Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

When Your Enemy Is Another Woman

Posted on November 18, 2025 by Abigail

Illustration by Caroline Church
Confessions of a Young Philosopher by Abigail L. Rosenthal

“Sisterhood is powerful.”

Well, often it is, but that power is not always protective. After all, in Genesis, the first Book of the Hebrew Bible, the first recorded relation between siblings is that of murderer (Cain) to murderee (Abel). Despite what is implied by the feminist motto quoted above, it’s not that different with women.

In this connection, let me thumb through the pages of personal memory.

After finally winning my seven-year struggle to get back my professorial job at Brooklyn College, I was enjoying my first lunch at the faculty dining room. A woman colleague approached me who had fought my reinstatement tooth and nail. She had a wide reputation as a feminist, a champion of women’s rights. I looked up expectantly to hear what she would say.

“You deserve tenure in hell,” she said. “You’re garbage!”

“Meredith [not her real name] that’s a terrible thing to say!”

Okay. Not a snappy comeback. But sincere.

The husband of a well-known feminist friend had decided to celebrate his wife’s birthday by treating a large number of guests to a magnificent dinner in her honor at Manhattan’s Top of the Sixes restaurant. At my table, the empty seat next to mine was tardily filled by Betty Friedan, a woman I knew by reputation only. She was the author of The Feminine Mystique and a founding mother of Second Wave feminism. By the time she arrived, the dinner plates had been cleared away. I got up and went into the kitchen, coming back with a plate loaded with all the good things we’d been served earlier. She did not thank me, but by then we had both turned to hear the speeches honoring my friend.

It was a pleasure to take in the speeches. At that moment, it seemed as if my deserving friend had won it all: a roomful of appreciative friends, a devoted husband, and an historic place in the feminist movement.

“It’s really ‘feminism without contradictions’!” I exclaimed to my equally celebrated neighbor. I was actually citing the title of an article of mine, published in a well-regarded philosophic journal.

“You don’t know what a contradiction is! You live

your whole life in cliches!”

I found my feet and started walking dazedly around the restaurant. Crossing paths with an editor who was a good friend, I told her what the famous feminist had just said to me.

“You are the last person of whom it could be said

that she lives her life in cliches!”

Her sympathetic look and kind words stayed with me, outweighing the insult – which over time came to seem merely comical. But it was certainly meant to wound!

One time the temple to which I belong invited a speaker who claimed to have an original approach – really a winning ticket – to our ancient religion. Not to disclose the brand name he had given to his new approach, I’ll just call it Bonanza Judaism.

I forget what-all went into his concoction, but he wound up making a pitch for the ground-level leadership displayed by Aaron, the brother of Moses. In the mind of this speaker, Aaron’s leadership showed up particularly well at the time of the mass demoralization that developed while Moses was away on Mt. Sinai, getting the Ten Commandments from God.

What Aaron had done, according to the speaker, was cleverly distract the murmuring children of Israel by encouraging them to fashion that golden calf so that they’d have something concrete to worship in the interim.

Hey, Mr. Invited Speaker,

what a great idea!

At the windup, our speaker asked for a show of hands. How many would endorse Aaron’s brand of leadership on that occasion? To my chagrin, every hand went up – except for mine and our Rabbi’s. I might have missed some but, from where I sat that’s what it looked like to me.

One of the raised hands belonged to a woman who had sole access to the safe that held important budgetary information concerning the temple. She was sitting close enough to me to see that, exceptionally, my hand had stayed down. She glared at me quite balefully, which I thought peculiar. Why did she care how I voted on the matter of the golden calf?

Some years later, it was discovered that the temple had fewer assets in the safe than had been assumed. Eventually the situation would be repaired, with mortgage extensions and bank loans, but that repair would require a long and rocky return trip to solvency.

*. *. *

In these three cases, what ought to have occurred, instead of what did happen?

In the first case, my woman colleague should have put the past behind her and started over in her relations with me, now that we were going to be in the same academic department – thus on the same team in a common effort.

In the second case, the famous feminist ought to have been willing to honor another hero, who had shared with her the effort to elevate the condition of women. With that mindset, she could never have gratuitously insulted another woman who was there to do precisely that.

In the third case, the woman with access to the safe ought to have reconsidered transferring her allegiance to the golden calf – rather than glare at a woman congregant who declined to endorse the worship of an idol.

There are many asymmetries between men and women, some of which can be corrected and rebalanced. In one respect, however, the sexes are already equal. Women, as well as men, can use their power –

against women.

Posted in absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, 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, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, 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, 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 Aaron and the Golden Calf, Aaron in Exodus 32, Aaron’s betrayal, Aaron’s brand of leadership, Aaron’s leadership in Exodus, Abigail L. Rosenthal’s Feminism Without Contradictions, academic feminist, academic job struggle, academic politics, academic protocol, anti-chivalry, battle of the sexes, bearing false witness, betraying one’s trust, Betty Friedan, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, breaking protocol, Brooklyn College, church solvency, defamation, defamatory gossip, devoted husband, dinner to honor feminist, equality of the sexes, erotic competition, false accusations, falsely accusing, famous feminist, female power, feminism and celebrity, feminism and marriage, feminism founding mother, feminist battle scars, feminist career, feminist friend, feminist leader, feminist politics, feminist power struggles, feminist reputation, feminist teamwork, feminist wounds, fight for academic tenure, forgive and forget, Golden Calf, guest of honor, heroines, honor among feminists, honoring a friend, honoring women, house of worship, husband of feminist, iconoclastic stance, ingratitude, insolvent seminaries, invited speaker, invited temple speaker, keeping the books, male/female asymmetries, manipulative and vulgar speaker, overcoming resentment, philosophic feminism, philosophical career, reform and reparation, reformed Judaism, refusing idol worship, repairing academic rifts, repairing collegial relations, repairing misdeeds, sisterhood is powerful, solvency and seminaries, solvency in organized religion, supporting congregants, Synagogue finances, synagogue solvency, teamwork in a common effort, tenure fight, the feminist movement, The Second Wave Feminism, Top of the Sixes Restaurant, unprofessional behavior, violating protocol, women against women, women colleagues, women consoling women, women damaging women, women enemies, women heroes, women insulting women, women undermining women, women’s history, women’s solidarity, worshipping idols | 2 Comments

I Stopped Trying to Get Above It

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Abigail

Reading Jeff Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom brought the topic of mysticism to the front of my mind. At earlier junctures of my life journey, mysticism had clearly been a concern. It seemed to offer a way out of the dilemmas and double binds of experience – impasses that I wasn’t breaking through and were making me sick. (I mean literally. I mean cancer. That’s not a metaphor.)

Of my most sustained experiment with a mystical path, I’ve told the story in these columns. A person had been recommended to me as a Realized Master in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta. She was a young Indian woman – almost transcendently beautiful – like no one I’d ever seen. Over time, I noticed a change in her, both in her appearance and in her speeches. Some kind of corrupting process was at work. She was dispirited – disillusioned with herself perhaps – and her swamis were taking control of the project of the ashram, possibly of her, in a way that smelled to me unhealthy. It looked like an organization on a downward slope, with mind control or brainwashing lurking at the bottom of it.

So I took one last long look, and went back to the common sense world, which has its own occasional, never-predictable near-miracles. Anyway, with or without miracles, I stopped trying to get “above it.”

Kripal’s book brought the topic – of an individual merging with the divine – to my mind in a new form. His discussion foregrounds the erotic component of such mergers. He finds it in the mystics themselves and in the historians who study them. His book has five chapters in which this two-level journey is investigated. Each of the chapters is followed by a discussion, labeled “Secret Talk,” in which Kripal’s own analogous experiences are brought out of the closet and set before the reader. So it’s pretty enticing stuff I guess.

There’s only so much I can read about other people’s sex life – no matter how transcendently effulgent it’s been. But his initial chapter, about the only woman historian of mysticism, got my attention. It told a story I didn’t know.

Her poetic name, Evelyn Underhill, is familiar to students of mysticism. Her book, Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, was first published in 1911 and has stayed in print ever since! She practically created and catalogued mysticism as a topic in its own right, requiring serious, specialized study.

According to Kripal, her work suffers from some serious shortcomings. For example, she smooths over the conflicts, conceptual and ideological, between mystics, neglects the Asian contributions, foregrounds Christianity overmuch, and scants the erotic components of the experiences that she does discuss.

Okay okay. Of course I don’t know as much about it as Kripal does, but I’m not “shocked, shocked” that the effort to climb close to God might incorporate, betimes in an unruly manner, the energies of human desire. After all, loving intercourse itself has a divine trajectory … .

What interests me about Underhill is, first of all, what an entrancing stylist she is! Here she is reflecting on a parchment with some writing on it that Blaise Pascal wore “sewn up his doublet,” which was discovered by a servant after his death.

“I know of few things in the history of mysticism at once more convincing, more poignant than this hidden talisman; upon which the brilliant scholar and stylist, the merciless disputant, has jotted down in hard, crude words, which yet seem charged with passion—a memorial of the certitude, the peace, the joy, above all the reiterated, all-surpassing joy, which accompanied his ecstatic apprehension of God (p. 229).”

Her book concludes with her own assignment of highest rank to the mystic as “the pioneer of Life on its age-long voyage to the One … [which] flames out, had we eyes to see, from every department of existence (p. 535).”

* * *

We each have to find our unique path in life – what we are called to. The better I have known myself, the more evident it has been to me that I’m not summoned to climb toward ecstatic union with the divine All.

So what is my actual assignment? So far as I can tell, it’s to live out my life on the timeline where one has ever and always to choose between the crackingly consequential alternatives – in the domains of

what to say, how to think,

and what to do.

Related Content: God and the Care for One’s Story Talk

Posted in absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, anthropology, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, 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, 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, terror, 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, Uncategorized, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged Advaita Vedanta, beautiful guru, beyond good and evil, Blaise Pascal, cancer and life experience, cults and corruption, dangers of a spiritual quest, dilemmas and double binds, Eastern mystics, eros and merging with God, eros and mysticism, escapism, Evelyn Underhill, Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism, experiential impasses, finding one’s life path, getting above it, guru who falls, gurus and exploitation, historians of mysticism, impasses, insoluble experience and cancer, knowing how to think, knowing what to do, knowing what to say, Kripal’s Roads of Excess Palaces of Wisdom, life in history, life journey, life on the timeline, life’s impasses and cancer, merging with the Divine, mind control and brainwashing, mystical journeys, mystical merging, mysticism and authenticity, mysticism and autonomy, mysticism and celibacy, mysticism and conformism, mysticism and human goals, mysticism and seduction, mysticism and sex, mysticism and the erotic, mysticism as academic topic, mysticism as escapism, mysticism studies, mystics in Asia, mystics in Christianity, Pascal as mystic, Realized Master, spiritual exploration and brainwashing, spiritual exploration and mind control, spiritual quest, spiritual quest and risk, theism and pantheism, transcendence, transcendence as escapism, woman guru | 2 Comments

Here Be Dragons

Posted on November 4, 2025 by Abigail

St. George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccello c.1456

These days, I’m taking in the impact of two recent books: Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature and Jeffrey Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism.

Hey, sex and mysticism! That pretty much covers it all, one might say. But no, it doesn’t. Not exactly. Not quite.

About Leaf’s book, I’ve already written about its present implications for those who are still dancing the dance of courtship between men and women. What he tells is that the Darwinian story of our ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors on the evolutionary tree were not apes. We share with apes a common ancestor – but our branch diverged from the primate branch several million years back – and our social patterns exhibit more traits common to other intelligent herd animals like dolphins than they do to the way apes and chimps behave.

What are the implications for our love life? Homo sapiens and its earlier forebears traveled widely in fairly small hunter/gatherer groups where sexual adventuring would have been disruptive and impractical. So it’s likely (as Leaf reads the evidence) that they settled into monogamous, child-rearing pairs, sharing both the joint responsibilities and the erotic rewards.

If Leaf’s reading of the evidence is right, it would go directly against the grain of what intelligent, well-read men and women have believed for at least the last hundred years. Women (let’s start with women) were urged to be super-confident, “out there” in the wide world and – above all – “healthy.” Healthy meant uninhibited.

What exactly was wrong with being inhibited? And from what were the inhibitions supposed to restrain one?

Sex, of course. Sex as self-sufficient – its own reward – as good in itself. In practice, in my youth, there was a tightrope which only the canniest could walk and keep their balance. “Uninhibited” did not, of course, include getting pregnant. Or getting the “slut” reputation. Ergo, as a rule, girls of that time tried to stop short of intercourse, especially since not many had independent access to contraceptives.

These dangers – biological and social – put one in a tricky, inbetween territory, which each of us negotiated well or badly, but without a map or reliable set of instructions. The whole territory would have been better mapped by the medieval cartographers as follows:

Here be dragons.

Meanwhile, the most talented and influential novelists came down on the side of the uninhibited women of their novels. As D. H. Lawrence put it in Lady Chatterley’s (corrected) Lover:

You’d think that a woman

Would have died of shame.

Instead of which,

shame died.

Well, it either died or became inarticulate.

Now what does Leaf’s new evidences of the differences – archeological, neurological, biochemical and behavioral (between primates and homo sapiens) – imply for women? Although sexual adventuring is still à la mode and culturally promoted, it’s still “problematic” (i.e. erotically disadvantageous) for women. As Simone de Beauvoir observes in The Second Sex, “people have trouble distinguishing the free woman (la femme libre) from the easy woman (la femme facile). Yeah.

I don’t claim expertise about what other women actually want, but – by the millions – they are still reading romance novels. Why? Because millions of women still want to experience … romance!

Hey! Here’s a philosophical insight! It’s unlikely to get me any new lecture invitations. But it’s still true.

*. *. *

Now what about Jeffrey Kripal’s book? As I’ve mentioned in an earlier column, as a teenager I had two great ambitions: to be a great lover or a famous saint. According to Kripal’s research – both into mysticism and into the lives of historians of mysticism – certain highly regarded mystics experienced union with the divine sexually as well as spiritually. The erotic language they used to describe their mergings with the divine weren’t just metaphors.

What’s more, recent historians of mysticism, who studied those paradigmatic mystics, found themselves also enjoying (or suffering) such compound mystical/erotic unions. Finally, to crown all, Kripal himself reports something analogous happening to him as he immersed himself both in the mystical texts and in the private letters and journals of the historians of mysticism!

So, insofar as one believes Kripal’s reports, it seems that my teenage ambitions – great lover or famous saint – might have been achieved simultaneously. I wouldn’t have had to choose!

What do I make of Kripal’s findings?

For me, at this point, the good life, the great ambition, the summum bonum, doesn’t now consist in the liberated orgasm – nor in mystical merging with the divine – however orgasmic that might be.

Hey, I’m Jewish. And not the kabbalistic kind, not one of those who live in the atemporal realms of universal mysticism. For me, the good life consists in staying on the timeline, one foot in front of the other, and knowing the difference between life’s before and after. It’s knowing when you learned what, why you had to learn it, and what difference that made.

In my experience, the God of Biblical and post-Biblical history keeps the distance from us that’s needed in order that the before and after of our moral lives can be retained. Because in real life not everything blends.

My grandfather knew Simon Dubnow, the Jewish national historian who was murdered by the Nazis in 1941. They tell about him, as he and his students were being rounded up for the intended slaughter, that he instructed his followers to observe everything that they were enduring.

“It may be that some of us will survive –

and tell what happened.”

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, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, 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, 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, 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, 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 ancestral child-rearing pairs, apes’ social patterns, asymmetry of the sexes, belief systems of modernity, chimps’ social patterns, contradictory ideals for women, current courtship styles, Darwinian views, distinguishing before and after, dividing parental responsibilities, drawing distinctions in real life, eros and spirituality, eros of sainthood, erotic rewards, evolution and monogamy, getting above the battle, healthy as uninhibited, herd animals’ social patterns, historians of mystiscm, Holocaust survivors, Holocaust testimonies, homo sapiens' ancestors, human evolution, humans and dolphins, hunter gatherer groups, illusions of modernity, inhibitions as unhealthy, intelligent herd animals, Jeffrey Kripal, Jeffrey Kripal’s Roads of Excess Palaces of Wisdom, Jewish national historian, Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth, kabbalistic mysticism, keeping the record, knowing when knowing why telling the difference, la femme facile, la femme libre, living in history, living on the timeline, love life of homo sapiens, love life of human forebearers, male cultural conditioning for women, male novelists’ ideals of women, monogamous early humans, mystical transcendence vs living in history, mystical/erotic unions, Mysticism, mysticism and erotic merging, mystics and erotic language, not from apes, pregnant out of wedlock, remembering as a duty, requirements of moral life, saints as lovers, sex and mysticism, sex as good in itself, sex as its own reward, sexual revolution and pregnancy, Simon Dubnow, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, staying on the timeline, the Biblical God, the free woman vs the easy woman, the God of post-Biblical history, the personal God, the slut reputation, transcendence and escapism, uninhibited but not a slut, uninhibited women of male novels, women and romance novels, women as cultural losers, women wanting romance, women's incompatible ideals, women’s balancing act, women’s biological and social dangers, women’s contradictory social directives, women’s incompatible social ideals, women’s no-win situation, women’s silent cultural dilemmas, women’s silent dilemmas | 2 Comments

Under the Chariot Wheels

Posted on October 28, 2025 by Abigail

Of late, I’ve begun to read certain well-regarded women writers. I started with Sylvia Plath and now it’s Joan Didion.

Earlier in my reading life, I had stayed away from these writers, fearing that they were whiners after all – whose complaints would be symptomatic rather than diagnostic. I suspected that they wouldn’t help me discover the root of the problem.

On the other hand, if we think of women on the model of dance partners, they’ve got a good chance of discovering by experience – direct and intimate – the awkward missteps of their lead partners. (Here “lead partner” would be my metaphor, either for the culture itself, or else for the men whom the culture might assess more impersonally and generically than the women do who know them best.)

So what women discover about men – and the culture we share with men – is not the only reason to find women writers interesting. But it is one reason.

The collection of Joan Didion essays that I’ve just finished reading is titled The White Album. I have no idea why it bears that title. Didion herself may be seen on the back cover – a slender, pretty woman, standing in a fashionable slouch, right elbow crooked and cigarette poised between the fingers of her right hand. In her essays, whatever scene she’s reporting appears through the lens of a world-weary anomie that perfectly matches her photo. (Since I want to know what motivates people, I can make nothing of world-weary anomie.)

There are, however, two essays in this Didion collection which do deliver a straight message, coming to you direct from the writer’s motivational system. “In Hollywood” (1973) tells about the process of producing a movie, a process to which Didion and John Gregory Dunn, her late husband, contributed as writers. She had a lot more interest and respect for the movie-making process – apparently always a gamble – and knew more about it than was known by the pretentiously high-brow movie reviewers. In that world, she was an expert.

The second essay that feels real to me is titled “The Women’s Movement.” It’s about the feminist movement as Didion encountered it in 1972. It was just going mainstream, with feminist pioneers of the time being invited to appear on TV talk shows.

“Attention was finally being paid, and yet that attention was mired in the trivial. Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue (p. 113).”

And here is Didion’s scornfully sincere assessment of these women’ s complaints. “All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it – that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death – could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all (p. 116).”

Her essay brought back to my mind certain shocks and disappointments that I experienced back in the days when I was writing “Feminism Without Contradictions.” That article was published in The Monist, a well-regarded philosophical journal that broke precedent by devoting an entire issue to feminism.

What were the shocks and disappointments that I remember?

*. *. *

Item: a lovely woman I knew who worked on MS magazine during its inaugural year attributed her mastectomy to the infighting of the women on the editorial board of that trail-blazing magazine!

Item: a not-so-lovely woman, whom I knew from an Upper East Side consciousness-raising group, was writing a book about the year when her husband was dying – of cancer I think. She was writing it during that year! Whenever, during her sacrosanct working hours, the phone rang, her dying husband would pick up the phone, take the message for her and explain to the caller that his wife couldn’t come to the phone just then because she was busy – writing her book!

Item: when I tried to interest the feminists I knew in the case of Juanita Broaddrick – who, in a credible interview, had described being raped by Bill Clinton in the time before he ran for President – I was the only feminist I talked to who had actually listened to the interview! The feminists I called gave different reasons for their reluctance to sign the petition I proposed, demanding accountability from Clinton. I can’t sign because Clinton supports abortion rights. I’m sorry but my feminist book is just coming out and I need jacket endorsements.

My real list of these experiences is far longer, but I guess we can stop here.

Despite their all-too-human inconsistencies, bad faith, cattiness and malice, Second Wave feminists did manage to change in some measure the legal and social culture for women. Some features improved, while other cultural features got discernibly worse.

As Hegel has pointed out, those world-historical figures who drive the chariot whose purpose is to change the culture in world history, typically end up under the chariot wheels – either in the sense of personal suffering or (much more costly) moral distortion. And the public feminists I knew at the time turned out to offer no exception to the Hegelian generalization.

What about feminists and me? On the one hand, they have helped me and, on the other hand, they have hurt me.

And they have done that

for all women.

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 God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, 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, 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, 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 Abigail L. Rosenthal’s Feminism Without Contradictions, academic feminists, anomie, antiwomen bigotry, authenticity and feminism, changing public opinion, consciousness-raising group, construction workers’ catcalling, copouts of feminism, differences denied, dying spouse, exploitation of women, fashionable authors, feelings aren’t facts, feminism and American politics, feminism and chivalry, feminism and cultural politics, feminism and political incorrectness, feminism and rape, feminism and womanly sympathy, feminism’s denial of difference, feminism’s repressions, feminist complaints, feminist diagnostic, feminist disappointments, feminist infighting, feminist motivation, feminist pioneers, feminist theory and real women, feminists on TV talk shows, Gnosticism and feminism, Hollywood screenwriters, honor your mother, human motivation, Joan Didion, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn, Joan Didion on feminism, Joan Didion’s The White Album, Juanita Broaddrick, manipulating guilt, marital callousness, marital indifference, movie reviewers, movie-making processes, MS magazine, narcissist, philosophy and feminism, rape accusation, second-wave feminists, self-indulgence, sense of entitlement, social intelligence, sophisticated woman writers, spinsters, Sylvia Plath, the beauty myth, the male gaze, The Monist feminism issue, trail-blazing women, understanding men, Upper East Side discussion group, utopian feminism, vulnerability repressed, what women know, women and social intelligence, women as victims, women understanding men, women’s autonomy, women’s depth experiences, women’s friendships, world-weary anomie | 2 Comments

Naked Apes?

Posted on October 21, 2025 by Abigail

Lately I happen to have been reading two books on what Darwin – and his intellectual descendants (like Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene or Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man) – got wrong!

The two books are philosopher David Stove’s Darwinian Fairy Tales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution and novelist Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature.

Neither writer is influenced by “creationism,” which I take to be the view that regards chapter one of the Biblical Book of Genesis as literally true. Stove was a staunch atheist for whom the skeptic David Hume provided the model, and – whatever Leaf’s background views might be – they do not figure in his book.

Stove contends that Darwin’s principle of “survival of the fittest” cannot explain human behavior. The case he builds – visiting intellectual forerunners like Thomas Malthus as well as Darwin’s contemporary allies and his influential sociobiological heirs – is painstaking and meticulous.

What is more, Stove’s findings actually turn out hilarious. I don’t ever recall laughing out loud when reading a book as carefully constructed and empirically buttressed as Darwinian Fairytales. But that’s what’s happening to me, and happening time after time, as I take in the gradual build of this book’s argument.

Jonathan Leaf’s book concerns itself with the results of more recent technological developments such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), DMA technology and CT scanners. All these now permit detailed comparison between our brains and the brains of great apes and chimpanzees.

Recent research has also given us a more accurate idea of the chronology of our human evolution, as compared with that of great apes. Although “it became common among primatologists to call all great apes hominids … actually [h]umans diverged from a common ancestor we share with orangutans between fourteen million and eighteen million years ago (p. 72).” That’s a very long time to have been on separate tracks.

Another difference: apes copulate with every female they can find and they don’t look back to see if she’s doing it with anyone else. Nor do they bond with their offspring. The simian reproductive strategies contrast sharply with what we find in the prehistoric evidence concerning homo sapiens.

Our remote ancestors lived mostly in small bands and – how can I say this? – they couldn’t afford to sleep around! If you reached for someone else’s mate, he’d kill you. So monogamy seems to have both the safest and the most satisfactory mating strategy for our farthest ancestors. With the result that some features of human psychology evolved to facilitate that outcome. Hey, men and women are possessive and jealous!

So now, what are the real-life implications for actual boys and girls like ourselves? Well, I sure wish I’d known this when I was dating!

Let me recall an anecdote shared with me by a woman friend in the time that stretched all through my youth and hasn’t ended yet. My friend was sitting in a café and minding her own business when a young man drew near her table with this approach:

“I know what you need.”

Hey, he knows what she needs. He’s heard about Darwin’s views of the human reproductive strategies as updated by sociobiology. He’s read that individual members of our species have to compete to out-reproduce their conspecific competitors! Isn’t that a good enough reason for young women to get rid of their virginity before they reach the advanced age of twenty?

Anyway, here’s how my tough young woman friend replied to her neoDarwinian suitor:

“That’s the last thing I need. And if I needed it, you’re the last person I would turn to, to get it.”

As we know, most girls aren’t quite that tough.

All the same, there are a host of reasons, founded on the biological differences between the sexes, why natural female pliancy – now abetted by the recent sociobiological updatings of Darwin – is female trouble waiting to happen.

Take the hymen: obviously a natural barrier to intercourse with a virgin. Can we take a hint from that protective barrier and think about restoring a social etiquette for courtship that might have been discarded prematurely – discarded on the basis of a wrong theory about human origins? As it turns out, we’re very different from apes.

Female apes don’t worry about getting pregnant. Human females do. I taught an evening class in Applied Ethics. My students were mainly middle-aged women of color. Some worked in hospitals. They became familiar with women coming in for their secret abortions. Those women included figures known for their public opposition to abortion.

Hey, sociobiologists, how many of you are in danger of an unwanted pregnancy?

What about men, young men and older men? If Jonathan Leaf is reading the evidence correctly, cooperative, lifelong pair bonding appears to have been very ancient in the evolution of our species. It might even predate the use of fire for cooking. From such findings, what might follow strategically – for men?

Hey, be the first kid on your block to be a gentleman! That doesn’t mean that you need to wallow in guilt over sexism or redesign yourselves as pushovers.

Just be normally courteous and kind.

That’s very

avant garde.

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, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, 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, Industrial Revolution, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, 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, 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 abortion public opposition private need, abstract ideals vs lived views, ape reproductive strategies, apes and pair bonding, apes and parenting, Applied Ethics, Atheism, authenticity and sociobiology, Bible as history book, competition and courtship, Creationism, culture and theories, Darwin’s allies, Darwinian courtship, David Hume, David Stove’s Darwinian Fairy Tales, Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape, DMA, erotic life and reductionism, etiquette for courtship, female guilt, female pliancy, groupthink, healthy relationships, herd mentality, Homo sapiens and monogamy, human brains and monkey brains, human evolution, human mating strategies, human psychology, idealism and cynicism, idealism vs real life, Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, jealousy in human beings, Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth, lived philosophy, male guilt, MRI, Oedipus complex, pair bonding and human evolution, philosophical reductionism, possessiveness in human beings, power politics, prehistoric monogamy, primitivism and social style, profaning the sacred, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, sex differences, simian reproductive strategies, social influence of theories, social result of wrong theories, sociobiology and bigotry, sociobiology and civilization, sociobiology and gender roles, sociobiology and human courtship, sociobiology and man/woman relations, sociobiology and misanthropy, sociobiology and misogyny, sociobiology and seduction, sociobiology and sincerity, sociobiology’s social influence, survival of the fittest, theology vs real life, theories and human reality, Thomas Malthus, toughness in women, unhealthy relationships, virginity and courtship, war of the sexes, who gets abortions, young men and chivalry | 2 Comments

“My Inescapable Femininity”

Posted on October 14, 2025 by Abigail

Sylvia Plath 1932-1963

My Inescapable Femininity — Cover from *Confessions of a Young Philosopher* by Abigail L. Rosenthal

Sylvia Plath is one writer I never wanted to read – partly because she seemed to have a “cult” following. My reluctance had, however, another motive: I don’t like to visit the lives or the works of women who’ve killed themselves before I could pull them back from the brink.

I feel that way about Virginia Woolf and her suicide. Even about Alice James, the sister of her top-of-the-line brothers, William James the philosopher and Henry James the novelist. (Alice didn’t kill herself; only suppressed whatever intellectual and creative proclivities she may have had, being advised by the best experts of the day that her explorations of her creative side were the cause of her phobias.)

I’ve talked two women friends out of killing themselves, and a third from smoking dope. So I have some reason to believe that I can tell what’s going on when women decide that they’ve failed at life.

In the case of Sylvia Plath, it can be argued that her psychic vulnerability had a biochemical basis, so that her opinions (or mine) about how her life was going would have counted for little vis-à-vis the final outcome.

Against this, there is the finding (for which Bessel van der Kolk makes the case in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma) that the brain itself is chemically affected by traumatic events, and – by the same token – traumatized neural pathways in the brain can be rerouted and normalized when the sufferer is trained to practice new, harmonious habits of one sort or another. If van der Kolk is correct, then we are not necessarily the victims of our wounds – whether societal or biochemical in origin.

So I tend to believe that she could have been saved and spared for a life that might have been long enough to acquire its full and fair share of frustrations, tragedies and fulfillments. She could have lasted.

Having just begun to read the Plath journals, I can see that the cultural values she faced as a woman much resembled the prefeminist ones that I and my Barnard classmates would be navigating too, a few years later. For one example: a woman friend who graduated first in her class – winning all the academic honors one could get – after graduation learned touch typing and took her first job at a women’s magazine by the name of “Charm Magazine.” She was just bright enough to have surveyed the post-college territory and seen how the life of a woman had been mapped from edge to edge by the culture of that time.

“From the moment I was conceived,” Plath writes, “I was doomed … to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording – all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy.”

Of course, she romanticizes the envied freedom of men. Men don’t walk through the world weightless, fearless or unconstrained. The competition between men goes understated in Western societies but is fully as fierce as the male imagination can conceive. Frankly, taking everything into the bargain, I’d really rather be a woman … .

So what’s the lesson to be drawn here? Let me draw on my own experience here. At the time I was acquiring philosophic training – training to teach and write in my field – I was told explicitly that, if I wanted to get anywhere in that field I would have to “destroy [my] femininity.”

That wasn’t said to me out of meanness. It was said because the professor who said it believed it to be true. So he was being honest with me. Which was, after all, in its way, respectful. What’s more, he was saying out loud what they all thought, both fellow students and my professors.

So why couldn’t I have just offered a refuting counter-argument? Well, perhaps I could have. But I sensed that this wasn’t about winning an argument. It wasn’t taking place on that level. It was about the matrix, the atmosphere, the surround of being a man or a woman at that time. What the culture denied – at that point in its unfolding – was that philosophy could be anything other than a masculine endeavor.

Even then, there were, of course, distinguished women in philosophy. But they were, to my perception, self-masculinized. So the seeming exceptions only proved the larger rule. Philosophy was – had always been, could only be – a masculine activity. Could I have fought that rule? To fight it was all too possible. But it would have taken a more masculinized (or else culturally blinkered) woman than I was!

By degrees, by efforts – some of them quite costly and self-subverting – the culture would begin to change. I knew a number of the women who were in the vanguard of the women’s movement, bringing about important changes, legislative and attitudinal. And I also knew in some measure what it had cost them. To some degree, and in my own way, I too shared the over-simplifications and the semi-gnostic great leaps of “the movement.”

Most of us do our best … to live as truthfully and decently as we can. Even if we can’t sail smoothly and effortlessly over the places – steep and rough – in culture and history where we find ourselves, I think of the rhetorical question that long ago I heard a young Russian ask his compatriots, in a café on the Rue de Tournon:

“What is love?” he asked, and then answered his own question:

“To love –

is to suffer.”

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 God, bigotry, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, 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, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, 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, 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, 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 mentor’s advice, academic mentor’s insensitivity, academic politics, Alice James, anti-fascism, anti-heroes, “My Inescapable Femininity”, Barnard College classmates, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, biochemical psychology, brutal honesty, defining women, envying men’s freedom, Femininity, feminism’s over-simplifications, feminism’s personal cost, Freudian therapy, guilt by association, Henry James’ sister, living truthfully, love and suffering, male competition, personal honesty in culture, personal integrity in history, philosophy and femininity, philosophy as a masculine discipline, political extremism, prefeminist values, preventable suicide, preventable tragedies, psychic vulnerability, pulling moral rank, reductionism and femininity, rejecting cultural stereotypes, reversing trauma, Revolution and messianism, revolution and utopia, revolutionary competition, revolutionary purity, revolutionary sex appeal, self-masculinized academic women, Sigmund Freud, suicidal women, Sylvia Plath, the women’s movement, tightrope walking, trauma and the brain, Virginia Woolf, war of the sexes, William James’ sister, women and suicide, women defined as losers, women friends, women friends vs suicide, women in prefeminist culture, women supporting women, women writers, women’s failures | Leave a comment

One of a Kind

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Abigail

David Stove was a philosopher of the not-cut-to pattern kind. (Is that a kind? Just how many are there?) For example, he did not hesitate to kick the seemingly unassailable Charles Darwin in the shins for a train of errors that Stove had methodically uncovered. I met him during the period when I lived in Sydney, Australia where my then husband John Bacon taught logic while I used my time to do the research for my first book, A Good Look at Evil.

That I got access to the library at the University of Sydney and had doors opened for me with a title (“Research Fellow” or something like that) was due entirely to Stove’s intervention. He smoothed the way for me, while giving me absolutely vital philosophical guidance about what to read.

I’d had no ambition to see kangaroos or in other ways explore the upside down world Down Under. My sojourn at Sydney was a wholly unsought byproduct of my marriage to an American philosopher who got hired there only after we’d decided to marry. But, largely thanks to Stove’s advice, the research for my book, and the readership it would draw, was very much enlarged. So much for my personal debts to him.

What was the scene there? At that time, philosophy at Sydney University had split mitotically into two ideologically incompatible departments: Traditional and Modern Philosophy, which did analytic philosophy (devoted to empiricism as a method and materialism as the metaphysical view) and, in the other department – General Philosophy – marxism and feminism.

Trad and Mod, as they called it, was where my then husband was based, as was David Stove, David Armstrong, Michael Devitt, Bill Lycan (briefly, as American visitor) – all very sharp analytic philosophers. On weekdays, its members lunched at the Staff Club, where they diverted each other (and any like-minded academics who joined) with witty philosophical tales of the trends, the news and the fresh gossip of the profession – along with good-natured professional sparring with each other. Their rivalry with “the other department” was part of the dramatic backdrop framing the lunch-time conversations.

(The only talk I gave at Sydney University was to “the other department,” and it was titled “Getting Past Marx and Freud.” Hey, what the heck! I wasn’t an analytic philosopher but – about M & F – why pussyfoot around?)

After I left Sydney, Stove and I continued to correspond. It’s a ten-year correspondence – probably the thickest personal file folder that I have. Some portion of our letters back and forth went into the archive assembled by Roger Kimball. I had not looked back at our correspondence since. From what I now see, our letters are spontaneous in feeling, careful in expression and candid.

His life – which he had lived with an evenness of temper, incisive wit, worldly circumspection and impressive philosophical erudition – ended with a drama and high pitch of tragedy that seemed quite out of keeping with the well-tended years before. His beloved wife was in recuperation from a stroke and he was under surveillance for cancer, though deemed provisionally free of it. It seemed that the things of his orderly life were at sudden risk of capsizing.

The details escape me now, but they affected his daily moods and stifled his powers of recovery. Besides, in Stove’s case, what could his ultra-Tory views be except the protective casing around an extremely sensitive soul? Perhaps also some contra-indicated medication contributed to his sense (in the words of Edgar Allan Poe) of “unmerciful disaster [that] followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore – of never, never more.”

So he decided to cut that part of his story short. Alarmed at what I was hearing of his ordeals, I telephoned him long distance from New York. He simply and efficiently bundled me off the phone! He did not choose to share with me what he planned to do next.

As a commonsensical nonbeliever, he deemed himself fully competent to decide on his own the matter of his end. I would not have agreed with him, had he discussed the matter with me. But he acted consistently, by his own lights.

When I heard the news, I prayed for him and also called a philosopher-theologian friend, whom I deemed a good pray-er, asking him to join in sending his good words Upstairs. Musing on the philosophical atheists, my friend started to note how quick they are to mock any who believe in a reality not made evident by the senses – but then he stopped himself – recalling someone reputed for his piety who had also ended his own life. These matters are not to be wrapped up in a formula, he concluded, and promised to add his prayers to mine.

I’m now reading one of Stove’s unpredictable, not-cut-to-pattern books, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution. The Darwinian theory, he says, however well it may work in accounting for flies, pines and cod, is wholly unable to account for the conduct and motivation of human beings.

While dissenting from the materialist reverence for Darwin, Stove sailed serenely through the disapproval of his colleagues at Trad and Mod. As I read Darwinian Fairytales now, delighted to be in David Stove’s company again, I savor this welcome revisiting of his striking and original powers,

exercised unafraid.

Related Content: A Good Look at Evil | Getting Past Marx and Freud

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, anthropology, appreciation, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, chivalry, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, eighteenth century, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, journalism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, memoir, memory, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, ontology, oppression, past and future, philosophy, poetry, political movements, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, self-deception, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged Abigail L. Rosenthal’s A Good Look at Evil, Abigail L. Rosenthal’s Getting Past Marx and Freud, academic history, academic philosophy, academic politics, academic rivalry, Analytic philosophy, Anti-Utopianism, atheism and suicide, Australian academe, Australian politics, Bill Lycan, candid correspondence, capsizing an orderly life, Charles Darwin, colleagues and conformism, commonsensical philosopher, concealing a sensitive soul, conservatism and liberalism, Continental philosophy, crisis overpowering coping strategies, cultural assumptions, Darwin and human motivation, Darwin’s theoretical shortcomings, David Armstrong, David Hume, David Stove, David Stove Archive, David Stove’s Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution, dramatic life change, Edgar Allan Poe, empiricism, eulogy, ex-husbands, Feminism, first husband, gentlemanliness and politics, healthy common sense, ideology and academe, idols of the tribe, intellectual debts, John Bacon, kangaroos and black swans, Marxism, meritocracy, methodological empiricism and metaphysical materialism, Michael Devitt, moderation as lifestyle, non-believer, nonconformist academic, nonconformist philosopher, nonconformist thinking, obituary and posthumous friendship, overpowering crisis, philosophical absurdism, philosophical atheist, philosophical competition, philosophical conversation, philosophical correspondence, philosophical erudition, philosophical gossip, philosophical guide, philosophical Humean, philosophical marriage, Philosophical Materialism, philosophical pen pals, philosophizing with style, philosophy at Sydney University, Poe’s The Raven, political correctness, prayer for suicide victim, private despair, protecting a sensitive soul, providential divorce, providential life-turn, providential marriage, received views, research fellow, right wing and left wing, Roger Kimball, sacred cow, sensitive soul, shocking life-crisis, social conformism, suicide and afterlife, suicide and choice, Sydney Australia, Sydney University Staff Club, Trad and Mod Philosophy Dept, traditional and modern philosophy, tragic crisis in an even-tempered life, trendy philosophy, tyranny of one’s peers, tyranny of public opinion, unexpected crisis, University of Sydney, unsung heroes | 3 Comments

What Was the Woman Question?

Posted on September 30, 2025 by Abigail

*Ivanhoe* by Sir Walter Scott, 1819.
Illustration by C. E. Brock, 1897 ed.

Freud asked, “What does woman want?” It’s a good question, and let’s credit him with sincerely wanting to know. Even if his answers weren’t that good, such questions remain credible.

When you ask that question of anybody, and want a credible answer, you need to ascertain what’s available, what’s realizable, in that person’s array of possible desiderata.

Of course, people can want things they cannot possibly obtain. When I was a child, I sincerely wanted to be a deer. From the way people laughed, I came gradually to understand that it wouldn’t be feasible.

Later I revised my hopes and tried to find out what objectives were accessible as well as desirable, with the aim of picking one or two of those. The items on my young girl’s revised list weren’t readily attainable either, but at least I was getting closer to the real world than I’d started out by being.

Equipped with Freud’s question, let’s look at the heroines in Jane Austen’s novels. Her women want (indeed already possess) certain socially approved accomplishments. They can dance, the dances of that era; they have poise and correct bearing in society; they have sufficient intellectual training to participate intelligently in conversation with well-educated men; their qualities of character – virtues and judgment – are sufficient to attract an effective and right-minded husband. And they’re rather good looking.

Okay Jane. Many thanks. That won’t be a problem.

Now fast forward to our own time, or at least to the era when I was coming of age. It was the Age of Conformity. “Feminism” was deemed a thing of the past. It had secured women the right to vote, to divorce, to own property in their own – not their husband’s – name. But now, as one young woman friend (I’ll call her Janene) said to me, over lunch at Schrafft’s, “we,” that is, women, had it all. At that time, Janene had a successful and well-respected psychiatrist husband, children, and a job with a well-known TV personality who dispensed advice to callers.

A few years later, the feminist wave broke over us all. My friend became one of its public pioneers, writing several books – the first on medical issues of special concern to women. While she was rising to prominence, her psychiatrist husband (whose office was in their apartment) had a woman patient whose “treatment” was becoming both audible and disturbing. The patient could be heard yelling, “Kill Janene!” What is more, while she was sounding off in this manner, another phase of the treatment seemed to involve the patient’s being brought to a sexual climax.

One of the things I regret (sort of) was that I let her down in one respect. When she implored me to come and give her my support while she listened to the tapes, I just couldn’t do it.

“I’m sorry, Janene, but I just can’t.”

I’m sorry I let her down, but still glad that I didn’t hear the tapes.

Much good came to women from the efforts of Second Wave Feminism. Janene gets credit for some of those good results. Many years (and two husbands) later, she and I met again for lunch at a New York restaurant.

“Are you still looking for Mister Right?” she asked me.

I allowed as how I was.

“If you find him,” Janene said, “I’ll believe in God.”

*. *. *

What do women want? Let’s make a short list of the basics.

(1.) Women want/need to attract. Is it biological? Social? Oh who cares! Let’s just mark it down as a datum.

(2.) Therefore, in normal circumstances, whatever women say, do, or express in gestures, they can’t – wholeheartedly and sincerely – want it to repel attraction.

(3.) Women who attract bad guys are endangered. Therefore, contemporary women who go about unchaperoned can’t wear their vulnerability on their sleeves. You have to look tough enough to be safe, but not so tough as to discourage nice applicants.

(4.) Women, like men, desire to know. To know what? What life is about, the meaning or purpose of their own lives and those of others. So, is there a problem? Yes. Men can feel threatened if women appear to know more than they do in a given domain. There is more. Women have a shorter time allotment – time to be fertile and, in the ideal case, attract a protective partner – than men have. Female vulnerability is enacted in the sex act, where she must be – how shall I say this? – penetrable. The sex act is not an insult. But it does, in some measure, shape the story.

Partly as a result of Second Stage Feminism, a range of novel choices have opened up for women and for men. But there are still some constants, which haven’t changed all that much. (For the yes and the no, there is first Genesis 1:27-30, where “God created the human in … the image of God, male and female created he them.” But there is also Genesis 3:16, where “[to] the woman He said, ‘I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs, in pain shall you bear children. And for your man shall be your longing, and he shall rule over you.”)

We have new mythologies – chiefly that the sexes are alike in all the important, life-course defining ways. The new mythologies combine to obscure the real question, on which light still remains to be shined:

What do women really want?

Related Content: Feminism Without Contradictions

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 God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, 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, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, 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, 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, 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 abusive and unethical psychiatrist, abusive and unethical psychologists, abusive psychiatrist husband, action and passivity in women, Age of Conformity, agnosticism and feminism, alienation and women, asymmetry of the sex act, atheism and feminism, attracting good guys, authenticity and women, autonomy and women, bad faith and feminism, beauty and feminism, Bible and women, bigotry and women, biological asymmetries between men and women, chivalry and women, Christianity and women, courtship and feminism, desire and feminism, discouraging bad guys, erotic life and feminism, ethics and feminism, existentialism and feminism, exploitation and women, fashions in feminism, femininity and feminism, feminism after Second Wave, feminism and absurdism, feminism and academe, feminism and adolescence, feminism and expanded options, feminism and identity, Feminism without Contradictions by Abigail L. Rosenthal, feminism’s new mythologies, Finding Mr. Right, Freud and women, Freud re the woman question, Genesis and male and female, Genesis and male female equality, Genesis and sexual asymmetry, Genesis and the man woman dynamic, heroic women, ideal women, institutional power and women, Jane Austen’s feminine virtues, Jane Austen’s heroines, Jane Austen’s values, looking for Mr. Right, men and accomplished women, men and intelligent women, men who feel threatened by women, men's relation to time, morality and feminism, novels and Jane Austen, obscuring the woman question, ontology and femininity, oppression and women, philosophy and women, politics of feminism, power and women, public feminist pioneers, radicalism and feminism, Second Stage Feminism, second wave feminism, sexual hierarchy, spirituality and women, surviving women's vulnerability, the Feminist wave, theology and feminism, theology and women, utopia and feminism, victimhood and women, what do women want?, wishing to be a deer, wishing to be an animal, woman and biological clock, women and protective partners, women and role playing, women and what life is about, women as public intellectuals, women attracting bad guys, women hiding vulnerability, women repelling attraction, women's relation to time, women's vulnerability, women’s attainable hopes, women’s biological receptivity, women’s desire to know, women’s love of wisdom, women’s need to attract, women’s need to look tough, women’s passivity, women’s preferences, women’s search for meaning, women’s search for purpose, women’s social receptivity, young girl’s hopes | 1 Comment

What Kind of a Man?

Posted on September 23, 2025 by Abigail

I grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (in the days before that got to be a swank neighborhood) and, aside from Mr. Z (our superintendent who turned out to be a Nazi spy), nobody – rich or poor or in the middle – thought Hitler was Mr. Nice Guy. Nobody believed there were two sides to that story. One side was evil, while the other side included the Allies who were about to win the War against Evil and save any surviving victims. The battle lines were clear and everybody knew where they were.

By the time incidents that betokened a different social reality began to occur, my formative years were behind me. In ordinary settings, I didn’t run into any nastiness about my being Jewish. It interested me – the fact that I was Jewish – but it was not socially problematic.

The dinner that Sydney University’s Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy gave for the guest speaker from Cambridge University’s Peterhouse may well have been my first such encounter in a respectable setting. At that dinner, which I’ve written about in a recent column, our guest singled me out for smiling, underhanded, unprovoked insult. I’ve already dealt with the unresolved question of how I should have handled it. Readers were divided about that. As was I.

Here I’ll add just one other observation. Think of the profound unmanliness – of Mister Peterhouse getting his jollies from abusing a woman! Not to mention a woman who was only there to honor him as the Department’s guest! What kind of a man does that? What must he feel about himself?

We pass on to a second incident, this one also in an academic setting. I was traveling solo to attend a University of Chicago conference on Emanuel Levinas. A French philosopher, a Jew who survived the Holocaust and, against that backdrop, worked out a philosophy concerned with the question of how human beings ought to relate to one another. Levinas is known for the emphasis he places on the human face. Your face is supposed to show that you’re a human being who deserves boundless respect. Atypically for philosophers, he argues that the Jewish approach sheds more light on this question of how people ought to view and treat each other than either the Christian or the secular approaches have done.

Incidentally, Catherine Chalier, the closest disciple of Levinas, told me that gendarmes have had to be stationed in his Parisian lecture halls to prevent assassination attempts!

The conference was well attended. It included people from various walks of life who had discovered Levinas on their own, finding him insightful and helpful. Nothing wrong with any of that, save for the striking fact that the specifically Jewish character of Levinas’s thought was – save for a very few exceptions – not mentioned! Not by most panelists nor by people in the audience.

After one such panel, I approached the speaker who seemed to me to have gone farthest out of his way to evade the Jewish reality behind the thinking of Levinas. With some fervor, I spoke to him about its relevance to the topic that was discussed by the panel.

By way of response, and much to my astonishment, he told me that my face showed the character defects that accounted for my objections! Aside from the crudeness of his personal insult, it was a remarkable choice of insult, given the emphasis Levinas places on the vital importance of respecting the human face.

Shaken and shocked by the encounter, I told the story to Catherine Chalier and I asked her this question:

“Do you think I did wrong to try to engage him in a face to face dialogue?”

“No, it was not your fault,” replied Catherine Chalier. “It’s hatred, and it’s hopeless!”

Yes, probably hopeless. By now, I think of the incident as shocking above all because it took place between a man and a woman. What kind of a man insults a woman’s face – to her face?

The last of these incidents took place at a university in California. I was giving a talk critical of Hannah Arendt’s view that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust hadn’t shown enough resistance to their murderers.

At the Q & A, the first question came from a dapper gentleman of middle years who was seated in the front row. Under the guise of being helpful, he explained that Jews had brought the Holocaust on themselves by controlling the banking industry! What is more, Mahler’s music justified the Holocaust because it was an insult to the German classical tradition!

Jerry, also seated in the front row, was wondering how in the world Abigail would respond to this!

I was wondering the same thing myself and, being a bit stunned, looked upward for Guidance. Then I spoke the words that came to me as I received them:

“I denounce you from the floor to the ceiling! I won’t try to deal with what you said. These are not questions. They are Nazi canards!”

It was a moment devoid of ambiguity or double meanings.

It was evil:

pure, uncomplicated and unmixed.

Of such a questioner, one no longer asks, what kind of man is that?

The eros of life, the desire – that animates most of us – for the realization of our purposes, had in this instance been traded in for motives quite different. Whatever subterranean source such motives came from, they failed to find a place among …

the stories lived out

by the rest of us

in the time we have

to spend with one another.

Peterhouse Meets Abbie

Posted on September 16, 2025 by Abigail

Peterhouse was founded in 1284 which makes it the oldest of the colleges in Cambridge University. A “college” provides a residence for students going for degrees at various levels and also for Fellows and other instructors who will be available to educate those students. However, as I am reliably informed (by my English collegial friend Michael Smithurst), exams are administered and degrees granted by the university, not the colleges.

Anyway, at the time when I was married to an instructor at Sydney University’s Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy and additionally attached to that Department as a Research Affiliate, the Department hosted a dinner for a visiting philosopher who was described to me as “from Peterhouse.” He wasn’t planning to stay with us, but (if memory serves) had made us one stop on his speaking tour of certain Australian universities.

Since the philosophers at Trad & Mod had a friendly relation to me, they gave me their heads up about Peterhouse. Apparently it had, even at that time, a stand-out reputation for Anti-Semitism. Okay. Sedimentary layers of the stuff must have really piled up since 1284.

I figured I’d be at the dinner as the wife of a member of the Department, as well as having my own philosophic reason for being present at such an occasion. Therefore, I supposed there’d be no cause for our guest’s awkward but surely private prejudices to be on view.

Golly, my mistake. Somehow the fact of my Jewish identity was mentioned and our guest from Peterhouse needed no further prompt to turn all his attention to me. Let me assure you that his attention was the reverse of flattering.

I’ve asked Jerry Martin (my husband today) what he would have done had he been in the position of my then husband. Jerry said promptly that he would have risen from the table and – without hesitation – taken us both home.

Husband number one was not so bold a character. So he did all he could, which was to keep saying “He’s baiting you!” under his breath.

As we see, I’ve never forgotten the incident. My question today is, what kept me in my seat at the dinner table? After all, I could have retired to the ladies’ room, pleading a sudden indisposition.

The restraining factors were probably these:

(a) I felt that I too was a beneficiary of the Department and, as such ought not to make anything resembling a fuss or a scene.

(b) I felt that my then husband’s social position within the Department might have suffered had I reacted more dramatically than I did.

(c) I felt that I was participating in a dinner designed to honor a guest and – even if the guest was being rude – it would be ungracious to return his rudeness with my own.

None of my then motives seem to me contemptible or unworthy. But, since that night, I’ve always felt that none were exactly right. Why not? Well, more was at stake than is covered by (a), (b) and (c). What more was that?

First, Mr. Peterhouse went back home to England entirely satisfied with himself and persuaded that, once again, he had come off a winner. That belief wasn’t good for him.

Second, it was a matter of honor. There was my honor and the honor of the Jewish people. Since my then husband would not have taken me home, and women never could settle such matters by telegraphing physical threats, my departure from the dinner table was the only thing I could have done to mark this event as one that had violated the honor of a people.

In any case – and by whatever methods for defending it one can find –

honor must be defended.

Related Content: Rudeness | Anti-Semitism and the Zeitgeist

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical God, bigotry, books, bureaucracy, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, 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, 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, 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, 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 dinner, academic politics, academic publications, Anti-Semitism at Cambridge University, Anti-Semitism at Peterhouse, anti-semitism in academe, Australian politics, Australian research affiliate, Australian Universities, bad manners, baiting a guest, christians and jews, colleges in Cambridge U, collegial friends, comparing husbands, countering an insult vs making a scene, culture of rudeness, defending honor, defending one’s honor, dinner for visiting philosopher, erotic failure, guest from Peterhouse, handling a social insult, handling social aggression, hidden prejudices, higher ed in England, honoring a guest, husband as protector, Jews handling Anti-Semitic insults, maintaining courtesy and countering insult, medieval Anti-Semitism revived, personal honor and honor of one’s people, Peterhouse, philosophical friends, philosophy in Australia, philosophy research affiliate, private prejudices, protecting a vulnerable wife, protocol of social life, responding to a rude guest, signals of safety, social boundaries vs personal protection, social decorum vs protecting one’s wife, social disadvantage, social protocol, social protocol and handling an insult, social protocol and personal insult, social protocol vs social insult, spousal failure as protector, spouse as ally, supportive husband, Sydney U’s Dept of Traditional and Modern Philos, symbolic life and death struggle, table talk, the honor of Jews, unhidden prejudices, unsupportive husband, unsupportive partner, visiting philosopher, women handling insults, women handling male insults | 1 Comment

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Recent Posts