ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the persistent social bases of discrimination against women and blacks in North America as a form of dishonor. Women and blacks in North America continue to bear socially shameful characteristics, even as the formal rules—and increasingly the actual practice—of late-twentieth-century society permit them far more opportunity for independence and social mobility than they have had before. Women are the original degraded social category, and such degradation is almost universal. The process of degradation coincides with the discovery of the myriad ways in which women's reproductive capacities and their capacity to work can be exploited for the material benefit of men. Women are so convinced that their bodies are shameful, dirty, and degrading that mutilation for purposes of self-esteem is considered to be mutilation for health purposes. Rape, wife-beating, and wife-murder are the chief weapons of gendered social terror. Western liberalism is unusual among social philosophies in its direct attack on practices of degradation.
