precise time when I lost my mother, I actually hoped it was the end – because otherwise there’d be a point to waiting. I would need to wait my whole life through before I saw my mother again – and that was too long to have to wait!

There was one other respect in which my kind of grief was unlike MCN’s. I would have interpreted her two-part dream in Dublin, which she had the night before her flight home, differently. In the dream’s first part, her mother appeared, “in her hospital bed, very emaciated and curled into a fetal position.” MCN had no comment about this part, but I would say that it registers one elementary fact about death:

it’s as hard to get out of this world

as it was to get in.

In the next part, her mother “suddenly stood up, looking young and beautiful as in the old photographs … . She smiled at me with her characteristically embracing wit, and said that others might call her wonderful, but she very much preferred to be called beautiful. I woke up and wept, knowing that things were not so.”

Without thinking twice, but instantly and instinctively, I would have seen such a dream as a preview of her mother’s “beautiful” appearance in the world she was about to enter after she left this one. After all, MCN – who has drawn emotional realities previously shrouded in darkness into the light of day where all of us may recognize them –

has no way of knowing

that “things were not so.”

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A Liberated Woman

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie’s talk at Stony Brook.

Homer’s World

The first time I came out in public as a feminist, I was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The State University of New York at Stony Brook. For some reason, I had decided to give a public talk titled “Why Women’s Liberation?” The topic was then a new one in academe. It was also just crystallizing in my own mind as something to think about.

I’d already read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex before it was translated. All my women friends who, like me, held Fulbright Fellowships in Paris, had read it and we debated it intensely. But raising questions inside professional life here in America – questions about the social status and legal rights of women – was a very different story. If I spoke candidly, might I not be risking present relations with colleagues in the Department, and possibly jeopardizing my future in academic philosophy? How far out on a limb should I go? It was scary.

When you’re scared, you have to go with whatever you know. What I knew was that it doesn’t matter what happens to a woman –

as long as she’s dressed for it!

So I walked out on the stage of that packed Stony Brook auditorium in a black mini-dress, black tights and black boots. As my talk began, with no holds barred, I could hear the sound of feet shuffling and angry whispers crescendoing. At first, it wasn’t clear that I’d be allowed to go on speaking.

But I kept on, and after a while the whispers subsided.

Finally, at the close of my talk, I invited my friend Fred-the-Drifter, who was wearing his blue jeans, green shirt, cowboy boots and carrying his guitar, to come up on stage with me and play behind me – while I sang songs that I’d written (to keep my courage up) for the women’s liberation movement (my new words put to familiar folk tunes).

The roar of applause filled the auditorium edge to edge. I recall one of my students saying as I left the stage, “I have never heard you so eloquent.”

“I thought he [the student] was gonna cry,” Fred said to me later.

Revised and retitled “Feminism Without Contradictions,” my talk was included in The Monist, which was, I believe, the first well-regarded philosophical journal to devote an entire issue to feminism.

So much for one of my pioneering contributions to those daring days. But what about now? What’s the news regarding feminism – especially as that news touches my present life?

Let me bring the question up to this very week. I had sent for a book I saw advertised that promised to foreground the women in Homer’s two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad concerns some of the decisive episodes of the Trojan War and the Odyssey tells of the long voyage home of Odysseus – one of the victorious Greek heroes in the defeat of Troy. The form in which we have these poems dates roughly to the 8^th century BCE (before the common era). Although it is a man’s story, of war and warriors, one of the important characters in the Odyssey is Penelope, the shrewd and patient wife who waits ten long years for Odysseus, her husband, to return home to Ithaca.

With her personal force and ingenuity, Penelope manages to hold off the young bachelors of Ithaca, who each want her to marry one of them and thereby inherit the wealth and position of the long-absent Odysseus. After many adventures, Odysseus does finally get home to Ithaca, where he slays the suitors and reclaims his and Penelope’s marital kingdom – in all its fine erotic and political contours.

The Odyssey had been a favorite book of mine in my early teens (together with Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers). So I was quite curious to read the new book I’d sent for, which promised to disclose the feminist lowdown on the story that I’d read long ago in the way Homer tells it.

As I began to read the new book, I didn’t find new incidents that had been omitted in Homer. There was a difference in emphasis, but no significant new information that I could detect.

I could see that the book was handsomely illustrated, with photographs of artifacts and detailed maps of Homer’s world. So I turned to the maps to find Ithaca, Troy and other such sites, on maps that took in territory as far away as Egypt. But, much to my astonishment, Biblical Israel – certainly contemporary with Homer’s world – did not figure on the maps. The territory of the Israelite kings, of the prophets – Isaiah would most likely have been contemporary with the dates assigned to Homer – was designated “Canaan” on the author’s historical maps.

I looked under “I” in the index. Hey, Israel was not even in the index!

That night I had a dream, whose graphic unpleasantness I won’t recall in this column. However, it clearly pertained to the book I’d been reading – a book ostensibly about the women in Homer.

By morning, picking up the book again, I noticed that it quoted a woman known world-wide for her belligerent activism against modern Israel. The quote, lifted out of its original context, was in this case being used by the author to condemn some case of unworthy conduct that Homer reports … but it certainly reinforced my unease. What was that woman doing in a book about Homer’s world that deleted contemporaneous historical Israel from its otherwise-inclusive maps?

In the mornings, I routinely sit for prayer and meditation. Normally, from my still and silent listening, I get the sense that I’m pretty much on track and can proceed forward into the coming day.

But the meditation of that morning was unlike my typical meditations. For the first time, I had the sense of a divine Presence very near me. Nearer in fact than I’d ever felt it before. Let’s go ahead and call it God’s face, for that’s what it felt like.

The face, or Presence, gave me a directive:

Throw the book out.

Throw out a book I had just purchased? Surely not. It must contain some interesting facts that I might yet glean. Couldn’t I at least flip to the end to see how it finishes? I might copy down some references … .

But the more I temporized in this way, the less persuasive I found all these moves-to-postpone. The command had been simple and utterly clear.

So I went to the room where I’d been reading the book and threw it right into the trash. And, as suddenly, all the magnetism that had attached to the book shriveled and emptied out. I felt released, having acted …

the way a free woman acts.

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Traumatic Memories: Past and Future

Posted on June 2, 2026 by Abigail

I used to take pride in my excellent memory. But sadly, it got somewhat less excellent after my first marriage. Perhaps my psyche decided that certain scenes from that part of my life story were best left un-remembered.

With regard to memory, by far the biggest holes were dug in 2023, after October 7th and 8th. At that time, as you may recall, there was rejoicing all round the planet – but especially in the universities – over the atrocities committed against Israelis by invaders from neighboring Gaza. The atrocities were photo-recorded by their jihadi perpetrators who boasted of committing them!

It seems that my psyche found itself unable to bear these scenes. So it dug out craters, forgetteries – psychic oubliettes – into which those memory segments could be dropped. And, since emergency defensive measures can be imprecise, more was dropped into the forgettery than needed to be.

Aware that it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, I’ve started to read books about memory, trauma and therapeutic treatments for memory loss.

The first book I read, Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past, by Peter A. Levine, PhD, offers theoretical explanations of brain function and malfunction, as well as detailed case histories of successful treatments. I assume that the patients shown must have also agreed to be photographed. The differences between their expressions and body language at the beginning and end of treatment are both clear and dramatic. It’s also evident that practitioners who follow Levine’s methods need to be carefully trained and to proceed in a gradual, step-by-step manner when working with clients.

At present, I’m about a quarter of the way into a quite different book. It’s titled Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith L. Herman, MD. Her overview might be called the vertical view: she situates attitudes toward trauma within culture and political history.

Some traumas, such as marital rape and incestuous abuse of children, were present long before the culture was prepared to recognize them. Women’s complaints were dismissed by eminences like Freud as fantasies or unconscious wishes – until the political empowerment of women in the latter half of the twentieth century made room for consciousness-raising groups and began the process of changes in the law.

As in Levine’s reports, it’s become possible to treat trauma because it’s now possible to remove victims from the scenes of their suffering. If you have been accurately diagnosed with PTSD, doctors no longer send you back into combat as they used to. Likewise, domestic abuse is now recognized as grounds for divorce and legal penalties. The judge won’t force a wife to go back to her wife-beater. And, although abused children can’t themselves take legal action, by now some attention has been drawn even to their predicament.

There is one major obstacle to my contacting one or both of these authors for referrals to therapists who might help me get back the full power of memory that I had before the traumatizing events of October 7th and 8th, 2023.

In the cases I’ve read about so far, the traumatizing deed is not being done now. The raped woman who confides her story to her consciousness-raising group isn’t being raped now – not at the same time that she tells the women’s group what happened to her! The traumatized veteran isn’t back at the front at the same time that he tells the therapist what shocked him in previous combat.

But anti-semitism isn’t over! On the contrary. It’s world-wide and it’s growing. So it’s not clear that the therapy that repaired the traumas in these reports could help in my case.

Speaking of anti-semitism, here’s an interesting factual detail: Peter Levine reports that the grandchildren of Holocaust victims carry bio-chemical traces of death-camp trauma that they did not personally experience. Such traces can be detected even in the wombs of grandchildren of survivors! So that trauma is being passed on even to the third generation!

In this context, I wonder whether the sudden reappearance of anti-semitism after October 7- 8 might not itself be a resurfacing of the contempt for Jews that had been commonplace for almost two thousand years. Social anti-semitism was repressed during World War II‘s war against Nazism. Meanwhile the discovery of the Holocaust – it became Exhibit A among the Nazi atrocities – prolonged the suppression of such thoughts. But just as the memories of suffering can be passed down the generations and detected in certain bio-chemical markers, so possibly the even older memories of Christian contempt for and cruelty toward Jews might erupt like a collective “return of the repressed.”

It would be hard to prove such an hypothesis, since by now the grass is green over the present generation’s anti-semitic great-great grandfathers. No doubt there are other influences also in play. But this sudden eruption of hate seems to be a surd in culture for which a fuller explanation might include such factors, conscious and unconscious.

On the brighter side, there is one improvement over the placid surface of earlier years. The Jews whom I see interviewed today, or making speeches of their own, are no longer as deferential and tip-toe-y as they used to be. They’re candid and contemptuous of their anti-semitic contemporaries.

Is it the very existence of Israel – a nation under arms – that gives this confidence? Theodore Herzl, who convened the first Zionist conference where he introduced the idea of a Jewish state, pictured manufacturing and agricultural produce that would enrich the world. There is all that – and Israeli Nobel prize winners have also enriched the world along the lines of Herzl’s vision.

But mainly, today there is a Jewish state. Only one – and it’s a small one – which you can see almost in its entirety from the air. But its citizens, surrounded by hostile forces, are armed.

And they know

how to fight.

Related Content: Witness | Reincarnation: Anne Frank and Me

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The Lot of Women

Posted on May 27, 2026 by Abigail

A line comes to mind that I first heard spoken in the alabaster French of the Comédie-Française, many years ago in the Paris of my youth:

Do you not pity the lot of women?

Le sort des femmes … the destiny of women. Well, I do and I don’t pity women. Depends on the woman and what exactly befalls her. Barring victimization of the sort the law now forbids and ought to punish, the destiny of women runs along a spectrum. To put it another way: in ordinary circumstances one gets a situation to keep in balance and the question is how to balance it.

*. *. *

A big question, but let’s start somewhere in the middle. I’m the only woman I know who actually watched the interview of Juanita Broaddrick after she reported being raped in her hotel room by (former President) Bill Clinton back when he was attorney general in Arkansas.

Broaddrick sure looked truthful to me. So I believed that the matter deserved independent investigation and thought a letter to the NY Times was warranted, signed by me (with my academic credentials) along with some feminists better known than me. But to my surprise, my feminist friends were not one tiny bit interested. Back then, they were looking to Clinton for legislation on certain favorite issues. Also, one had a book coming out and she needed favorable reviews. But several feminist friends praised my idealism. And so on.

Since then, the fearless Phyllis Chesler, who has helped so many women, told me she would have signed. But at that point we hadn’t met and somehow it didn’t cross my mind to contact her.

One feminist did agree to sign such a letter, but she was not widely known. However, I did eventually locate a feminist who had sufficient public presence: Catharine A. MacKinnon who has written importantly on the topic of rape. She was willing to co-sign a letter. However, MacKinnon put up one condition: Broaddrick herself must approve the project of such a letter.

Now it may be that MacKinnon believed me incapable of tracking Broaddrick and securing her permission. If so, she reckoned wrong because I can be very persistent.

To abridge a long story, I did finally manage to contact Juanita Broaddrick and did speak to her at length. By the end of our conversation, I got her approval for a multiply-signed feminist letter to the Times.

When I got back to MacKinnon with the good news, very much to my astonished chagrin, MacKinnon told me that she was leaving town and couldn’t give any more time for this particular effort! The result? I let Juanita Broaddrick down and likewise all the people who had helped me to track her.

Here’s another case “from the middle” of feminist real-life. At an early point in my career in the Philosophy Department of the City University’s Brooklyn College, I was pressured to vote for a candidate for Chair of the Department whom I thought quite unqualified. I was not the only junior member of the Department who was fired for voting “wrong.” We all were. But my case was striking since the same senior professors who voted to fire me in the fall had – just the previous spring – voted to promote me to a higher rank! To explain why their estimation of me had plummeted so suddenly, they claimed that over the summer I had “lost all my talent”!

The trouble with this story was that by my lost-talent September I’d had another article accepted for publication in the same philosophical journal that had published me in my promotion-worthy June. So the bloc of senior professors would certainly have a use for any additional evidence, to support their flimsy case for firing me.

Anyway, among other avenues, I tried appealing to the faculty feminist group on campus. The experience was not a happy one. Not only did they decline to support my claim of having been fired for reasons irrelevant to my academic merit – they sent a letter to my chairman that endorsed my firing! Even in the annals of academic feminism, that’s probably unusual.

What was behind their extra effort? Well, I had not joined a “women’s bloc” in the Department that had seemed to me more relevant to the personal power of Professor Gertrude Ezorsky, the most senior woman of that faction, than it was to any potential unfairness to women as such in the Department. I’d also thought it rather unfair to extort a promise to join their bloc as a condition of voting for my appointment.

At the time of their putting that condition before me, I had answered them ambiguously – “if the chairman thinks I’m his tool, I’m nobody’s tool” – and of course they held that ambiguity against me once I didn’t automatically join their bloc but instead voted on the merits as I saw them.

Here’s another case from the middle. When I was last in Paris, I had the pleasure of meeting with Catherine Chalier, the closest disciple of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In the course of our conversation, I asked her whether the prestigious French feminists had been of any help in her efforts of that time (since successful I gather) to get a more secure teaching appointment in the French academic arena.

The feminists? Chalier made the sort of gesture one makes when alluding to the preposterous.

*. *. *

Recently I’ve been reading Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant by the late Andrea Dworkin. Though she has many bad stories to tell from her own life, Dworkin also concedes that certain advances for women have by now been enshrined in the law. No longer may husbands batter their wives. Sexual harassment in the work place is now illegal. Rape in marriage is now illegal. And, incidentally, Dworkin reports working constructively with Catharine MacKinnon to bring rapists to justice.

MacKinnon? Wait a minute! Wasn’t MacKinnon the feminist who let me down so badly in my effort to get a fairer hearing for the testimony of Juanita Broaddrick? Does that mean that Dworkin’s praise was misplaced? Not necessarily. Perhaps it was in the Broaddrick case, which is the one I know about first hand. But the praise might have been warranted in other cases that Dworkin knew of or worked on.

In real life …

these distinctions can get blurry.

Related Content: Battle Wounds | Afghan Hope

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The Lot of Women

Posted on May 26, 2026 by Abigail

A line comes to mind that I first heard spoken in the alabaster French of the Comédie-Française, many years ago in the Paris of my youth:

Do you not pity the lot of women?

*. *. *

Since then, the fearless Phyllis Chesler, who has helped so many women, told me she would have signed. But at that point we hadn’t met and somehow it didn’t cross my mind to contact her.

Now it may be that MacKinnon believed me incapable of tracking Broaddrick and securing her permission. If so, she reckoned wrong because I can be very persistent.

The feminists? Chalier made the sort of gesture one makes when alluding to the preposterous.

*. *. *

In real life …

these distinctions can get blurry.

Related Content: Battle Wounds | Afghan Hope

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, Suicide, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged academic feminism, academic merit, academic retaliation, ambivalence of feminists, Andrea Dworkin’s Heartbreak, believing the woman, Bill Clinton, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Catherine Chalier, Clinton accused of rape, Comédie-Française, distinctions can get blurry, Emmanuel Levinas, faculty feminist group, feminism and changes in the law, feminism in academe, feminist bloc, feminist distinctions can get blurry, feminist friends, feminist hypocrisy, feminist idealism, feminist politics, feminist real life, feminists betraying women, fired for voting wrong, firing not merit-based, French feminists, Gertrude Ezorsky, in-house academic politics, independent investigation, Juanita Broaddrick, le sort des femmes, marital rape, merit-based firing, NY Times letter, Parisian feminists, Philosophy Department of City University’s Brooklyn College, Phyllis Chesler, political loyalty and feminism, political reprisals in academe, politics of feminism, rape and feminism, rape in marriage, sexual harassment, the destiny of women, the lot of women, victims of feminism, victims of sexism, wife battering, women controlling women, women in academia, women’s bloc | Leave a comment

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Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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