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

by Elise Loehnen

Lerner writes, “The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining ‘respectability’ and ‘deviance’ according to women’s sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women.”

Those in the first camp, who believe the body must be controlled, overruled, and dominated, attribute much of the body’s baseness to its “feminine” qualities. After all, physical matter (or mater, i.e., mother) represents the potential of life, the magic and sometimes chaos of creativity. Rather than recognizing that what runs through our bodies is sacred, holy, and even divine, people in this first camp are in battle with themselves, looking outside for approbation and approval. They desire to dominate nature, to control it, to sanitize and separate the human experience from that of other living creatures. You can see how this ideology manifests from the macro to the micro, and still does today: man in dominance over nature, man in dominance over woman, and then within each of us—male or female—the desire to subject the body and its “feeling” states to the primacy of the mind and its thinking states. This is patriarchal thinking, and it doesn’t affect only women. Men, too, are victimized by this need to repress and suppress emotions and creative chaos.

The Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine might sound like woo-woo concepts, and it’s easy to conflate these ideas with being a man and a woman, as we have long been socially conditioned to embrace the energy associated with our assigned sex, but they have nothing to do with gender and everything to do with consciousness. We know what toxic masculinity looks and feels like—it’s the dominance and aggression that define our current culture. But when balanced, or “Divine,” the masculine is the energy of direction, order, and truth, the container that gives creation (a feminine quality) structure. Balanced, or “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. When we tip into either extreme, we veer off course and become stuck, addicted, scared. Right now, the resurgent energy of the feminine is required to bring our culture’s toxic masculinity into balance: It’s an energy dedicated to nurturing and tending what’s already been created, rather than extracting more and more.

According to biological anthropologist Lee Gettler, testosterone drops in new fathers, in part, they believe, so that oxytocin can soar. Men are biologically designed to be right there with us, hunched over nappies and dodging vomit. Instead, we have bought into a cultural idea that women instinctively must know best. Keeping men at arm’s distance is called maternal gatekeeping: that you must rush in because your husband is too doltish to change the diaper just right. In upholding this concept, we fulfill a false prophecy, guarding gender roles defined by culture, not nature.

point. Schulte went straight to it: “To be a human and to be alive is painful because we’re not really quite sure what we’re doing here. I know a lot of people have faith, and I think that’s wonderful, but we don’t know what comes next. The only thing we know is that it’s brief, and that we will die, and there is real pain to that. Busyness does cover some of that up.”

It’s like that well-worn concept that when someone breaks your heart it doesn’t destroy your capacity to love, it tears and builds the muscle so that you can then love stronger. When we resist what’s hard, when we are not fully in it, swirling and splashing around in the muck and the mess, we grow tight and small. We atrophy. For many of us, work is the antidote to the pain of life, the clearest path to self-evolution. We can’t be until we do.

But rather than spending all our energy on the doing out there, where we can never be done, we need to reserve some power for ourselves. We need rest so that we can apply ourselves to what matters to us, whatever that may be in the moment.

women usually reserve their undiagnosed envy for other women (as opposed to men), and especially those who are most like them. I feel this tendency acutely. Men who are doing big things in the world don’t trigger much emotion in me, but women are something else entirely, particularly women who occupy the same lanes I swim in.

Envy is often an arrow, pointing me to a breadcrumb on my own path, my future self, tapping me on the shoulder to say, “Pay attention to this.”

But in that moment, sitting with my arms crossed in judgment, I didn’t realize it was envy, coaxing me to step forward into my own dream. I was looking for every reason to criticize Tina rather than owning that feeling. Thinking back, it’s wild how blindsided I was by it.

In Untamed, Glennon writes: “Strong, happy, confident girls and women are breaking our culture’s implicit rule that girls should be self-doubting, reserved, timid, and apologetic. Girls who are bold enough to break those rules irk us. Their brazen defiance and refusal to follow directions make us want to put them back into their cage.” Our response to women and girls like this is to say things like “I just don’t like her.” It’s reflexive, unconscious, and incredibly vague, yet this is the de facto blanket statement we reach for to cover any woman who makes us feel uncomfortable with her bigness.

It wouldn’t feel so shameful if we could acknowledge and then air our envy out, if we could openly discuss what it brings up for us and then move on: “Ugh, I get it, she’s perfect and it makes me feel inadequate,” rather than, say, “That woman is the fucking worst.”

Gottlieb’s contention that envy disguised as judgment or rejection is a signpost for what we want. “So why can’t we identify—and then lift the hood on—our envy?” I asked. “Why is this so hard?” “Women struggle to acknowledge what they want,” she offered, “in part, because we’ve been conditioned to believe we don’t actually have wants.” Pow.

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. We recognize that wanting is dangerous, for ourselves and for each other, because when we disparage the other, it just might be because we want what she has. But when that longing is not reacted to but studied, it can be a lighthouse for your heart’s desire, shedding its rays on purpose and potential.

But when a woman acts big and we look to make her small, is it because we don’t like her, as we typically suggest? Or is it that we don’t like what she’s doing?

Instead of denying envy, we need to let it be our compass, let it land on those tender spots that point us toward the fulfillment of desire.

Finding perverse joy in watching each other fail, fall short, or be taken down a notch has a name. It’s schadenfreude, originally a German word that translates to “damage, harm” and “joy,” and means, colloquially, the delight we feel when bad things happen to other people.

Women’s choices not to speak or rather to dissociate themselves from what they themselves are saying can be deliberate or unwitting, consciously chosen or enacted through the body by narrowing the passages connecting the voice with breath and sound, by keeping the voice high in the head so that it does not carry the depths of human feelings or a mix of feelings and thoughts, or by changing voice, shifting to a more guarded or impersonal register or key. Choices not to speak are often well-intentioned and psychologically protective, motivated by concerns for people’s feelings and by an awareness of the realities of one’s own and others’ lives. And yet by restricting their voices, many women are wittingly or unwittingly perpetuating a male-voiced civilization and an order of living that is founded on disconnection from women. This disconnection Gilligan writes of is required to exist and thrive within patriarchy.

Gilligan explains that girls perceive danger in separation, in standing out from the crowd at the threat of exclusion. She writes, “The danger men describe in their stories of intimacy is a danger of entrapment or betrayal, being caught in a smothering relationship or humiliated by rejection and deceit. In contrast, the danger women portray in their tales of achievement is a danger of isolation, a fear that in standing out or being set apart by success, they will be left alone.” 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.

As Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider write in Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, “We can believe in a woman’s equality and yet, as women, feel guilt when we put our own needs forward or uncomfortable when other women do the same.”

As they point out, children come to insert the word don’t before critical words: For boys, it becomes I don’t care; for girls, it is I don’t know.

It’s predicated on a mother watching the girl she cherishes achieve something outside the mother’s reasonable ambition and live a life that wasn’t necessarily available to her.

Carl Jung said that nothing is more influential in a child’s life than the unlived life of the parent, an idea that Jungian psychotherapist Marion Woodman expands on as a component in many mother-daughter relationships, writing: “The mother…is often the one who gave up her hopes for her own creative life, and in her disappointment projected her unlived life onto her child. Spoken or unspoken, the grief and frustration of that sacrifice weigh heavily on the child. The mother felt locked in a cage of marriage, the bars of the cage being not her husband, whom she had already realized was not Prince Charming, but the child in her womb. The guilt that the child feels for the crime it never committed has its etiology then in the very fact of its existence.”

It was only when I became a mother myself that I realized that my mother’s sometimes obvious frustration with parenthood was nothing personal, just a function of the time and place we find ourselves in now.[*4]

She would need permission to tell the truth about her envy and resentment of her daughter.

Instead, the Buddha taught people how to walk the line between self-expression and attachment—how to know who you are and what you want without clinging to a certain outcome.

provenance. In the interim, you must do your best to express your gifts—you must put yourself out there.

You know you’ve been expanded on a subconscious level when you have an aha moment where you go, “Oh…oh my gosh, if they accomplished that, then I can do that too.”

When we shame another woman for dreaming and acting “big,” for daring to think she’s something special, we oppress our own potential. May we stop reflexively condemning, so that we may birth what we want for ourselves as well.

We must be likable and unthreatening enough to ensure everyone else feels comfortable—our power must be cushioned. Who, me? Don’t look at me. It’s an impossible balancing act to parent any young girl to be both strong and universally adored. Strength is partnered with respect; love, with sweetness, obedience, and care. Girls who excel must walk a high wire and still risk banishment and exclusion.

In one frequently cited study, 156 subjects assessed two fictional CEOs—one man, one woman—who both talked a lot, or a little. Participants expected the powerful man to speak up and rewarded him for dominating the conversation, whereas the woman received backlash for talking more than others. Both the male and female respondents judged the female CEO harshly. What’s especially troubling, to me, is that women know they’ll be penalized for the performance of confidence. When I ask friends if they think they have a confidence problem, they assure me they don’t: They acknowledge that they know they’re better prepared and more competent than most of the men with whom they work; they just know better than to show it.

Reticence to express confidence is borne out in research by Christine Exley and Judd Kessler, who found that even when women knew they performed equally to men, they were loath to profess it: We have been trained not

We are so afraid of being perceived as prideful that it limits our full self-expression—and sometimes any self-expression at all. Malkin works with his patients to get them to the middle point between echoism and narcissism in a zone called “healthy narcissism.” Feeling pride is an essential and important component of healthy self-esteem: It suggests that you recognize your gifts, your specialness, your uniqueness, and that you feel empowered to use your talents in the world.

But that’s also the point: Our talents are significant insomuch as they touch other people and serve their needs. It’s a call and response. We all are, whether we like it or not, one collective. The ego as a point of distinction is essential, because it’s what makes us a global community of humans, not an efficient hive of honeybees. Women are primed to serve the whole—it’s how we’re conditioned. Our ultimate survival as a species revolves around the imperative that women bring their gifts to bear—in every sphere. And that they’re echoed back to us.

Ego becomes an issue when it surges toward primacy and dominance rather than communion and co-creation.

This faith in our own specialness is critical so that we stay attuned to doing and being better. It’s essential for us to believe that we can improve the world, that we can overcome hurdles that often feel overwhelming.

It is perhaps one of the most foundational wounds of childhood if your parents, the first people you idolize and revere, do not see or celebrate your true self.

Carissa explained: “The less you need to be to the world, the more you can be to yourself.”

In her bestselling book Caste, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson talks about the science of wolf packs and our misunderstanding of what keeps the dogs together: She discovered that while the alpha gets the attention and acclaim, it’s the omega who functions as the group’s heartbeat, the most essential canine, the most mourned when lost. This indicates to me that our obsession with the ones who stand in front means we miss the gifts of everyone else—we’re failing to recognize how the work gets done, who does it, and the essential role every one of us plays.

Everyone’s part is critical: We cannot afford for women to stand back. We need their leadership, their wisdom, their understanding of the whole.

Glennon writes in Untamed, “The word humility derives from the Latin word humilitas, which means ‘of the earth.’ To be humble is to be grounded in knowing who you are. It implies the responsibility to become what you were meant to become—to grow, to reach, to fully bloom as high and strong and grand as you were created to. It is not honorable for a tree to wilt and shrink and disappear. It’s not honorable for a woman to, either.” Humility doesn’t mean hiding in the side curtains, it just means you should keep your feet planted while you reach for the

1992, Marianne Williamson presaged Oprah’s advice to Glennon Doyle, writing: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world…. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

It can’t be done for us by our mothers, fathers, sisters, or brothers. I cannot liberate you; you cannot liberate me. But if you liberate yourself, perhaps I can model my freedom after yours. We can show each other what it would look like to live in a state of loving ourselves, celebrating ourselves, living in service of purpose, and delivering on our own unique prophecy, fully bringing ourselves to the world in pride.

Research has also linked internalized weight bias to prediabetes and “a conglomerate of cardiovascular disease risk factors that strongly increases the risk for diabetes, heart disease and stroke.” That is, what we think of as health risks associated with being fat may in fact be health risks of experiencing discrimination and internalizing stigma.

Marion Woodman, in her Jungian framework, believed that anorexics want to be light, to be untethered to matter, to feel empty and clean, as though they’ve been scrubbed inside with a bottle brush. On the other side, those who eat compulsively want to be buried alive, to concretize themselves in mass. Both are avenues to numbing, to dissociation—and at the same time a battle for control.

The choice to use food as defense is sometimes the outcome of trauma, from experiencing the body and world as unsafe.

He talks about the impact of trauma on digestion, how when we eat compulsively and quickly, enzymes don’t have time to break down our food and we swallow air, leaving us bloated and uncomfortable.

All good feminists understand that objectifying our bodies is another symptom of an oppressive culture that pushes us to control ourselves, our appetites, and our weight. We recognize that the admonishment to maintain smallness is fucked up; we really do believe we should take up as much room as we want. Yet we can’t seem to break the cycle. If we stop controlling ourselves, how will this patriarchal structure ensure we stay controlled?

I hate that I am letting down so many women when I cannot embrace my body at any size.” Body positivity feels like an edict: Loving our bodies is not something that comes naturally to many of us, even if we are deemed to have a “good” one. Our bodies are containers for so many of our traumas, many of which are unprocessed, many of which we try to keep locked inside.