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

by Elise Loehnen

we are better than the worst thing we’ve done, that no one deserves to be someone else’s executioner.

We all struggle to be known, to express the truest, most tender parts of ourselves, to feel safe enough to bring our gifts to bear. We wonder: Who am I? What do I want and need? How do I find my purpose and serve? Our greatest imperatives are to belong, to love and be loved in return.

Indeed, educability is our species’ trait. And that is why to be human is to be in danger, for we can easily be taught many wrong and unsound things.

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.

“Our biology does not decree that one sex shall rule over the other. What determines that sort of thing is tradition, culture.”

The devaluation of the feminine can be traced to the emergence of monotheism; its demonization of the goddess and a maternal, nature-oriented worldview; and the rise of Christianity.

Women—the instigator for the fall of men—are at a notable disadvantage as a result: We are compelled to prove our virtue, our moral perfection. But we will never be able to prove our virtue, as the word itself is out of reach for women: Its etymology is Latin (vir), for man.

the Seven Deadly Sins. The attempt to avoid these sins corrals women and diminishes the potential fullness of our lives. These sins are woven into society and our concepts of selfhood in profound ways.

After all, culture is contagious: We pass it on to each other like a virus.

The sins became the perfect mechanism through which the church could maintain power and control and could pressure the public to repent continually and stay permanently on their knees.

We have been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.

When we overlimit ourselves, we become complicit in denying ourselves a full existence. We force ourselves to lead narrow lives. We fear crossing a line we can’t see. We don’t want to be perceived as wanting too much, or being too much; we equate “self-control” with worthiness.

We are so consumed with the doing—and the not doing—that we have forgotten how to be.

developing and making use of your unique gifts—finding and fulfilling your individual, true purpose—is the primary work and point of life.

Life is hard, full of pain, suffering, death, decay; it’s also beautiful, magical, renewing, and meaningful, replete with bright sparks of wonder and transcendent joy.

One of the mechanisms of the patriarchy was to force adherence to a vertical family structure. Because strong, even primary bonds between women had persisted over time in communal-living cultures, the push toward vertical family structures was intended to shift women from interdependence among each other to dependence on men.

The Bible is the product of a centuries-long game of Telephone, edited by men according to their preferences.

That the church deemed the Gnostic Gospels (and their followers) heretical and then hunted them says it all about the church’s desire to assert itself as the sole authority, the mediator of God’s will, and the enforcer of behavior required for salvation.

When Pope Gregory preached about the Seven Deadly Sins for the first time, he assigned these vices to Mary Magdalene and branded her a whore, conflating Mary Magdalene with the “sinful woman,” the presumed prostitute who appears in Luke 7 and anoints Jesus’s feet with oil. In that commingling, Pope Gregory made Mary the embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Women had always traded information, support, friendship—they did life together.[*12] Those female friendships were specifically targeted by the witch hunts; when witches were tried, accused women were forced under torture to denounce each other.

It’s hard to believe we would willingly collaborate to enforce a system that oppresses us. But so much of this is beyond our conscious awareness.

We know what toxic masculinity looks and feels like—it’s the dominance and aggression that define our current culture. But when balanced, or “Divine,” the masculine is the energy of direction, order, and truth, the container that gives creation (a feminine quality) structure. 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.

My husband does not share my (irrational) perspective, I suspect, simply because as a man he’s immune from the programming that he should be proving his worthiness by doing more. He feels no compulsion to make all his time have redeemable value. For him, once he’s done his day job and the boys are asleep, it is enough.

While envy is a gateway for the other sins, it also has the honor of being the one that, unlike gluttony, greed, or lust, offers zero sustained pleasure. Envy tests our tolerance for watching other people get what they want—and reminds us of what we’ve been too afraid to pursue.

“I always say to people, ‘Follow your envy. It tells you what you want,’ ” Gottlieb explained to me. “Instead of sitting there saying, ‘Oh, I wish I had what that person has’—and then denigrating them to make yourself feel better—say, ‘What is this telling me and how can I get it?’ ”

“Strong, happy, confident girls and women are breaking our culture’s implicit rule that girls should be self-doubting, reserved, timid, and apologetic. Girls who are bold enough to break those rules irk us. Their brazen defiance and refusal to follow directions make us want to put them back into their cage.”

it is actually not a woman’s job to make everyone else happy.

the Buddha taught people how to walk the line between self-expression and attachment—how to know who you are and what you want without clinging to a certain outcome.

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.

I love Lacy’s checklist and the concept: expansion in lieu of envy, a reclamation and re-languaging around this essential need, and then a way of using each other to get bigger and bigger. This support and abundance is the model of a sisterhood.

When I ask friends if they think they have a confidence problem, they assure me they don’t: They acknowledge that they know they’re better prepared and more competent than most of the men with whom they work; they just know better than to show it.

“Self-confidence is gender-neutral, the consequences of appearing self-confident are not.”

Feeling pride is an essential and important component of healthy self-esteem: It suggests that you recognize your gifts, your specialness, your uniqueness, and that you feel empowered to use your talents in the world.

“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.’ ”

What if we each gave to ourselves first? What if we learned to love ourselves before turning to love others?

Being among the sisters provides a visible manifestation of what a community can become when its members understand and share their gifts.”

She discovered that while the alpha gets the attention and acclaim, it’s the omega who functions as the group’s heartbeat, the most essential canine, the most mourned when lost. This indicates to me that our obsession with the ones who stand in front means we miss the gifts of everyone else—we’re failing to recognize how the work gets done, who does it, and the essential role every one of us plays.

They would each get the same annual allowance, to spend as they pleased, without censure or commentary. To earn it, they weighed themselves every January and needed to be within five pounds of their thirty-year-old baseline.

What the actual fuck is this body policing nonsense?

The liberal person’s free and open attitude contrasts with the greedy person’s preoccupation with possessions and tightfisted grip on money as ‘mine.’ ” So wealth is OK, so long as you are only its steward and not its jailer.

The women I know are deeply ambivalent about money: We’re attracted to its promise of security and power and repelled by the inequities it perpetuates.

The sheer quantity of stuff in my color-coordinated closet made me feel comfortable, safe, affluent.

“Shopping was portrayed as an expression of patriotism, a way to show the terrorists that they could not destroy our economy, our consumerism, the American spirit, or the American way of life.”

For men, greed and ambition are good—or if not a virtue exactly, then expected—respected and admired.

That is what the economy needs—sufficiency for all of us, for everyone. Because our society does not want to provide a safety net, it is on each of us to provide it for ourselves.

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

I thought I wanted to be rescued until I realized that I did not—that dependency would only feed my insecurity and that I needed to stand on my own two feet.

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.

Jesus believed in sexual union—and never condemned sex as sinful.

What a profound sentiment, this idea that guilt is an expression of power and control. It suggests there is something we could do—if we just knew what it was!—rather than recognizing our only option is to let it be, to allow. I wonder if a desire for control, the belief that control is possible, is why so many of us—men in particular—do not permit our own sadness to emerge.

Many of my friends now refuse to engage with the world in the 2019 way, and they are thriving in their scaled-back, less compulsively busy realities.

LOL - I feel like this is a very privileged point of view, not sure that most people are able to “scale-back” like this