Originally Posted by wilbjammin

Example: You're an upper-middle class woman sometime in the 1800s. You grow up in a family that teaches you that success for a woman is to get married. All of your friends talk to you constantly about how they can't wait to be married, how they want their marriage to be huge, how they want their invitations, etc. You have never in your whole life even considered not getting married and being an individual independent of a husband.

Someone asks you to marry him - he's of the right class, your parents like him, your friends like him, so you marry him.

Environmentally, you have been limited creatively by not seeing any viable alternatives to the typical "go get married" attitude, you haven't seen "successful" women that haven't been married, and you've never imagined yourself not getting married. This is severely going to limit your choices, even though it is theoretically true that you could say "no, I'm not getting married" and you use your immense creative well to create alternate realities - you won't. Our radical freedom is always limited by our unwillingness to consider ideas because we haven't seen these alternate ideas in practice, or we have been so "programmed" by our environment that we've been taught (brainwashed) that there is only one thing that we're actually free to do. I think most of us feel limited in this way, and it takes a special kind of brilliance (or sociopathic tendancies) that the average person doesn't have to break out of this mold.

Additionally: There is a really great book by Lakoff and Johnson that argues that you cannot uphold the seperation of mind and body called Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.