Women’s subordination is ostensibly mitigated by the
unwritten contract for exchange of services in marriage,
which Lerner called “paternalistic dominance”: Men are
expected to provide economic support and protection from
harm in exchange for obedience, sexual service, and unpaid
domestic service, including care of dependent family members
(Lerner). These expectations are built into marriage and
divorce laws (Weitzman) and help define women’s roles,
opportunities, and sense of self (Degler). The perception
and public rhetoric that women’s subordination is “normal,”
“necessary,” and even desirable for women may contradict
women’s lived experiences. Yet without language and
communities in which women may define their own experience,
subordination often goes unchallenged.
In a 1990 article in the Annual of the Society of Christian
Ethics, Karen Lebacqz offered a powerful analysis of the role
conditioning of men and women that contributes to domestic
abuse in marital and nonmarital relationships. She argued
that “‘normal’ patterns of male–female sexual relating in
U.S. culture are defined by patterns of male dominance over
women,” so that women come to expect male domination
and the possibility of violence in heterosexual relations
(Lebacqz, p. 3). Many recent studies (Fortune; Against Her
Will ) find that women have often experienced undesired
forced sexual relations with male acquaintances that neither
women nor men considered to be rape. Male power over
women is eroticized in mainstream media and pornography
and comes to be perceived as sexually desirable, even when
women know their experiences of abuse are not desirable
(Lebacqz).
