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

by Elise Loehnen

When she teaches activism, she asks of her students: “Are you programmed? Or are you self-determined?” I hear her. It’s time for us to self-determine, to detach from the trap of goodness and unwind these patterns so we can create new ones. It’s time to stop perpetuating—and believing—“wrong and unsound things” and to teach—and walk—a path to inner truth instead.

Those in the first camp, who believe the body must be controlled, overruled, and dominated, attribute much of the body’s baseness to its “feminine” qualities. After all, physical matter (or mater, i.e., mother) represents the potential of life, the magic and sometimes chaos of creativity.

For her—as indeed for many of us—an endless to-do list was her form of therapy, the measure of her time, the record of her productivity, a way to suppress whatever else might have been fermenting below. When you don’t stop, you don’t have to feel.

The type of pain, the ache I experience when I slow down, when I pause from my frantic anti-slothness, brings empathy, understanding, wisdom. It hurts, yes, but it enables me to lean more heavily into moments of unencumbered joy, to fight for all that is wonderful in this world. If there is no yin to the yang, then we lack perspective and our range of feeling becomes limited, partially expressed, unfit for the vagaries of life.

It’s schadenfreude, originally a German word that translates to “damage, harm” and “joy,” and means, colloquially, the delight we feel when bad things happen to other people. It runs rampant in our culture, as it has across time. We want to see other people brought down to their appropriate size; we would rather feel superior to our peers than inferior.

We must emerge out of the contraction of the patriarchy. We must shake it out of our systems as a destiny. We can choose something different. While this transition is painful and hard, while we have all been wounded on some level by the journey, we belong to each other in these horizontal bands of society, as sisters. And together we can expand the conception and idea of what is possible for all of us, including generations to come.

In Lacy’s view, to make the impossible possible, to make all our wanting plausible, we must journey deep into our own minds to remove blocks—and then replace those blocks with concrete examples of people who represent our biggest dreams for ourselves. These people serve as our “expanders,” shedding light on a realizable path. It’s a process diametrically opposed to how so many of us have been conditioned to think: It’s her or me, there’s room for only one of us, scarcity, scarcity, scarcity. In Lacy’s world, it’s She has it, and so I can have it too.

but rarely do you hear a woman give voice to pride in herself for a singular achievement. There are always others to thank—all the people who got her there and are co-responsible for her achievements—instead.

I don’t think we minimize ourselves because we’re naturally afraid of pressure; I think it’s because we’ve been coached to lead with our worst qualities or to undermine ourselves through caveats: “This may be a stupid question, but…,” “I’m just wondering…,” “Sorry if you’ve thought of this before…,” “I could be wrong, but…” We also rush to point out all our potential shortcomings to others before they’re pointed out on our behalf.

“As children, many of us had to leave our true selves because it was not safe. Naturally, the child assumed an identity based on what it saw was ‘safe.’ ”

antifat bias has become a “dog whistle that allowed disdain and bigotry aimed at poor people and people of color to persist, uninterrupted and simply renamed.” It’s a mechanism for racism, sexism, and classism wrapped up as “healthism.”

Research has also linked internalized weight bias to prediabetes and “a conglomerate of cardiovascular disease risk factors that strongly increases the risk for diabetes, heart disease and stroke.” That is, what we think of as health risks associated with being fat may in fact be health risks of experiencing discrimination and internalizing stigma.

Many people who’ve been traumatized become aware of the anxiety that has accelerated their eating and denied them a full portion of pleasure,” he offers. The practice becomes a map for how to eat every meal: slowly, mindfully, while attending to what you feel—particularly what feels good.

Our bodies are containers for so many of our traumas, many of which are unprocessed, many of which we try to keep locked inside. As someone with a body that conforms, that sits smack dab in the middle of “normal” on the BMI chart, I still relate to Gay’s words, because it’s not about the scale. The body is just the means through which we project our own anguish.

We are all on our own, divorced from the tribe, fending for ourselves while plastering on our smiles because it’s too shameful to admit we’re terrified.

We need to stop wasting one of the only nonreplenishable sources—our time—trying to control the future and steer our attention back to this moment. We’re here, what do we need? As Kimmerer writes, “We’ve accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy. It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.” Belonging certainly, and a longing just to be.

As she underlined, objectifying women was and always has been culturally acceptable; showing them as drivers of their own lust, less so.

Women, as sexual subjects, stating their lust feels foreign and shocking because it is. Too few of us know what it’s like to embody our own desire, and to do so with zero fucks given to what society thinks of us for it.

“We are more comfortable talking about girls as victims of sexuality rather than agents of sexuality.” In

When we refuse to listen, to process and metabolize every icky or hard feeling we’ve shoved down, the experiences don’t evaporate. They metastasize. And what our bodies are trying to tell us becomes harder to parse, like a dialect that’s lost if not spoken. But revisiting the trauma can liberate. As psychotherapist Galit Atlas explains, “When our minds remember, our bodies are free to forget.”

Even our language condemns such women as ‘shrews,’ ‘witches,’ ‘bitches,’ ‘hags,’ ‘nags,’ ‘man-haters,’ and ‘castrators.’ They are unloving and unlovable. They are devoid of femininity…. It is an interesting sidelight that our language—created and codified by men—does not have one unflattering term to describe men who vent their anger at women.

According to Harriet Lerner, our biggest fear around self-expression and setting boundaries is that doing those things will mean we’ll get dumped. We are terrified to hold our ground—particularly women who find themselves in a more patriarchal relationship.

She interviewed 150 people with melanoma and found them all to be pleasers, with “type C personality” traits like being “cooperative and appeasing, unassertive, patient, unexpressive of negative emotions (particularly anger) and compliant with external authorities.” In short, unprocessed and sublimated anger is killing us.

Instead of “I am angry because they…,” he urges us to flip the script and say: “I am angry because I am needing….” This is not easy. As women, we have been trained to not overtly need anything—it is one thing to acknowledge needs exist and another to assert them confidently.

Action is more powerful when it comes from a place of love. We’d recognize that if we plumbed our emotions more—they’re more useful and usable once transformed.

Our anger can push us into discord, disharmony, hate, cycles of blaming and shaming and judgment. Or our anger can provoke change and establish new ways of being in the world through grace and peace.

As the saying goes, you can’t heal what you can’t feel. The feelings must be allowed to come up.