(To readers who do think that women in the United States are subordinated no longer, here is another view. In modern liberal democratic societies, most inequality is partial, contradictory, and contested: it is often more informal [in behavior] than formal [law or policy]. Yet these complex conditions are not so complicated that their negative impacts are unpredictable. Disrespect for women is not unpredictable enough. It is more often affectively sensed or experienced in episodes than objective and dramatically fixable. Popular culture is terrible at dealing with mixed bags and mixed feelings when the register is ideological and the topic is intimate, and women remain the default managers of the intimate. Even if social negativity and antagonism are intricate and uneven and not merely top-down, the social field is still shaped powerfully by them.)
- Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint
(Berlant is not saying that formal subordination no longer exists. Surely some women are formally subordinated more than others.)
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