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

by Elise Loehnen

The forms of behavior that characterize us as human beings are determined by the socialization process we undergo, the cultural conditioning in which we are molded, the customs by which we are all made. And there’s the rub, for we are the most educable of all the creatures on this earth…. Everything we come to be, to know, and to do as human beings we have to learn from other human beings. 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.

I’ve never dressed provocatively or like “I want it,” as it’s my job to patrol the borders of my own physical safety. I see myself as a vessel for male desire rather than the operator of my own body. Good women want to be seen as sensual, warm, and inviting of sex but not overtly interested.

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. In worrying about everything we do not want to be, in suppressing our instincts and impulses out of fear or shame, in attempting to be “good,” we’ve forgotten who we are—all special, all “divine” in our own individual ways. We’ve gone unconscious and, oddly, unnatural. We are so consumed with the doing—and the not doing—that we have forgotten how to be. 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 are giving away our power and accepting exhaustion, resentment, despair, and disconnection instead. We deny ourselves joy, our rightful inheritance.

The naturalist E. O. Wilson said about the problem of humanity: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” This idea reminds me of what one of my great spiritual teachers, Carissa Schumacher, says: “We have had much progress without evolution.” They both mean that we’ve created a world that’s changing at a speed beyond our ability to keep up. We’re trying to construct a new era of peace and equity from tired and worn-out materials, methods, and energy.