On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

by Elise Loehnen

Every one of us is conditioned and caught in a system that we cannot see—but its effects are suffocating and deadening. We are so used to functioning in this structure that it’s only when we attempt to break free that we can feel just how tightly we’ve been restrained.

The Bible is the product of a centuries-long game of Telephone, edited by men according to their preferences. This might sound silly and obvious, but when I realized that, I felt a door had been wrenched open in my mind. What has been lost? And what did we get wrong?

This is how history is made and then remade, how it seeds ideas about what’s natural, what’s right, and how it’s always been—at its essence, because some men said so.

Balanced, or “Divine,” femininity is creativity, nurturance, and care, the energy of bringing things into being. It also represents the ability to hold many things at once without jumping into action. Toxic femininity is chaos and overwhelm, emotional disturbance and despair.

this approach fits a common worldview: the belief that being kind to ourselves is the gateway drug to indolence, that we will become lazy or self-indulgent unless we propel ourselves forward through hate and judgment.

The early promise of technology was to improve efficiency to liberate us from constant toil. In reality, it’s done the opposite. The idea of fallow time, creative time, time for sitting and thinking or for visiting with an office mate suggests that you’re not maximizing your yield, that there’s room to give or do more.

Perhaps I find so much comfort in career because it’s easier to demonstrate value there relative to contribution. With children, effort can’t guarantee a good outcome.

Denying us space and stillness is the most pernicious way those at the top of the patriarchy keep their feet on our necks.

of our mothers abided by the cultural dictate that caring for us was their primary destiny. Rejecting this as too small of an ambition for our own lives feels ungrateful at best.

I believe that as we become better at voicing what’s in our hearts, we will become more conscious of the way we monitor other women for expressing what’s in theirs. Wanting things for ourselves is an essential act of individuation.

We have these limitations in part, she explained to me, because we’ve been conditioned to think that satisfaction, abundance, safety, and security aren’t possible. If you’ve never seen it, you can’t believe it.

The idea that in the meritocracy of America talent naturally rises trained us into passivity. If you build it, they will come; if you’ve got it, you’ll be found.

Malkin explained to me, “Echoists live by the rule: The less room I take up, the better. They are afraid of being a burden. And in our research, what we found is that the core defining feature was a fear of seeming narcissistic in any way

In short, we will do almost anything to avoid embracing the reality of who we are, if only because getting still, looking inward, and sitting with ourselves is so much harder than letting others do the defining for us.

Fat-phobia is the last bastion of acceptable bias, disguised in the morality of health.

The classification of greed as a Deadly Sin became a very useful exhortation for getting wealthy citizens to give the church money; a lack of generosity came to be the sin’s most pronounced dimension, not the accumulation of wealth.

Bezos’s ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, who earned half of her and her ex-husband’s Amazon equity at the time of their 2019 split. She has already managed to give away a reported 18 percent of her fortune, noting that she will be writing checks to worthy institutions until her safe is empty. Meanwhile, her ex-husband gave away 1 percent of his wealth during the same time span, added $130 billion to his pocket during the pandemic, and is flying penis-shaped jets to space.

We expect men to provide and we commend their professional success; meanwhile, we expect women to give.

Perhaps it’s having lived through 9/11, the Great Recession, and COVID, but my panic response to any assault on the American economy is to assume I’ll lose everything if I don’t in turn spend everything to keep the market going. Women have been programmed to believe the thrumming economy is our responsibility, not the responsibility of policy makers in D.C.

I believe women don’t participate in the market to the same extent as men because women feel it’s wrong to make money materialize without effort. If we view money as a balancing agent, as finite, boundaried, exchanged for goods or employment, the idea of passive income feels sinful.

Dependence on a spouse for money is terrifying, and this dependence is the root of the patriarchy’s power.

These factors, and others, ensure that women rarely feel the luxury of security that comes from self-determination. Our value is full of contingencies. We are used to not only taking less but taking it with the message that earning it requires good behavior, staying in line, doing our parts. Only then can we justify the paycheck, the allowance, the social aid. We should be grateful. We’d best not fuck it up.

(The art of negotiating requires the temerity to sit in uncomfortable silence, a difficult practice for everyone, but especially for women, who are often taught to ensure everyone is happy and at ease.)

straight women don’t know what they want because they’ve been told they shouldn’t have any sexual wants at all. Our desire is off the charts simply because we haven’t been taught to map it.

It is ironic, of course, that chastity has historically been held up as the surest path to God—denying the body means you barely live at all. To avoid the body is a disavowal of the beauty of our humanness, the creative matter of life, and arguably the reason we’re here: to experience the world through our senses, to be fully in ourselves.

Righteous indignation changes the world. It is the spine of social change, the force of progress. When women are restrained from expressing anger, it gets sublimated and repressed. Or we turn it on ourselves and each other.

There is no realm, private or public, where women and girls get to work with their anger. We’ve been trained to make other people comfortable. We’ve been directed toward passivity and its implied dependency and victimhood. We’ve been instructed to suppress our natural aggression, or we’ve been told we shouldn’t have any at all. Because we cultivate no appropriate channels, this aggression finds its way out sideways.

Rosenberg puts words like should and have to in the bucket of deferential, “life-alienating communication,” arguing that as soon as we begin to identify how we feel and what we need, we become much harder to control and oppress. How many of us are compelled in our daily lives by what we think we should do? By what we have to do? In all this caretaking, we backburner our own needs, never lending them any heat, hoping, perhaps, that someone will notice our selflessness and reciprocate by taking care of us. This is often futile: It’s impossible not to feel resentful, to take that anger and turn it toward ourselves.

Fear of losing our relationships is the nut of it for women: If we push, self-define, and assert ourselves overtly, will we still belong? Will someone stick with us if we prioritize our own needs and desires first? It’s terrifying to contemplate. And for many, it’s easier to hold those unexpressed needs inside, letting them ferment into internalized anger rather than outward dissent.

We struggle to move forward because we spend too much time defending our “goodness,” stuck in the binary that if you’re not impeccable in your behavior—across the arc of time—then you must be bad. And badness, of course, means you’re undeserving of love; you’ll be cast out of your community, canceled by the culture.

We must prioritize the needs of those who are most marginalized, as a bottom-up movement and not top down. This can’t be about white women protecting their status—and then reaching out a hand. It will require our exile from the system itself, a fresh vantage point, a chance to build back anew. We will need to stop clutching at this structure and recognize that our fear keeps us bound, not safe, and that what we all need is equity within a society that is balanced and humane.

We often fight like hell to stay confined to a small, familiar cell, even as we simultaneously beat our wings against its restrictions.

I had trained myself to believe that I didn’t deserve love unless I was doing for others, that my worth was tied to my output, my ability to service people’s needs, that focusing on what I wanted was selfish, an instinct that should be suppressed. The little girl in me, whose needs for space, stillness, love without stipulations had not been appropriately honored or addressed: She was pissed.

grief is something for which we have little cultural tolerance. We want people to show action, to “move on,” to medicate, treat, or work through it—to put it away, not to wallow or get stuck. The underlying message seems to be that it’s best to prioritize the comfort of those who would rather not bear witness to your pain—people who don’t want to contemplate how someone can be there one day and gone the next, or even that emotions are hard, requiring feeling and processing.

I’ve never found it surprising that most of the great mediums and intuitives are women, able and willing to access information that doesn’t abide by the structure we culturally validate.

There is a surrender in faith that offers relief from the oppressive idea that we should have it all figured out, that there is no magic at play in the universe, only knowable facts.

When I survey our beautiful and damaged world, I can’t find many women to blame for its destruction.

In a heterosexual marriage, women typically do the job of processing their own feelings, as well as a second shift processing the feelings of their husbands, so their husbands do not have to explore their own emotions.

We discourage our boys from developing the capacity to metabolize their emotions and then stereotype them as being less equipped.

Trauma is what happens to you, certainly, but it’s also what you never receive.