Prior to this change in thinking, men and women were qualified by their degree of metaphysical perfection, whereas by the late eighteenth century, a new model was established on ideas of radical dimorphism and biological divergence.
This metaphysical shift in the understanding of sex and gender, as well as the interplay of these redefined social categories, solidified many of the existing beliefs in the inherent disparities between men and women.
This allowed scientists, policy makers, and others of cultural influence to promulgate a belief in the gender binary under a veil of positivism and scientific enlightenment.
[citation needed] Since the eighteenth century, the dominant view of sexual difference has been that of two stable, incommensurable, and opposite sexes on which the political, economic, and cultural lives of men and women are based and social order is sustained.
"[3] It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the idea of two distinct sexes was established and, through the politics of the time, generated new ways of understanding people and social reality.
[citation needed] In 1949, the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir published her book The Second Sex, in which she described two concepts that would later be developed in the fields of linguistics and psychology and become the basis for the male-as-norm principle in second-wave feminism.
[4] de Beauvoir writes that man is regarded as "both the positive and the neutral," foreshadowing the study of markedness, or the linguistic distinction between the "marked" and "unmarked" terms of an opposition.
[4] Just as Simone de Beauvoir had done in recent decades, French feminist and literary scholar Luce Irigaray centered her ideas regarding the male-as-norm principle on the idea that women as a whole are otherized by systematic gender inequality, particularly through gendered language and how female experience and subjectivity are defined by variation from a male norm; through opposition in a phallocentric system where language is deliberately employed as a method of protecting the interests of the phallus and subliminally affirming his position as norm.
Irigaray affirms that the designation of woman as an inferior version of men, an aberrant variation from the male norm, is reflected throughout Western history and philosophy.
By examining gender stratification in various societies throughout human history in accordance with language, Lerner provides an in-depth look into the historical and modern significance of the male-as-norm principle.
[9] Sue Wilkinson, a professor of Feminist and Health Studies from Loughborough University, wrote in 1997 that there are distinct theoretical traditions in feminism that assert women's inferiority, two of which are rooted in the idea of male as norm.
She notes that this has had disastrous effects on the lives of women and the valuation of the female perspective, and consequently the history of Christian theology has missed opportunities for opening new understandings of what it means to be human.
[11] Lucinda Finley is the Frank G. Raichle Professor of Trial and Appellate Advocacy at the University of Buffalo and has a research focus on Tort Law and Gender Issues as well as feminist legal theory.