Sublime

Of course, many of the progressives weren’t themselves interested in or focused on the economic stuff. But there was an elective affinity between their meritocratic, crack-the-glass-ceiling view of “emancipation” and the free-market ethos.

The status of women was not just an indicator, but fundamental to the success of any culture.

Women may not be simply human beings but positioned as human givers when it comes to the dominant men who look to them for various kinds of moral support, admiration, attention, and so on.

Not only do women across the world produce the workers that keep the global economy in motion. Starting in the early ’90s there has been a leap in female migration from the Global South to the North, where they provide an increasing percentage of the workforce employed in the service sector and domestic labor.

Consumer culture has always been intimately involved with the disciplining of women’s bodies—whether fashion or advertising or magazines exhorting women to shape up, work out, and do better in everything from appearance to parenting to sexual techniques.

Jan was an outspoken feminist who had, in fact, written numerous articles that critiqued traditional sex roles.

it became clear, quickly, that a lot of the problems feminists continue to take on are rooted in a deep hostility toward and suspicion of unfettered female pleasure, happiness, and independence.

“gender discount”

Our culture is repelled by what it imagines as sexual license, naked women under no one’s control, something totally aboriginal and primitive.