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

by Elise Loehnen

But I think it’s deeper, that 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.

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.

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.

The Seven Deadly Sins became a kind of CliffsNotes on how not to be. Easy to remember, they lend themselves to visual and allegorical representation. They are also unavoidable in daily life: To be alive is to engage with them. 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.

While the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments are concrete, the Seven Deadly Sins are amorphous, ripe for interpretation, which may have something to do with their continued potency. They are not about objective, tangible bad actions (you stole, you killed, you cheated); they are about human qualities where one crosses an imperceptible yet defining line (you are slutty, greedy, lazy!). And because they are subjective, they are easy to brandish like a whip.

Badness is in the eye of the beholder,

Because these values are subjective and arbitrary, it’s so easy to damn someone, to accuse them of falling short.[*1]

Centuries ago, the people mediating between supplicants and God were priests. Now, in our secular culture, we turn to parents, critics, partners, bosses, even strangers on Instagram. We are easy to shame, eager to prove our worthiness, to seek validation from some power outside of ourselves.

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

common sayings many of us heard as the chorus of childhood: You can sleep when you’re dead (sloth). Jealousy is the green-eyed monster (envy). Pride goeth before a fall (pride). Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels (gluttony). Money is the root of all evil (greed). Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere (lust). Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned (anger). There is a lot of stigma attached to each of these ideas, which are ingrained, specifically, in the minds of women.

We routinely stop ourselves from exulting in any moment of permissiveness because doing so feels like a transgression, as if a rubber band has been stretched and will snap back in our faces.

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.

This denial prevents us from crediting ourselves (pride), pleasuring ourselves (lust), feeding and securing ourselves (gluttony, greed), releasing our emotions and asserting our needs (anger), relaxing (sloth), and desiring…really anything at all (envy). This denial keeps us from celebrating abundance, personal accomplishment, and fulfillment.

“Otherization,” creating socially acceptable power distinctions, has been used broadly since—against Jews, Muslims, Black people. Women simply went first.

God made deals almost exclusively with men—and confirmed women’s role as property.[*4]

Genesis, the Bible’s creation story, is a retelling of a Sumerian myth from 2500 B.C. that includes the goddess (i.e., the Divine Mother), a tree, and a serpent.

In the original, the serpent, in its skin-shedding, represents death begetting new life, not evil, and there is no eviction from paradise. But in the Old Testament version many of us hold sacred (scholars believe Genesis was written between 950 and 500 B.C.), God the Father replaces the goddess as the lone creator, and a woman becomes the symbol of sin and the cause of man’s fall.

In this ancient Creation story, common to all Judeo-Christian cultures (about one-third of the world’s population today), women are not only disempowered but spiritually depraved.

While historians today assert that women were critical to early Christianity—as leaders, teachers, and believers—the early church not only minimized and erased this legacy but cast women as progenitors of sin, containers for moral turpitude.

The Bible is the product of a centuries-long game of Telephone, edited by men according to their preferences.

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.

The early church was fixated on the idea of an exclusively patrilineal lineage: Jesus came to earth from God in heaven, assembled an all-male team of disciples, and, upon his ascension, anointed them as his priests, end of story. That the church deemed the Gnostic Gospels (and their followers) heretical and then hunted them says it all about the church’s desire to assert itself as the sole authority, the mediator of God’s will, and the enforcer of behavior required for salvation.

The witch hunts targeted women (and some men) of all ages, as well as children, but the first hunted were the “crones,” the wise women, the elders, typically widows who refused to remarry or had no options to do so. These older women had long been the keepers of powerful traditions—they were the culture’s healers, prophets, and midwives; they initiated young girls into the rites of womanhood; they mentored mothers; and they carried intergenerational stories and wisdom. But beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century (dramatically peaking from 1560 to 1760), these women, too old to be seen as sexual objects, and possessing knowledge and skills the church viewed as threatening, were persecuted as witches.[*10]

We can see their rejection to this day: Our culture has little tolerance for or interest in women past their procreative prime, and certainly we have no reverence for them. While we have sanctified old men and propped them up as the ultimate authorities—the priests, lawmakers, judges—we have exiled their counterparts.

Those female friendships were specifically targeted by the witch hunts; when witches were tried, accused women were forced under torture to denounce each other.

The patriarchy has run its course. It is time to usher it out and replumb society’s structure with organizing principles that are more appropriate to this era. We must identify the patriarchy’s practices and tactics so we can pull them out by the roots and then investigate the holes they’ve left in our psyches, the way they’ve perverted some of our most natural instincts. Only then can we redress these wrongs.