First Kiss, Innocence, and the Female Predicament | Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 1.2

In Part 1.2 of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their conversation on Part One of Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

In Paris, a café conversation between two young philosophy students turns suddenly from politics to love. What begins as argument and intellectual sparring becomes Abigail’s first romantic encounter, forcing her to confront not only desire, but innocence, vulnerability, and the meaning of a woman’s body in the eyes of another.

Jerry and Abigail explore the unsettling philosophical backdrop of the scene: a world shaped by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, and Marx, where innocence can no longer easily be defended. Abigail reflects on erotic validation, existential terror, the loss of a hoped-for future, and what she calls “the rights of inhibition” — the possibility that hesitation and restraint may protect something real.

Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically.

Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo

Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated.

Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Transcript

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:00:16,183 ]What kind of a hand have we been dealt as women today, and how can we best play it? It's a large question that's always lurking in the background, and since the answers aren't obvious, I find women's lives to be immediately suspenseful and interesting. Don't you? Wait a minute. Who am I? I'm Abigail L. Rosenthal. Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and while my advice has always been not to take my advice, I do write a weekly blog I call Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column. And so, dear listener, I invite you to pull up a chair at this virtual cafe table, no matter your gender, age, convictions, or style of life. 

Narrator:

[ 00:01:35,083 ]Married philosophers Discuss Confessions, part one continued. Married philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenfeld discuss her newest book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. In this episode, a cafe conversation between two young philosophers turns suddenly into Abigail's first romantic encounter. What begins with arguments about politics and ideas shifts quickly into something physical. As Abigail tries to make sense of what is happening, a larger question emerges. What becomes of innocence in a world that no longer recognizes it?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:13,483 ]So if you're just observing this in this highly eroticized city that Paris certainly was, and trying to sort of figure it out, what's going on here, wow. And then you meet a young man. He's a Greek but a student of philosophy also, but in studying in Paris. And you run into him as a student cafe. And and you you you start walking with him and so on. And at one point he says, oh you have a lot of arguments with him. He's a communist.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:53,683 ]not to mention. He's a communist, a French French Greek French communist. And which is a, you know, big thing in French politics, especially in Paris at the time and so we argue about those things a lot, as well as other things. You have a lot of arguments. Two philosophers are like that, even two very young philosophers. And at one point he says, Phidias is the name you give him in the book, you know, you change the names to protect the innocent and the guilty.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:03:26,313 ]Exactly.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:27,403 ]We have, he says, we've talked too much of politics and not enough of love.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:36,063 ]Good move, Phidias," he said reflectively, "you know, thoughtfully, and in the warm, the warm lamplight." Now he moved forward soundlessly, and we kissed.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:51,783 ]And this is your first real kiss ever.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:56,093 ]And the next thing that happens, even in our swift-moving American life of today, I found shocking.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:05,143 ]You kiss and right after the kiss he moved furtively with a hand swift as an otter rolling it under my skirt.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:16,063 ]Who does that? Well, he obviously knew how to do this because it was a move automatic to him and orchestrated with with lightning speed. And you respond, Oh no, wait, wait a minute!

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:35,003 ]I muttered rapidly in English, she said. And then he, after a little back and forth, says, you're not going to tell me you're a virgin. You know?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:49,103 ]Well, of course I'm a virgin, you say. And then, as you are, then you have a little argument about virgins and virginity and your condition. And you say, worse, 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.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:17,103 ]He shook his head impatiently as if abruptly roused from some utter unreality, his hands went back to their previous place.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:29,133 ]And you said we were now as it suddenly seemed engaged in a physical struggle.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:37,193 ]If things once take that turn, a woman has lost ground that is tactically crucial.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:47,713 ]Let me go on. I mean, that scene is so striking, but there's an ideational backdrop to all of this. He goes on.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:59,133 ]He's so good at this stuff. I'm always struck half with shock and half with admiration.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:05,723 ]should give lessons.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:07,823 ]ha He says, it's 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.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:23,113 ]Or if it was, you comment in the year text, you couldn't prove it by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Marx. What it felt like was cold, extremely smooth, and oddly impersonal.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:42,713 ]And those are part of the contending worldviews.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:46,603 ]is not just contending cultures

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:50,013 ]a highly eroticized culture. America's view often says it's a little too pragmatic for that but it's these worldviews where this hypercharged eroticism and hyperaggressive, also is kind of materialistic. He's a communist. These thinkers are all kind of materialist reductionists of one kind or another. It's all just X.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:20,223 ]period. That's all it is, and that's all you are. Therefore, would that be a fair statement? Yes.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:27,123 ]That was so deeply shocking to me. I unders- 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.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:56,713 ]Yeah, yeah. 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.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:14,243 ]You know, okay, here's another, you know, another round.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:19,283 ]And so these back and forths go on and and not too long, he does manage to get you in his room and in his bed and to in ways that you barely notice, he sews... one piece of clothing after another disappears and you're in his bed naked.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:41,033 ]and his face smoothed in what looked like a religious emotion as he looks at you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:50,283 ]And he shook his head with utter conviction as if I... oh, 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, you know, like the Sistine Chapel vision almost.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:14,043 ]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.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:30,343 ]So what a question. I guess it wouldn't have occurred to me, you know, but maybe every female reader or listener would, yeah, that's a big question.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:09:47,043 ]Yeah  Oh yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:49,613 ]what as a physical being, what are others going to make of me, you know, of me exhibited unsure and

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:03,403 ]Yeah, it's funny. This many-stage defloration, this 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.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:10:32,713 ]Uh-huh.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:33,883 ]I know, this should have happened with the right man. I have a, you know, I have a 50s sense of, you know, 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, you know. They don't usually paste that vocabulary on these very private...

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:14,373 ] we keep this to ourselves experiences of women, but they do comport existential terror because of what gives value to a woman, her youth, you know, her her untouched character, her you are the first, her ability to convey that.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:46,403 ]and I and that was of course very strongly etched in 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, got nothing on me.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:19,553 ]On another level, the merger of that validation with the right moral social future-bearing supports has dropped out.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:40,033 ]and so I'm both fulfilled in a way, a realized, you know, big success as a woman in one sense of that word, and another way of looking at it, from another vantage point, terrifyingly abandoned, you know, in a condition

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:13:08,823 ]verging on one bereft of hope, you know, something I hoped for is gone and cannot come back.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:21,203 ]Yeah, and you write as if, I think you write as if you're already no longer a virgin even though, you know, no official sex act has taken place.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:33,663 ]and certainly my sense, and I don't know if it goes right up to the present, you talk to younger women sometimes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:42,503 ]I certainly have read women hoping or often wishing because it hadn't happened that their first had been the right person and especially had been the right kind of experience.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:57,223 ]you know, the right surround, the right moment, the right sense to what this what this transaction was about.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:05,733 ]the vulnerability of women that they expose and give away requires, in terms of the emotional logic of that situation, a receiver or 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.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:44,703 ]the banalization of sexual initiation today seems to me I don't want to

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:15:03,083 ]seem to be talking moralistically or, you know, in terms of bygone, banalities and clichés that everybody seems to have outgrown. But the culture is not noticing the dynamic of a woman. It's not honoring that. It might

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:15:32,663 ]One might hope that perhaps the future will disclose some way of honoring it that doesn't put women in girdles and nylons and, you know, the other constraints and tell them if you're not married by the age of 23, you're in the dust heap of history. I mean, there were these downsides to the great value placed on virginity as innocence.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:01,743 ]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, doesn't treat her as

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:31,233 ]as ruined goods, but on the other hand despises her innocence. You know, 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. That's not poetry, that's prose.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:00,743 ]And there's something, 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.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:30,383 ]which are nature's protection after all before the age of contraception, we're talking, I don't know, million years how long we've evolved, we've taken to evolve, but 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.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:05,983 ]so these things are not superficial or merely outdated fashions. They have a very deep ingrained hold on our natures. You know, we know them without it being good form anymore to talk about them. That doesn't mean these realities have vanished.

Narrator

[ 00:18:40,023 ]This is Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions. What begins here is not just a first encounter, but a confrontation between experience and the ideas meant to explain it. See you next episode or sooner at dearabbie-nonadvice.com.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:53,953 ]If this added value to your life, I'd be happy if you subscribed. You can find me at www.abigailrosenthal.com. I've written a book called A Good Look at Evil, and if that's not too scary for you, you can buy it on Amazon. Another book is called Confessions of a Young Philosopher, and that's forthcoming soon with illustrations.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:20:08,463 ]Thanks so much, dear listener. If this added value to your life, I'd be happy if you subscribed. You can find me at www.abigailrosenthal.com. I've written a book called A Good Look at Evil, and if that's not too scary for you, you can buy it on Amazon. Another book is called Confessions of a Young Philosopher, and that's forthcoming soon with illustrations.