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

by Elise Loehnen

if you feel like you’re good enough, you’ll be safe from judgment, loved.”

We all struggle to be known, to express the truest, most tender parts of ourselves, to feel safe enough to bring our gifts to bear. We wonder: Who am I? What do I want and need? How do I find my purpose and serve? Our greatest imperatives are to belong, to love and be loved in return.

Indeed, educability is our species’ trait. And that is why to be human is to be in danger, for we can easily be taught many wrong and unsound things.

our tradition and culture have decreed that women are inferior in all ways: physically, spiritually, and morally. This social mythology has kept us desperate to prove our basic goodness and worthiness.

Women—the instigator for the fall of men—are at a notable disadvantage as a result: We are compelled to prove our virtue, our moral perfection. But we will never be able to prove our virtue, as the word itself is out of reach for women: Its etymology is Latin (vir), for man.

culture is contagious: We pass it on to each other like a virus. It permeates everything. No one wholly invents themselves. Culture is whispered into us, transmitted through almost every interaction.

The sins became the perfect mechanism through which the church could maintain power and control and could pressure the public to repent continually and stay permanently on their knees.

We have been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.

When we overlimit ourselves, we become complicit in denying ourselves a full existence. We force ourselves to lead narrow lives. We fear crossing a line we can’t see. We don’t want to be perceived as wanting too much, or being too much; we equate “self-control” with worthiness.

We are so consumed with the doing—and the not doing—that we have forgotten how to be.

The naturalist E. O. Wilson said about the problem of humanity: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

Carissa Schumacher, says: “We have had much progress without evolution.”

we’ve created a world that’s changing at a speed beyond our ability to keep up. We’re trying to construct a new era of peace and equity from tired and worn-out materials, methods, and energy. But we cannot get to where we need to go by using the same old ideas. We must open our eyes to the ways in which old stories and outdated science imprison us, and to the f...

We too often forget that balance is the goal—fulfillment and restraint, eating and excreting, “light” and “dark,” “good” and “bad,” masculine and feminine. Many of these are false binaries.

Perfect goodness, as an absolute state, is not achievable; to be alive requires participation in some harm—after all, we must kill plants and animals to sustain life.

In its early years, Christianity was a small, fledgling, widely persecuted cult. It had no formal center or official documents, only “gospels”[*6]—individual recountings of Jesus’s teachings and experiences—recorded long after his crucifixion. Preached and proselytized, the gospels were passed on by mouth and ear, and then written down and copied by scribes for generations, with varying and unknown accuracy. Original versions—if there even were any—did not survive.

Which of the gospels—there were many more than the four contained in today’s New Testament—were to be ordained as “orthodox,” or “right,” and which were “wrong”? The decision came down to preference for a specific narrative. The gospels deemed “right” confirmed a male apostolic tradition and the central role of a church. The council marked gospels that ran counter to their mission as heretical (the etymology of which is, tellingly, “to choose”), and ordered them destroyed (including the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which recounts Christ’s teachings after his resurrection).

Later that century, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, complete with an all-male apostolic tradition carried forward by the “first apostle,” Peter.

The irony, of course, is that if you go back to Jesus’s teachings, an all-male apostolic tradition was never the point—nor was an organized religion. And Jesus himself did not write. The Bible is the product of a centuries-long game of Telephone, edited by men according to their preferences.

While each piece is different, the consistent theme of Gnosticism is that the experience of the divine is personal and direct, mediated only between you and God. There’s no priest, no physical church.

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.

My mom did not know how to play, and it would never occur to her to relax, or even to try. There was always something in her hands. For her—as indeed for many of us—an endless to-do list was her form of therapy, the measure of her time, the record of her productivity, a way to suppress whatever else might have been fermenting below. When you don’t stop, you don’t have to feel.

I find a similar compulsive satisfaction in cleaning the kitchen, wiping down every surface, being alone with skillets and soap bubbles. Putting everything in its right place is its own kind of meditation.

If we were always going, we would never get stuck. If we contributed—had important jobs—then we could anchor ourselves to some bigger idea of belonging, of security.

the belief that being kind to ourselves is the gateway drug to indolence, that we will become lazy or self-indulgent unless we propel ourselves forward through hate and judgment.

Throwing herself into this work proved the value of her time outside of being a mother, a title for which she did not have much reverence or respect—nor, it should be said, did our culture. My mother could have been “somebody.” Perhaps our presence reminded her she was not: She was just another invisible cog in the wheel of raising the next generation.

As Headlee writes, “We have been deluded by the forces of economics and religion to believe that the purpose of life is hard work.”

Early Protestants believed that grace, which would ensure salvation, came from hard and diligent work. Economist Max Weber credits this idea as being the foundation of capitalism. A timecard-punching “working class,” supervised by salaried, managerial overlords, defined early capitalism, but these days almost all of us participate in an economy that measures us by output.

The early promise of technology was to improve efficiency to liberate us from constant toil. In reality, it’s done the opposite. The idea of fallow time, creative time, time for sitting and thinking or for visiting with an office mate suggests that you’re not maximizing your yield, that there’s room to give or do more.

So many of us recognize that we toil in silly and fruitless ways—that in “making it” we make nothing at all. For in determining the value of our minutes, capitalism also determines our values. A CFO gets $300 an hour, a graphic designer’s talents may earn $50, and the enrichment of the minds of future generations through teaching guarantees…a nonlivable minimum wage.[*3]

Nobody can quantify what a “good mother” even looks like these days; most of us just swim in the shame of certainty that we wouldn’t qualify.

As economist Heather Boushey writes, “American businesses used to have a silent partner. This partner never showed up at a board meeting or made a demand, but was integral to profitability. That partner was the American Wife. She made sure the American Worker showed up for work well rested…in clean clothes…with a lunch box packed to the brim with cold-cut sandwiches, coffee, and a home-baked cookie…. This unspoken business contract is broken.”

tantra, Boehm said, is not really about sex; it’s about intimacy and the cultivation of sexual tension, because, over time, couples become too similar, too friendly.

One partner must be in their “masculine,” while the other must be in their “feminine”—both types of energy, receiving and directing, must be represented, regardless of the gender of the participants. It doesn’t matter who chooses which, but per Boehm, when it comes to good sex, one partner must “animate one end of the spectrum, while the other partner goes as far to the other end as possible.”

We’re too overwhelmed. We don’t have time to fight for our reproductive rights, for equal pay, for paid family leave and reasonable gun laws to keep our children safe. We don’t have time to expand. Denying us space and stillness is the most pernicious way those at the top of the patriarchy keep their feet on our necks.

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.”

In our culture, we conflate jealousy and envy, even though there’s a critical difference between the two words. Jealousy is not between two people. It requires a third. This might show up as someone in pursuit of the same date to the prom, or a sibling who gets more time and attention from a parent, or a co-worker who has a better relationship with the boss. Jealousy is about fear and threat of loss, and there’s typically a reasonable target.

Envy, on the other hand, is unsavory; we think of it as malicious and largely unconscious.[*2] It’s also intimate and one-to-one: Someone has something, or is doing something, that you would like for yourself.

Brené Brown explains in her book Atlas of the Heart that envy is typically armed with hostility and deprecation: “I want that, and I don’t want you to have it. I also want you to be pulled down and put down.”

“I always say to people, ‘Follow your envy. It tells you what you want,’ ” Gottlieb explained to me. “Instead of sitting there saying, ‘Oh, I wish I had what that person has’—and then denigrating them to make yourself feel better—say, ‘What is this telling me and how can I get it?’ ”

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. But it wasn’t until my conversation with Gottlieb that I started to acknowledge the truth of this to myself and realized how bad it makes me feel.

I would find myself telling my husband all the seemingly valid reasons I didn’t like someone, only to realize that I had, again, missed the point: Oh, she’s not pretentious, I’m envious that her grade schoolers are doing high school–level math and winning art fairs! Oh, she’s not a sellout, I’m envious that she’s achieving more than me in the world and is always on vacation! In romantic, far-flung locales! What. a. bitch.

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.”

“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.

Envy is reflexive—and because we’re so ill-equipped to understand it, we fail to identify what it is before it comes out of our mouths. Typically, envy comes out wrapped in cruelty and masked as opinion.

Anne Lamott describes a similar epiphany in Bird by Bird, as she finally began to process her seething envy toward another, more successful writer: “Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic…but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.”

‘Envy and jealousy are the private parts of the human soul.’ ” 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.

We’d rather nobody get the “thing” than feel like it’s out of our reach—even though the reality is that very few of us even want the same things. Or more markedly, we fail to see that life is not a zero-sum game; it’s not true that if one woman “wins” another must invariably lose.

We want to see other people brought down to their appropriate size; we would rather feel superior to our peers than inferior. We don’t want to see them die or anything, just put in their rightful place, right below us. (Interestingly, research suggests schadenfreude is more common in men, though that might mean it’s more easily expressed, as women likely feel ashamed about acknowledging it.)

We are conditioned to believe that selfishness is bad, immoral, wrong; that we must step back, serve through compliance. A symptom of this is that we ascribe any good fortune or success to something outside ourselves, as if it’s not our fault we’re successful, smart, attractive.