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.

I have to wonder if the emotional sediment of this is one of the reasons women today can be wary of each other and are often willing to watch each other get cut down: This trauma is in our DNA. I suspect this fear is one of the reasons we self-restrict. We continue to hold the line, enforce our own smallness, and struggle with the idea that we’ll be called out, put back in our rightful place, blamed.

She puts much of the blame on Martin Luther and what would eventually become the idea of the Protestant work ethic, that labor can be a salve for suffering, a form of penance.

Work has become a sprawl, something we do, and think about, all the time, instead of being relegated to the confines of an office or the outlines of a traditional workday. Through technology, our work pervades and invades every corner of our lives, zapping us with endless anxiety.

Our knowledge that it could be worse keeps many of us from putting words to the overwhelm and from fighting against it.

If you’re single or childless, your value in the capitalist market approaches that of a man—but socially, you’re perceived as broken or selfish. Pick your path.

Peace will come when we get into the river of life together, when we accept that we are all bound to each other, when we share the burdens—and beauty—of care, for a more balanced future.

I thought about how shameful it is for women to express desire, in all parts of our lives—and how many of us would rather clip the bud of our ambition than experience the humiliation of being exposed for thinking we’re worthy of adding something meaningful to the world.

What’s more, Gilligan’s research describes how boys shape their morality around being someone in the world, adhering to logical and legal codes, whereas girls are conditioned to see their morality as being in service to the world.

Carl Jung said that nothing is more influential in a child’s life than the unlived life of the parent,

I believe that as we become better at voicing what’s in our hearts, we will become more conscious of the way we monitor other women for expressing what’s in theirs.

When we shame another woman for dreaming and acting “big,” for daring to think she’s something special, we oppress our own potential.

“Self-confidence is gender-neutral, the consequences of appearing self-confident are not.”

In our desire to adulate only the most visible leaders, we often overlook the people who matter most in our lives. Aren’t they ourselves and our neighbors, the mayor, the teachers at our children’s school, the people who work alongside us? Whom would we miss the most: the person who collects the garbage from the curb, the person who harvests the summer crops, or the CEO down the street?

Lee Kaplan, the director of the Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital, has identified almost sixty varieties of obesity. And researchers from Cambridge have found more than two dozen genes where a single mutation guarantees obesity.

We also love any narrative around personal responsibility, preferring to damn those who don’t fit the parameters prescribed by society. And while we do describe obesity as an epidemic, we don’t treat those affected as if they’re victims of a chronic disease. We blame them for poor choices.

According to Daniel Lieberman, PhD, an exercise biologist and Harvard professor who wrote the tome Exercised, the average physical activity level (PAL, which is the total expenditure level divided by basic metabolic rate) of a hunter-gatherer was 1.9 for men and 1.8 for women; an American who sits at a desk all day is typically between 1.4 and 1.6.

A typical American guy, just north of five foot nine, weighs 200 pounds, up from 181 pounds in 2001; a typical postadolescent American woman, just shy of five foot four, weighs 171 pounds, up from 152. Meanwhile, the weight loss market in 2019 was north of $70 billion, up from $34.7 billion in 2001.

Jesus famously said, “It is easier for a camel to get through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the realm of heaven!” (Matthew 19:24).

Women, as sexual subjects, stating their lust feels foreign and shocking because it is. Too few of us know what it’s like to embody our own desire, and to do so with zero fucks given to what society thinks of us for it.

“We are primed to hear the anger of men as stirring, downright American, as our national lullaby, and primed to hear the sound of women demanding freedom as the screech of nails on our national chalkboard. That’s because women’s freedom would in fact circumscribe white male dominion.”

“We have inherited a language that served kings and powerful elites in domination societies. The masses, discouraged from developing awareness of their needs, have instead been educated to be docile and subservient to authority. Our culture implies that needs are negative and destructive; the word needy applied to a person suggests inadequacy or immaturity. When people express their needs, they are often labeled selfish.”

The worst-case scenario for many women, the reason we’re so loath to put on the boxing gloves, is relationship loss. According to Harriet Lerner, our biggest fear around self-expression and setting boundaries is that doing those things will mean we’ll get dumped.

Fear of losing our relationships is the nut of it for women: If we push, self-define, and assert ourselves overtly, will we still belong? Will someone stick with us if we prioritize our own needs and desires first? It’s terrifying to contemplate. And for many, it’s easier to hold those unexpressed needs inside, letting them ferment into internalized anger rather than outward dissent.

He continually points to women with “superautonomous self-sufficiency,” or an unwillingness to ask anything of anyone else, as well as “niceness” and its correlation with cancer, ALS, and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.

‘we are disturbed not by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens.’

We are only now beginning to understand that our interdependence—the strength of our connections to each other and the wider community—is perhaps the most critical linchpin of our survival and sanity.[*1]

To love requires that you will lose. But it is our one human imperative to wager it all, constantly. We must accept the prospect of grief and anguish in exchange for love. Too many of us attempt to keep both at bay, insisting that by avoiding the messiness of attachment we can control life and protect ourselves from loss.

We need to increase our tolerance for discomfort and hard emotions, to hold space for those who are mourning and struggling, to watch, allow, and learn.