Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions: Beginningwise, Part 2

Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) pursue their discussion of Beginningwise, which is Part One of her new book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Let’s see how their discussion goes forward.

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Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. She is the author of Confessions of A Young Philosopher (forthcoming), which is a woman's "confession" in the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau. She writes a weekly online column, "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column" along with "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Podcast," where she explains why women's lives are highly interesting. Many of her articles are accessible at https://brooklyn-cuny.academia.edu/AbigailMartin. She edited The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes's Secret; Spinoza's Way by her father, the late Henry M. Rosenthal. She is married to Jerry L. Martin, also a philosopher. They live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She can be reached a dearabbiesilvousplait@gmail.com.We live under the sheltering umbrellas of our worldviews.  To the point where we would feel naked if we were caught in the street without them.

Transcript

Jerry: You’re against getting out of what you call the female predicament. It’s full of vulnerabilities, of this erotic vulnerability. Not just you can be beat up in the alley, but this erotic vulnerability. And you conclude that chapter with the following statement: “The big question was how to endow our feminine existence with ineradicable value and how to endow our values with feminine existence.”

Abigail: Yes, I saw the two things in tension. There were philosophic and perhaps even religious traditions that educated young people, young women, inherited. By the time we graduated from college, we had learned not to put the romantic kind of feminine existence in the same roster with values. Values were either impersonal and neutered or masculine. It seemed to me that one had some kind of quest – there was a dynamic inherent in the search for high purpose, high values – and it did not fit with the requirement that nobody could dodge honestly, to realize one’s femininity. The culture at that time gave women a few years in which to accomplish the second. And of course eternity to accomplish the first. That seemed to me to be quite a predicament. And therefore it seemed urgent, to find some way to merge eternal values and the very contingent, fragile, destructible value of femininity.

Jerry: Well, at first you’re just observing this in this highly eroticized city that Paris certainly was, and trying to figure it out. What’s going on here? And then you meet a young man. He’s Greek, Greco-French, a student of philosophy, studying in Paris, and you run into him in front of a student restaurant, and you start walking with him. It turns out he’s a communist, and communist is a big thing in French politics, especially in Paris at the time. And so you argue about those things a lot, as well as about other things. You have a lot of arguments. Two philosophers are like that, even two very young philosophers. 

And at one point he says – Pheidias is the name you give him in the book, you change the names to protect the innocent and the guilty – he says, “‘We’ve talked too much of politics and not enough of love,’ he said reflectively in the warm lamplight.” (Good move Pheidias.) “Now he moved forward soundlessly, and we kissed.” 

And this is your first real kiss ever. And the next thing that happens, which even in our swift-moving American life of today I found shocking, you kiss, and right after the kiss, he “moved furtively, with a hand swift as an otter, rolling it under my skirt.” Who does that? Well, he obviously knew how to do this, because it was a move, automatic to him and orchestrated with lightning speed. And you respond “‘No! Wait a minute!’ I muttered rapidly in English… .” 

And after a little back and forth, he says, “You’re not going to tell me you’re a virgin?” You know, well of course I’m a virgin! you say. And then you have a little argument about virgins and virginity and your condition. And you say, “I was pretending to him, and to myself, that we were discussing a commodity, when what was really under discussion was the future course of my life. 

“He shook his head impatiently, as if abruptly roused from some utter unreality, and his hands went back to their previous place. …We were now, as it suddenly seemed, engaged in a physical struggle. If things once take that turn, a woman has lost ground that is tactically crucial.” 

Let me go on. I mean, that scene is so striking, but there’s an ideational backdrop to all of this. Pheidias goes on. He’s so good at this stuff, I’m always struck with shock and half admiration. Should give lessons. “‘It’s not wrong, it’s not wrong, there is nothing wrong about it,’ he went on simply, rhythmically, crooningly, shaking his head, looking at me.”

“Or, if it was,” you comment in your text, “you couldn’t prove it by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, and Marx. What it felt like was cold, extremely smooth and oddly impersonal.” 

And those figures are part of the contending worldviews. It’s not just contending cultures. It’s a highly eroticized culture. Americans, we often say, are still too pragmatic for that. But it’s these worldviews where this hyper-charged and hyper-aggressive eroticism, is also kind of materialist. He’s a communist, these thinkers are all kind of materialist, reductionist of one kind or another. It’s all nothing but x, period. That’s all there is, and that’s all you are, therefore. Would that be a fair statement?

Abigail: Yes, that’s what was so deeply shocking to me. I grasped the fact that, if you repaint the world so that those are its outer boundaries, and its internal contours, you can’t make a case for such an ideal state of things as innocence.

Jerry: Yes. And in fact you say a little later, “Here I was going through something for the first time, and he was acting as if it was a shopworn thing.”

Abigail: Yes.

Jerry: He does manage to get you in his room and in his bed, and in ways that you barely notice. He is so smooth. One piece of clothing after another disappears and you’re in his bed naked, and “[h]is face smoothed in what looked like a religious emotion” as he looks at you. He had said, you’re so beautiful, something like that, and then shakes his head with “utter conviction, as if I were the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.” Like the beatific vision. “Undeniably, I was beginning to feel a little happier in the nude. The existential question, ‘What is my body for others?’ was receiving a pleasant answer.” 

So, what a question! I guess it wouldn’t have occurred to me, but maybe every female reader or listener would say ‘Yes!’ That’s a big question. ‘What, as a physical being, are others going to make of me exhibited, unshorn?’

Abigail: Yes, this many-stage defloration is of course a crucial rung of the down-going ladder. Because, as soon as the favorable answer to the question, What is my body for others? has been delivered, I’m not the same girl. I know this should have happened with the right man. I have a 1950’s sense of, you’re not supposed to have this experience more than once. And so I have a sense of some kind of, I don’t know if this is too strong a word, existential terror. They don’t usually paste that vocabulary on these very private we-keep-these-to-ourselves experiences of women. But they do comport existential terror because of what gives value to a woman. Her youth, you know her untouched character, her you are the first, her ability to convey that, and that was of course very strongly etched in the social life of that era. 

But I understood that, in one way, I’m being celebrated up to the skies – just as might be the ambition of any woman – the erotic ambition. Okay, Michelangelo’s ceiling’s got nothing on me. On another level, the merger of that validation with the right moral, social, future-bearing supports has dropped out. And so I’m both fulfilled in a way, a realized big success as a woman in one sense of that word. However, in another way of looking at it, from another vantage point, terrifyingly abandoned! In a condition verging on that of one bereft of hope. Something I hoped for is gone and cannot come back.

Jerry: You write as if you’re already no longer a virgin, even though you know that no official sex act has taken place. And certainly, my sense, and I don’t know if it goes right up to the present, I certainly have read accounts of contemporary women hoping or often wishing that their first night had been with the right person and especially had been the right kind of experience. You know the right surround, the right moment, the right sense to what this transaction was about.

Abigail: Yes, the vulnerability of women that they expose and give away requires, in terms of the emotional logic of that situation, a receiver, a recipient who will protect them, who will support them, who will ensure that the surrender of that moment has a long future. And so you can’t get that back.

And the banalization of sexual initiation today seems to me – I don’t want to seem to be talking moralistically or in terms of bygone banalities and cliches that everybody seems to have outgrown – but the culture is not noticing the dynamic of a woman. It’s not honoring that. One might hope that perhaps the future will disclose some way of honoring it that doesn’t put women in girdles and nylons, and the other constraints, or tell them if you’re not married by the age of 23, you’re on the dust heap of history. I mean, there were these downsides to the great value placed on virginity as innocence back in those times. But there was something correct about it that I think is still alive in the experience of women. 

And there’s a new kind of puritanism that doesn’t despise a woman who has lost her innocence. It doesn’t treat her as ruined goods. But it’s a puritanism that despises her innocence, and so says about this despising – which is a kind of ruination taken for granted if that’s not too much of a hyperbole, if that’s not an exaggeration – says about it, oh, that doesn’t matter; don’t worry kid, that’s not poetry, that’s prose.

I can sort of feel a stifled sob in the feminine breast in the face of that kind of repression, the repression that denies the rights of inhibition, that says you can’t have your inhibitions, which are nature’s protection. After all, before the age of contraception, we’re talking I don’t know a million years, however long we’ve taken to evolve, but for the last say million years, intercourse meant pregnancy. So the repression is not simply some late-grown artificiality. It’s built into the nature of protection for infants, protection for mothers, protection that’s biologically required. 

So these so-called repressions are not superficial or merely outdated social styles. They have a deep, ingrained hold on our natures. We know them, without it being good form any more to talk about them. That doesn’t mean these realities have vanished.