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

by Elise Loehnen

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.

Well, 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.

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 fixated on an authority “out there,” we’re missing the miracles inside, all the moments that illuminate our connection to something bigger within ourselves.

We deny ourselves joy, our rightful inheritance. Meanwhile, the world needs us, just as we are. The saddest part is that in accepting the restrictions of the Seven Deadly Sins—subconsciously or not—we’ve trained ourselves to separate our true nature (our first nature, the essence of who we are) from how we act in the world. We sever ourselves from the deepest parts of our souls, the pulse of life that feels right, resonant, and, perhaps not ironically, a truer definition of good. We’ve become disconnected from our intuition, that inner knowing that many would identify as our connection to the divine. We have been led to believe that something primal and essential, our relationship to the universal force—God, nature, true self, whatever you want to call it—must be forced through the prism of an interpreter. And so we go there for approval, rather than trusting in ourselves.

Women and children conquered in conflict and taken as slaves, servants, and concubines were the first property of the patriarchy: Men practiced their dominance on them and learned its possibilities. This became the foundation of slavery, the economic engine for many cultures. Over time, the oppression of women came to seem natural, normal, the way it had always been. “Otherization,” creating socially acceptable power distinctions, has been used broadly since—against Jews, Muslims, Black people. Women simply went first.

Under extreme torture, women betrayed each other—friends turned in friends, daughters their mothers. We came to learn that glancing contact can be dangerous; it’s best to keep to your own. I have to wonder if the emotional sediment of this is one of the reasons women today can be wary of each other and are often willing to watch each other get cut down: This trauma is in our DNA. I suspect this fear is one of the reasons we self-restrict. We continue to hold the line, enforce our own smallness, and struggle with the idea that we’ll be called out, put back in our rightful place, blamed.

And you should do more, we’re told, because through the grace of work, you’ll climb a mountain built from your talent and then be able to look back and survey the summation of your life, your worth.

I know there are many, many women who do not have the support I do. But the comparative pain scale is part of the problem we find ourselves in: Our knowledge that it could be worse keeps many of us from putting words to the overwhelm and from fighting against it.