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

by Elise Loehnen

In Greek, the word dīmon translated to a life energy that wouldn’t obey the rules—that part of ourselves that’s impossible to control—so Evagrius was not so much imagining literal, fire-breathing demonic beings as battling with his own natural inclination toward emotion or passion,

This is how history is made and then remade, how it seeds ideas about what’s natural, what’s right, and how it’s always been—at its essence, because some men said so.

The body is the mechanism by which we experience the world. We are supposed to use it as a means for understanding, transmuting, and bringing ourselves and our world into balance. We are not supposed to badger it into submission with our minds, in the same way we are not supposed to subvert and overwhelm nature. The body and nature are both metaphors for the feminine: We must allow it to emerge, to reinstate it in a place of respect if not reverence.

It may have been the yoke around our necks for eons, but it is actually not a woman’s job to make everyone else happy. It’s not our job to serve the needs of others at the expense of our own. It’s not our job to stifle and suffocate our own desires out of fear that we’ll offend or lose connection to those we most love.

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? It’s no mystery who has a greater impact on our collective health and well-being.

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.”