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

by Elise Loehnen

The Bible is the product of a centuries-long game of Telephone, edited by men according to their preferences. This might sound silly and obvious, but when I realized that, I felt a door had been wrenched open in my mind. What has been lost? And what did we get wrong?

For her—as indeed for many of us—an endless to-do list was her form of therapy, the measure of her time, the record of her productivity, a way to suppress whatever else might have been fermenting below. When you don’t stop, you don’t have to feel.

What’s more confusing is how alone I feel swimming in this anxiety soup of parenthood. My husband doesn’t seem similarly anxious, and while I know my fellow “mom friends” feel this way too, we’re all so consumed by the needs of our own families that there’s not much left for us to be able to support each other’s angst.

This is a type of learned helplessness, born out of the idea that if Rob makes it onerous enough for me by needing a lot of direction, I’ll just do it myself. It works. The other night, I asked him to heat some tortillas and cut up an avocado while I finished dinner prep (turkey tacos). After he asked me for guidance on which avocado was ripest and how long he should heat the tortillas, I shooed him out of the kitchen.

researchers believe other modern crises like ADHD are at least partially sleep disorders. We all need rest.

A girl who is “full of herself” will have no friends.

“Echoists live by the rule: The less room I take up, the better. They are afraid of being a burden. And in our research, what we found is that the core defining feature was a fear of seeming narcissistic in any way.”

until the economy faltered, at which point President George W. Bush exhorted us to do our patriotic duty by heading to the malls, rather than signing up to fight. His call resonated with me. Twist writes, “Shopping was portrayed as an expression of patriotism, a way to show the terrorists that they could not destroy our economy, our consumerism, the American spirit, or the American way of life.” This work of patriotism was carried out by women: We spend more.[*6]

This is the perfect description of “himpathy,” a term coined by philosophy professor Kate Manne to describe the ways in which we prioritize the emotions, health, and happiness of men over their female victims. Himpathy happens all the time; it’s a reflex. As women, we are so conditioned to be selfless, caretaking, and “other-directed,” we fail to recognize this overreach of responsibility.

Our access to birth control, abortions, even the power to say “no” has become one of the hot-button issues in politics today, entirely limited to the domain of the female body. We continue to debate who “birth control” belongs to and whether it’s a woman’s right as a human to make decisions about her own body, or whether she continues to be property over which to be adjudicated, even at great risk to her health, employment, and

There is no greater lever for keeping women in poverty, in subservience, than to deny them the ability to determine their procreative future.

Yet men are absolved: there is no conversation about charging these would-be fathers with a crime as co-creators, victims of their own lust, or as co-terminators, eager to free themselves from responsibility and limitation.

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.

It is an interesting sidelight that our language—created and codified by men—does not have one unflattering term to describe men who vent their anger at women. Even such epithets as ‘bastard’ and ‘son of a bitch’ do not condemn the man but place the blame on a woman—his mother!”