Parsons argued that medicine was a social institution that regulated social deviance through the provision of medical diagnoses for nonconforming behavior. Medicine was, in this understanding, engaged in social control.

Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

However, as Bordo herself notes, the problem with the adoption of postmodern ideas in general is that they have led some writers to disregard the materiality of power relations.

...women's bodies are "inferiorised, stigmatized . . . within an overarching patriarchal ideology.

For example, biologically and physiologically, women's bodies are seen as both disgusting in their natural state and inferior to men's'' (2001, p. 141).

The unpleasant image of the feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered by the interests who so bitterly opposed the vote for women...

Radical feminism is still threatening.