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

by Elise Loehnen

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.

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.

There is a deeper, more real me. I keep her largely hidden, mediate her through these filters, make sure she remains in check. I always believed it was dangerous to let her out. But now I’ve come to understand that it’s more dangerous to keep her bound: If I don’t unshackle her from these oppressive ideas of goodness, that part of her will slowly asphyxiate and I will never know what it will feel like to live fully as myself—not diminished, not bound, not scared.[*2]

We are so fixated on an authority “out there,” we’re missing the miracles inside, all the moments that illuminate our connection to something bigger within ourselves.

We have been led to believe that something primal and essential, our relationship to the universal force—God, nature, true self, whatever you want to call it—must be forced through the prism of an interpreter.

And for those who think that there is more (heaven, an afterlife, reincarnation, the beyond), fixating on proving ourselves worthy of it prevents us from recognizing that maybe this is the thing, and this is the place.