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

by Elise Loehnen

I let my anger rise to show me where I had betrayed myself. And, of course, it had started young: I had learned—through my parents and the culture at large—the fallacy that love is conditional. I had trained myself to believe that I didn’t deserve love unless I was doing for others, that my worth was tied to my output, my ability to service people’s needs, that focusing on what I wanted was selfish, an instinct that should be suppressed.

anger can sometimes be a mirage—it is often a secondary or reactionary emotion to sadness, fear, and shame.

rushing to blame, as we know, is a cop-out. It’s a type of violence that solves nothing.

understand when anger is running us rather than informing us. When it informs us, it is a drive shaft of compassion and care; when mined for its lessons, metabolized and transmuted, it is the energy that changes the world. When properly expressed, it cleanses, leaving the foundation for new growth and fresh starts, a revitalized postpatriarchal landscape.

While we think of grief as something that corresponds only to death, we experience small ego deaths all the time. Allowing sadness—feelings of disappointment, rejection, loss—is essential.

death and suffering come to everyone; her wealth is no protection. There is no reprieve; instead of rejecting this reality, it would benefit us all to contemplate its nature. We need to increase our tolerance for discomfort and hard emotions, to hold space for those who are mourning and struggling, to watch, allow, and learn.

“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.

Asserting power over others creates significant psychic burdens—in the moment, and for future generations to address. If we want to free ourselves from this system, the liberation of men can’t be an afterthought. Nor is it worth criticizing all of them for participating in a structure of which they’ve barely been conscious. None of us have known any other way. As more of us wake up to norms that drive society, we can begin to shift them.

It doesn’t feel good to be the oppressor, even if you’ve never been conscious of your exalted status or weaponized it in a way that causes harm.

Sadness is a gateway to feeling and to life—it must be reclaimed from the idea that it is weak or “womanly.” Only when sadness is embodied can men access their tenderness, a fuller experience of love, a more complete expression of themselves. The health of our culture requires this submission.

It is human to sometimes be sad. Women understand and allow this, and we must now bring sadness to all spheres. We must give sadness its rightful throne and accept its lessons. There is much to mourn, the grief must come: Women can lead us through this wasteland, to where a more balanced era awaits.