Dear Abbie - The Non-Advice Podcast

Some years back I attended a wedding at a fashionable Manhattan club .  Le tout New York was there.  The bride was a long-stemmed American beauty, highly thought of in her profession.  The groom was one of those Englishmen whose recent best seller depicted his death-defying struggle to survive a desert trek through the back of beyond.  Glasses were raised, the happy couple stepped out on the dance...

What work does the fear of death do in our lives?

Desire is the motor of every life.

It is a fact of social life – perhaps a bizarre fact – that needful and strenuous efforts can be overshadowed by someone, anyone, who is dubbed “cool.”  

Is it a good thing? A subversive thing? A morally neutral thing?

I know it sounds funny to say, in a “non-advice column” for and about women, but the most evil people I have known personally were women.

Clothes are a much bigger subject than is generally supposed.  I often say, “It doesn’t matter what happens, so long as you’re dressed for it.”  I suspect more than a few women would agree with me.

Invisibility can signal erasure.  

Aging is about stratagems plus the overview.  My stratagems are Denial, Disguise and (to paraphrase Jefferson) “Eternal Hostility” against every form of aging known to womankind.  

Years ago, when the feminist revolution was a new discovery for me, I telephoned a family friend who was the only woman engineer in an airplane factory.  I thought she’d be thrilled to hear of the New Day Dawning for women. . .

Any woman still maintaining that the terms “masculinity” and “femininity” should be put between scare quotes, as mere social or grammatical constructs, is invited to walk unescorted into the midst of this bunch.  In shorts.

“Bitch” is an insult word, yet I doubt there is any living, adult, English-speaking woman who hasn’t applied it (at least in her mind) to another woman, in cases where no other descriptive term will do. . .

It's walking a tightrope, or anyway a delicate business. . .

 I see two ways to approach “need” and “fulfillment,” the political and the existential.

The mention of male clients’ “darkest thoughts & feelings” brought to mind an incident I hadn’t thought of in many years. . . 

About tragedy: I think of a Lakota woman I knew. . .

When I first started full-time work as an assistant professor, philosophy was an overwhelmingly male profession. All my colleagues would be men. In my college days, the women who taught me masculinized themselves in their gestures and dress, so that no one could accuse them of allowing seductive feminine wiles in the halls of academe.

What kind of 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 immediately be suspenseful and interesting, don't you? Wait a minute? Who am I? I am Abigail L. Rosenthal, Professor of Philosophy emerita of the Brooklyn College of the...