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

by Elise Loehnen

the word sin in Hebrew (chatta’ah) and Greek (hamartia) translates to “missing the mark.” I love this concept when it speaks to integrity, or wholeness, or the idea of achieving full humanness: when we think of “the mark” as an alignment with oneself and, theoretically, the divine. If sins are intended as an internal compass, this directional guide is for our own use—nobody can or should decipher it on our behalf.

We are not pawns in a battle between the dark and the light. We are human, a bridge between matter and spirit; we can find the middle and hold the line.

With the advent of monotheism, we also see the creation of an all-powerful, male deity: For the first time, there was no goddess, either as primary divinity or a consort.

The council marked gospels that ran counter to their mission as heretical (the etymology of which is, tellingly, “to choose”), and ordered them destroyed (including the Gospel of Mary Magdalene,

Jesus himself did not write. The Bible is the product of a centuries-long game of Telephone, edited by men according to their preferences.

there are those who believe we are spiritual beings having a physical experience, that the divine is in everything, including our naughty bits, and that the denseness of the body and its pleasures is what keeps us from floating away, back into the energetic force field from which we came and to which we will return. This camp holds there’s no place to “go” in the afterlife and nothing to overcome; being in the body, with its manifold pleasures, in this 3-D world, is the main event.

Did this just describe my spiritual beliefs idk

What his commitment earned, he felt, was a house that was well tended and children who appreciated the sacrifices made on our behalf.

My mother could have been “somebody.” Perhaps our presence reminded her she was not: She was just another invisible cog in the wheel of raising the next generation.

I can help my children chart their course and acknowledging that their future is largely out of my control. It’s a nebulous uncertainty where no amount of effort or resources can engineer an outcome. But that doesn’t stop me—or any of the women I know—from trying.

the reason the pay gap is so stark is that so many of the jobs of “care” in this country (teaching, nursing and home healthcare, food services, housekeeping, and childcare) pay the worst.

Our response to women and girls like this is to say things like “I just don’t like her.” It’s reflexive, unconscious, and incredibly vague, yet this is the de facto blanket statement we reach for to cover any woman who makes us feel uncomfortable with her bigness.

likability offers security within the patriarchy—it means you offer no disturbance to the status quo, you are just getting along with everyone and everything, exactly as it is.

We need pride in our unique talents to deliver them to the world; when we feel shame in developing our powers, they die on the vine.

We are tired of this lie, this idea that our bodies are machines equivalent to cars, unaffected by hormones, history, and other complex systems we still don’t understand.

The Seven Deadly Sins are about toeholds of control—if we can excise all our human impulses, we will be safe, if not divine. Gluttony, like lust, lands in the body as its battleground; under its banner we commit acts of war against ourselves, judging ourselves as good or bad, too much or just right.

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.

I made a budget with three tabs—Current, Ideal, and 5-Year Plan.

suppressing our innate sensuality also means blocking our vitality.

The church succeeded in making sex a dirty thing and marked women as the instigators of this filth; it was in this era that women were understood to be the root cause of human depravity.

“Traditionally, men/boys are expected to be sexually active, dominant, and the initiator of (hetero)sexual activity, whereas women/girls are expected to be sexually reactive, submissive, and passive. Moreover, traditionally men are granted more sexual freedom than women. As a consequence, men and women can be treated differently for the same sexual behaviors.

Our abstinence-minded approach to sex education means we leave children in the cold, with no pleasure map, no language to express desire, and little coaching around the subtleties of consent.

While women’s choices are policed, I’ve yet to hear the suggestion that men should be forced to pursue vasectomies until they can be responsible for the result of their seed.[*9] We’ve never contemplated it—because it’s never really been about abortion; it’s only ever been about corralling, controlling, delimiting, and policing women.

What might the world look like if its most popular religion abided by Mary’s gospel? And how might the lives of women be better for it? It’s time that we unyoke from the precepts of our culture’s translation of the Seven Deadly Sins, that we climb out of that sticky web so we can see ourselves for exactly who we are: perfectly human, already divine, on the road back to wholeness.