People have always built their identities through choosing or, to use the old word, discriminating. On the one hand, feminism promised to give women access to the “higher” style of destiny-defining choices that men had seemed to monopolize, as heads of families and as swashbuckling soldiers, executives, and politicians. On the other hand, it threatened to drag both sexes down to a world in which petty, phony-baloney shopping decisions, carried out to the din of TV marketing pitches, were dressed up as matters of destiny and came to constitute the whole of one’s identity.
