The Significance of Limitations and Inferiority

If there is any kind of difference between men and women that matters to us, as there must be if we are to subscribe to the very existence of the distinction in our culture, we need to know what that difference is and what it makes possible for women and what it makes impossible. Once we know what sexual identity genuinely means, we can begin to understand the disadvantage that is now illegitimately imposed upon women, denying them access to what is both possible for them as women and necessary to the success of their lives. As I have argued above and argue further below, it is only denial of access to such goods that can constitute genuine and hence illegitimate disadvantage, or what I from here on call deep disadvantage. Those limitations of experience and capacity that are simply part of the meaning of sexual difference, the product of what it means to belong to one sex rather than the other, may give rise to inferiority in certain settings, so as to be disadvantages to women in those settings, but they are not in themselves disadvantages to the project of a woman's life, despite the fact that they may appear to deny women access to many valuable forms of experience, including most obviously the experiences of men.