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

by Elise Loehnen

As Geneen Roth offers, “Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart. Spiritual hunger can never be solved on the physical level.” Instead of positivity, we need neutrality.

Freedom feels like the opportune word, for it suggests a path to peace. Perhaps the goal is really a point of truce or homeostasis with our bodies, where we can live as friends.

I believe women don’t participate in the market to the same extent as men because women feel it’s wrong to make money materialize without effort.

But too few of us have the resources to be in the market, or the foundational confidence or willingness to engage. It seems as if it will never be the first instinct of women to conjure money by doing…nothing. For us, wealth is grounded in the material, not a magical illusion attached to no output, talent, work.

While the desire for more has a masculine energy—the energy of conquering, of taking, of pillaging—women experience it differently. I don’t know many women in the West, at least, who feel as though they have enough: enough money, enough time, enough support, enough opportunity. And for the most part, this is true. We teeter on the edge, captive to the anxiety of insecurity, and worry that we may be incapable of ensuring we will get what we need.

And so we experience a whiplash of shame. First, it’s humiliating to give voice to what economic security would feel like—money is gross, base, not spiritual.

And then it’s humiliating to express desire for anything beyond basic needs when so many are living in extreme lack. How can I deserve more when I have more than others? We

Women have been programmed to believe money is like a pond, finite and boundaried, whereas men perceive it as a roaring and endless river.

We identify with Mother Earth—we know that everything has its end, which then feeds a new cycle of growth. This understanding is in direct contradiction to the market economy—to the right and up, where there’s always room for more wealth, more growth. In response to this masculine idea of an exponentiality, perhaps it’s incumbent on the feminine in each of us to hold the line, to retract, to turn our backs on the rabidity of incessant accrual.

To do this, I knew I needed to heal my relationship with money, to learn how to hold it without hoarding it, to spend easily but not rashly or guiltily, to steward it without clinging or attachment. I also wanted to continue to refine and remodel my relationship to the things in my life. I needed to figure out the difference between my wants and my needs.

Mother Teresa offered that when she needed something, she prayed, and her needs had always been met.

But what if we wrote our needs down, put them in a little glass bottle, and set them out to sea, trusting they would be received?

We need to stop wasting one of the only nonreplenishable sources—our time—trying to control the future and steer our attention back to this moment. We’re here, what do we need? As Kimmerer writes, “We’ve accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy. It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.” Belonging certainly, and a longing just to be.

passivity. It is too embarrassing, too unsafe, to blow apart social norms, to ask a guy out and be told no, to be mocked and derided for apparent desperation. Instead, we back-channel our desires, or dump them into diaries with flimsy locks, and then wait until we are picked—a process where our worth is then confirmed. This passivity is problematic. According to gender studies professor and psychologist Deborah Tolman, “Society’s dominant cultural construction of femininity encourages girls and women to be desirable but not desiring.”

While women are not called out, the email is clearly gendered. “Do not cause distraction.” What qualifies? It’s like being told that having your period in the ocean will inspire a shark attack—the presence of your body is not safe, and it’s your duty to figure out how to make it so. It’s a brilliant trick, this foisting of over-responsibility onto girls and women.

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.

Therapist Wendy Maltz describes herself as a “patchwork survivor,” someone who has “experienced different kinds of sexual abuse at different times in his or her life.”

If rape is the most pointed expression of power and authority, the power structure of the patriarchy rests on the suppression of women: It relies on the patrolling of our purity, the controlling of our procreation, and the threat and success of sexual violence. It’s been this way for five millennia and continues to delimit our lives today. This alternately repressed and forced sexuality is the bedrock of our society—and with it comes the belief that men own women’s reproductive capacity.

Chivers observed in heterosexual women exists in part because we are inexpert in understanding, naming, and talking about our pleasure and desire. Our minds—what we state we find arousing—and the response in the body are not always connected, because it’s a path not well defined, much less well trodden and entrained.

And are so many heterosexual women still stuck in the space of objectification, intent on doing the pleasing with little regard for their own pleasure? What is it to want instead of merely responding to being wanted?

cultural conditioning dictates that women should respond sexually to a man’s intense longing: If he wants me, then I come alive. This idea of needing to be desired gets complicated for people who confuse the idea of being wanted with being wanted without consent.

Woodman writes, “Rape suggests being seized and carried off by a masculine enemy through brutal sexual assault; ravishment suggests being seized and carried off by a masculine lover through ecstasy and rapture. Rape has to do with power; ravishment has to do with love.” The ideas are close. When someone cannot restrain themselves from your body, when your presence encourages them to cede control, that’s a form of power—nested in the safety of mutual desire. Their loss of control is a bid to liberate you to exult in your pleasure too. Rape has everything to do with power too—it’s just one-sided and has nothing to do with pleasure or love.

He asserts that you can’t let go, and can’t surrender to the chaos of pleasure, when you don’t feel safe.

he writes, “Excitement is generated by the mind, a mind that endows images and sensations with just the right meaning to create pleasure. When it comes to sexual arousal, psychology makes use of biology, not the other way around.”

Bader makes the brilliant connection that our fantasies don’t necessarily invoke what we like or what we want—they are mental stimulation, not reality—but do illustrate what’s required to feel safe enough to get turned on. In his view, many women who fantasize about being dominated might be culturally programmed with the idea that they are “too much.” In a fantasy, if they are being bossed, there is no way they can be accused of overpowering the other.

you worry you’re overwhelming, it makes sense you’d want reassurance that you can be easily overwhelmed.

The reader is engaged in a literary pursuit that’s ostensibly about love—and then suddenly everyone is having sex.

it suggests fantasy is a map to feeling safe within our sexuality, a path to reclaim our lust and sexual agency, to short-circuit our inhibitions—many of which are cultural—in order to get aroused.

Plus, if we’ve learned anything from mythology and religion, it’s that you can’t go up until you go down. Jesus descended before he ascended; so did Dante, Odysseus, Aeneas. The Divine Feminine, the Black Goddess, waits for us below, willing us to liberate her from the clamp of patriarchal control.

She has many faces and just as many names; she resides in us all. She guards the underworld and she ushers in new life—marking the entrance to the void, the cave, the womb, and the tomb. These are essential passages, the structure of all of life. It is no mistake that orgasms are called le petit mort, “the little death.” When we release, we go somewhere—then resurrect anew.

The age we are entering is not matriarchal or patriarchal but balanced, an age where these essential energies are meted out and honored appropriately.

juxtaposed to Serena Williams in the 2018 US Open final, when she openly fought with umpire Carlos Ramos.

When women are restrained from expressing anger, it gets sublimated and repressed. Or we turn it on ourselves and each other. Harriet Lerner laments, “You know, really educated college women say things today, like ‘I believe in equality, but I’m not a feminist because I’m not one of those angry women.’ ”

As British historian Mary Beard explains in Women and Power, “There are only two main exceptions in the classical world to [the] abomination of women’s public speaking. First, women are allowed to speak out as victims and as martyrs, usually to preface their own death…. The second exception is more familiar. Occasionally women could legitimately rise up to speak—to defend their homes, their children, their husbands or the interests of other women.”

If we follow the breadcrumbs established by Beard and other historians of our more ancient history, it’s easy to see fear of women’s anger as fear of the long-repressed goddess. Until all but extinguished by the patriarchy in the Indo-European world, the goddess represented both creation and destruction, the latter making way for new life.

Meanwhile, in mythological systems, the goddess—who went by many names—represented the full cycle of life.[*6] Only later did goddesses come to represent distinct emotions, like anger.

And let’s not forget the Gorgon, Medusa. Anthropologist Marija Gimbutas explains that before Medusa became a monster slain by Perseus (her face, encircled by live snakes, could turn man to stone), she represented one-half of the goddess. The symbolism of the snakes is no accident. While Medusa became a monster—or, as Beard points out, a popular meme for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, with Trump posed as Perseus—she was originally so much more.

Angry women are unacceptable in the public sphere, of course, unless they are used as a shield to protect patriarchal men, or any system of power and oppression.[*7]

Traister writes that “Mama Grizzlies,” prominent in all points of history, “were permissioned to cast themselves as patriotic moms on steroids, some bizarro-world embodiment of female empowerment, despite the fact (or, more precisely, because of the fact) that what they were advocating was a return to traditionalist roles for women and reduced government investment in nonwhite people.”

We are so eager for reassurance that we are worthy of love, that we are good. And for many of us, goodness has required obedience, compliance, softness, “femininity.” We are taught that we are nurturers, limited to the domain of caring; we are taught that our first instinct when stressed is “tend and befriend,” rather than “fight or flight.”

The late Marshall Rosenberg, famous for creating and training people in “nonviolent communication,” was a master negotiator, dispatched to save crumbling marriages and flailing peace deals. He spent a lot of time working with parties in high-conflict situations, helping each side state their needs. The goal of resolution is not compromise, per Rosenberg, it’s satisfaction, which requires feeling heard. Not listened to, but heard.

In his tradition, there are two types—one that is fiery and hot and red, and one that is frozen and icy. The former, the fastest to damage ourselves and our relationships, happens in five stages: (1) impatience, (2) irritation, (3) tantrum, (4) anger, and (5) rage, which left unchecked destroys all it touches: “It takes one hundred years to grow a forest, but a fire can burn it down in two hours.”

Vietnamese monk Thích Nhât Hanh suggests that venting only inflames anger. He writes, “You may think that anger is no longer there, but that’s not true; you are simply too tired to be angry.” We think we’re getting it out of our systems, but instead we are just breaking it down so that, like a muscle, it can build back stronger, still unresolved.

I’m guessing all women can relate to Brooke: We want our needs to be anticipated, even if unspoken, and our boundaries to be respected, even when not visible. When this frustration erupts into outright anger, it’s too late.

John Gottman, the founder of the “Love Lab” at the University of Washington with fellow researcher Sybil Carrère, observed couples and was able to predict—with 94 percent accuracy—who was destined for divorce, primarily through evidence of “the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” namely (1) criticism, (2) defensiveness, (3) contempt, and (4) stonewalling.

We spent the first day with the Gottmans building up our relationships: shared dreams, priorities, appreciation sessions, fondest memories, plans for increasing time spent and intimacy when we returned to our regularly scheduled lives.

And then day 2 rolled around, when the Gottmans sent us into war. This is easy to do. Ask a couple to pick the scab off a typical, intransigent argument and watch faces flush red fast.

makes sense to me that we’re bad at conflict. Fighting is shameful—particularly for women, where there are no cultural accolades for expression, just easy deprecations of us as scolds, nags, old ladies, and bitches.

(When I interviewed psychologist Adam Grant, he offered that one of the best moves we can make as parents is to ensure that our children watch us resolve conflict—a revelation that felt so counter to my desire for a “nothing-to-see-here” existence.) I didn’t grow up understanding that conflict is both healthy and necessary for functioning relationships.

Being assertive is almost opposite to how many women are programmed to function in relationships, which is typically more as master manipulators. Many of us learn young how to maneuver to get what we want, while making it someone else’s idea. This skill set is one of the functions of “traditional femininity.”