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

by Elise Loehnen

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. This “niceness” can be understood as an avoidance of conflict and suppression of anger.

In short, unprocessed and sublimated anger is killing us.

Simmons writes, “Our culture refuses girls access to open conflict, and it forces their aggression into nonphysical, indirect, and covert forms. Girls use backbiting, exclusion, rumors, name-calling, and manipulation to inflict psychological pain on victimized targets.”

As journalist Amanda Ripley writes in High Conflict, “More than five thousand people have now participated in these Cyberball studies, across at least sixty-two countries. Some of these people had their brains scanned while they played. The scans show heightened brain activity in the same areas triggered by physical pain.” It hurts palpably to be left out.

As outsiders, they have a healthier relationship to anger; they understand how to transmute it into action in highly productive ways. Researchers at Clayton State University found this to be true. As professor Kristin Neff explains in Fierce Self-Compassion: “Black women were found to report lower levels of reactive anger in situations in which they were criticized, disrespected, or negatively evaluated compared to others. These findings were interpreted to demonstrate the maturity that develops from having to deal with racism and sexism on a daily basis; Black women are able to recognize the protective function of anger but are also more able to regulate it.”

Our resentment, frustration, and anger live in us. When our partners, our parents, our bosses, the system itself, refuse to absorb our wrath, to hear us, we don’t know where to put these bad feelings—and they must go somewhere. We shift into blaming and shaming. We become angry with ourselves and each other.

White women are wrapped up in so much self-consciousness it’s counterproductive, inhibiting our ability to be effective allies—or even allies at all. Rather than quietly doing the work—educating ourselves, changing our hiring practices, writing to Congress, speaking out when we witness microaggressions, showing up at rallies and protests, taking on Uncle Joe at Thanksgiving, getting behind community organizers, registering people to vote and driving them to the polls—we spend our energy on defensive moves, securing safety from criticism through virtue signaling on Instagram and car bumpers. This desire to always do and say the “right” thing with no real action to back it up is what earns the title of a performance.

But only so long as we do something and push past the need for constant validation. I understand this is hard: We are so well trained to seek approval as little girls.

efforts. We want our affirmation cookies, reassurance that we are good and, as a result, safe. We lack durability in the face of conflict.

It is my hope that the coming years clear the way for white women like myself to be sharper with our dissatisfaction, more clear about what a unified future looks like, and less tripped up in whether we are impeccable in our activism. Throwing off this idea of perfection will require grace for ourselves and each other, because we will mess up, but it feels imperative for this next phase of our collective advancement.

As she writes in Loving What Is: “They all began by realizing a truth so basic that it is usually invisible: the fact that (in the words of the Greek philosopher Epictetus) ‘we are disturbed not by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens.’

And who had the solution? Again, me. I realized that I could be right, or I could be free.” She’s talking about socks, yes—but she could be right, or she could be free.

Watching Sautee resist liberation was a powerful testament to how scary it can be to have agency and freedom, to be responsible for yourself. We often fight like hell to stay confined to a small, familiar cell, even as we simultaneously beat our wings against its restrictions.

was also angry with myself for spending all my energy building something that felt personal but at the end of the day was not mine. The most painful part was that I had wrapped up my value with my job—my success there was a testament to my goodness.

We must learn how to tend our own gardens, to plant seeds of peace rather than seeds of shame and blame.

According to the anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, the symbolism of black and white also reversed in more recent millennia. As she explains of the pre–Indo-European world, “Black did not mean death or the underworld; it was the color of fertility, the color of damp caves and rich soil, of the womb of the Goddess where life begins. White, on the other hand, was the color of death, of bones.”

When men refuse to metabolize this emotion, we must consume it for them.

This research holds for any type of grief, even if it’s “ambiguous loss,” the types of unresolved issues that are not well acknowledged by society, like miscarriage, divorce, dementia, abandonment, infertility, long-term singledom, or illness.

In past decades, women have frequently been encouraged to behave more like men: to grab and wield power, to rule. The suggestion is that we can take power and sanitize it with our gender, make it softer and more gentle, somehow less patriarchal. Though this instinct toward balance is problematic, I understand why it makes sense—our innate Divine Masculinity deserves its space. But the more urgent need is the reverse. We need men to embrace their Divine Feminine, to reconnect to compassion and care, to yield, and to move from the traits of toxic masculinity to a version that’s balanced. Doing this requires men to lay down a quest for control, power, and dominance and to allow their feelings to come up—all of them. This feels particularly critical when women are being asked to balance society by stepping into power; masculine power as it’s performed now, particularly at work, is not the right model.

As professor bell hooks explains in The Will to Change, “By supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed…. When the feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of ‘feelings,’ some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them.”

He cites the research of Constance Hammen and Stefanie Peters, who ran a study of college roommates across genders. They found that when women tell roommates they’re depressed, they’re met with nurturance and compassion; men, meanwhile, are met with social isolation and unkindness.

In The Will to Change she writes, “Mothers who ally themselves with patriarchy cannot love their sons rightly, for there will always come a moment when patriarchy will ask them to sacrifice their sons. Usually this moment comes in adolescence, when many caring and affectionate mothers stop giving their sons emotional nurturance for fear it will emasculate them. Unable to cope with the loss of emotional connection, boys internalize the pain and mask it with indifference or rage.” It’s a form of abandonment, an insidious and subtle trauma our culture rarely acknowledges.

In Mary’s gospel, Jesus is saying that sin is an invention of man, not an indictment from God—it’s what happens when we deviate from who we are at our root, our point of origin.

As part of this, we must resacralize the feminine and recognize that the death of the goddess, the demotion of Mary Magdalene, and the subjugation of Mother Earth are doing us no favors. This requires no religious belief, only a faith that we cannot rebalance the world until we reconcile the “Masculine” and its pursuit of truth, order, and direction with the “Feminine” and its tendencies toward creativity, nurturance, and care. Each of these energies is critical, in each of us, regardless of our stated gender, in all spheres of life.

We must reject the early patriarchal idea—an idea that still endures—that the feminine must be controlled and choked out and that the rights of all women must be limited to ensure the dominion of (white) men. In turn, men must let their feminine emerge and dull the edges of their masculine.