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

by Elise Loehnen

This “niceness” can be understood as an avoidance of conflict and suppression of anger.

unprocessed and sublimated anger is killing us.

Research suggests that Black girls are more comfortable with conflict, that the insidiousness of “nice girl” programming targets those who are most likely to be closest to power.

but anger turned inward is no salve either.

We want to be heard—not to hear that we’ve also been weapons of oppression. That fact feels intolerable—and it abrades our desire to be seen as good. We alternately internalize and offload this shame.

White women, in particular, self-flagellate, prostrate ourselves, and resign from jobs at any suggestion of wrongness or badness. We turn our venom on each other and lick wounds, rather than confront our feelings, take empathic accountability, or figure out the most effective path forward.

We aim for perfection, shuddering at the moments when we’ve said the wrong thing, missed an opportunity, put our foot in our mouth. When this happens, many women (especially white women) get scared—and we stop engaging. 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.

Dolly Chugh, author of The Person You Mean to Be, instead of gunning to be perfect in our goodness, we should aim for “good enough.”

White women are wrapped up in so much self-consciousness it’s counterproductive, inhibiting our ability to be effective allies—or even allies at all.

This desire to always do and say the “right” thing with no real action to back it up is what earns the title of a performance.

Moral identity is a measure of whether I care about being a good person, not whether I am a good person…. Most of us want to feel like good people.

We lack durability in the face of conflict. We must reparent ourselves for difficult conversations and learn the skills now that we were not taught as kids.

Part of evolution is allowing our humanity to emerge without rushing to stuff it down. We need to resist letting stories about who we’re supposed to be—good, pliant, obliging—define us. We must do the work of defining ourselves first. For those of us who feel buried under layers of cultural expectations and programming, anger can be a guiding light, a means of showing us what and where our boundaries are.

Rosenberg believes that we cannot express ourselves and listen to others until we become conscious of what we need.

Instead of “I am angry because they…,” he urges us to flip the script and say: “I am angry because I am needing….”

As Brittney Cooper writes in Eloquent Rage, “I have too much feminist shit to do to spend my time hating white women. Any time a white woman says something wrong in the public sphere these days, there is an army of Black feminist writers at the ready with think pieces that can snatch her wig and have her picking her face up off the floor months later. Going after white women online will get you lots of clicks and likes. But you’ll feel exhausted at the end and, often, white women’s attitudes won’t have changed one iota.”

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’d recognize that if we plumbed our emotions more—they’re more useful and usable once transformed. Anger points us to what we care about deeply—our own dignity and autonomy; it clarifies what matters and the cost of suppressing our own needs.

Anger well used, anger understood, becomes righteous indignation. This indignation transforms irritation into just action. It fuels the grace from which we can serve the world.

I realized that I could be right, or I could be free.”

anger can sometimes be a mirage—it is often a secondary or reactionary emotion to sadness, fear, and shame.

Leaning into honesty requires facing our fears of relational loss. It requires relinquishing the desire to please. It requires advocating for our own interests and needs, without apology.

“emotional liberation” means we recognize we are not responsible for other people’s feelings and we don’t make them responsible for how we feel either.

Denying sadness hurts women, but the consequence of sadness’s exclusion is particularly dire when it comes to men, both in the experiencing of their own lives and in collateral damage that affects our entire culture. When men refuse to metabolize this emotion, we must consume it for them.

Sadness is the most existential of all emotions—it is the death of connection—and its only cure is grief.

This disconnection is the trauma of feeling unseen, unlovable, unsafe as yourself—it’s the trauma of being forced to leave your identity to don the armor of society’s dictates.

Too many of us function as the prefrontal cortex for our children, letting our kids outsource their self-regulation to us, because it’s so hard to watch them struggle, even when struggling, as we know, is how we learn and grow.

We have been made complicit in a culture that we did not choose, in the same way that we didn’t choose the factors of our birth—the tone of our skin, our gender, our sexuality, our place of birth, our class. The divisiveness, denial, rejection, and rage that we’re seeing in our culture right now seems to be a reflexive response to our guilt with no name. We don’t know where to put it.

With space, stillness, and sacred pause, I began to recognize how cultural distortions were showing up in my own life and my own body. I found the room to see the crevasse between who I really was and how I had been performing myself in the outside world. I thought a lot about that breathless, overwhelmed girl inside me, suffocating from the strictures of a society that insisted I prove my good-enough-ness ritually.

I now see pride, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, sloth, envy, and even sadness not as sinful but as neutral cues. It’s society that has turned these innate human impulses into the makings of morality.

we must look inside for the directions, and we already have everything we need. The “ascension,” which we’ll all undertake, isn’t a joyride up to heaven but an internal journey back to our true selves.

Or my favorite, “Foolish Wisdom,” cautions us not to focus on fixing other people when we have plenty to refine within ourselves;