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

by Elise Loehnen

Even those who don’t believe in a larger spiritual or religious construct seem to agree that developing and making use of your unique gifts—finding and fulfilling your individual, true purpose—is the primary work and point of life. But we can’t focus on that when we are spending our mental, emotional, and spiritual capital contorting ourselves, pulling ourselves out of balance, and using an abundance of energy to punish ourselves for the very qualities that make us human.

This denial prevents us from crediting ourselves (pride), pleasuring ourselves (lust), feeding and securing ourselves (gluttony, greed), releasing our emotions and asserting our needs (anger), relaxing (sloth), and desiring…really anything at all (envy). This denial keeps us from celebrating abundance, personal accomplishment, and fulfillment.

fixating on proving ourselves worthy of it prevents us from recognizing that maybe this is the thing, and this is the place. There is no need to pay for passage through the pearly gates with asceticism because we are already there.

The path to connection is balance, the middle: being aware of our wants and needs and acknowledging, modulating, and meeting them while being conscious of the wants and needs of others.

We need to process the ways in which the legacy of “goodness,” defined as purity and abnegation, continues to both limit and torment us. Until we learn how to give ourselves and each other grace, we’ll struggle to dismantle the parts of society that are toxic and to do the work of building it back anew.

“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.

In a balanced version of the world, masculine and feminine energy would be present in equal parts within each of us—and therefore would be present equally in the world.

This work requires rest, self-care, and support. It requires boundaries and letting go of perfection, or any expectation that pulls us away from what absolutely needs to get done—and distracts us from what we feel called to do.

This push into perpetual action, this coached fear of sloth—or more practically, the idea that we don’t deserve rest—has made us frantic, exhausted, depleted, depressed.

The real promise is peace. We need to recognize we’re confusing peace with security, believing that by ensuring the latter through unyielding effort we will arrive at the former. This is a fallacy.

Gilligan asserts that to achieve full women’s rights, which we still haven’t done, we must enable “women to consider it moral to care not only for others but for themselves.” This means we must begin to prioritize and assert our own wants and needs, to give them a voice, to let others hear our desires.