Things men did to Martha Nussbaum that she didn't react to in a conventionally feminist way.

Sorry but I've got one more New Yorker article to blog about "THE PHILOSOPHER OF FEELINGS/Martha Nussbaum’s far-reaching ideas illuminate the often ignored elements of human life—aging, inequality, and emotion," by Rachel Aviv. I just wanted to pull out 2 things:

1. From her experience in the graduate program in classics at Harvard, in 1969: "When her thesis adviser, G. E. L. Owen, invited her to his office, served sherry, spoke about life’s sadness, recited Auden, and reached over to touch her breasts, she says, she gently pushed him away, careful not to embarrass him. 'Just as I never accused my mother of being drunk, even though she was always drunk,' she wrote, 'so I managed to keep my control with Owen, and I never said a hostile word.' She didn’t experience the imbalance of power that makes sexual harassment so destructive, she said, because she felt 'much healthier and more powerful than he was.'"

2. From the 1990s, when she was in a relationship with Cass Sunstein: "In an influential essay, titled 'Objectification,' Nussbaum builds on a passage written by Sunstein, in which he suggests that some forms of sexual objectification can be both ineradicable and wonderful. Straying from the standard line of feminist thought, Nussbaum defends Sunstein’s idea, arguing that there are circumstances in which being treated as a sex object, a 'mysterious thinglike presence,' can be humanizing, rather than morally harmful. It allows us to achieve a state that her writing often elevates: the 'abnegation of self-containment and self-sufficiency.'"