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

by Elise Loehnen

80 percent of sexually violent crimes against women are perpetrated by people we know and sometimes love.

rape is the most pointed expression of power and authority, the power structure of the patriarchy rests on the suppression of women: It relies on the patrolling of our purity, the controlling of our procreation, and the threat and success of sexual violence.

“Misogyny filters so granularly into action. Those men did not hate me, as a hungry person does not hate a refrigerator. They simply valued their own needs above mine. And I had seen that flash in their eyes when I refused them, as a hungry person might grow frustrated with a refrigerator that does not open.”

fantasy in which one is forced to have sex” is a creative way the mind solves “a pathogenic belief that one is not supposed to be sexual…. It is telling one’s conscience, family, and culture ‘It’s not my fault.’

Loud women are unstable, dangerous, dramatic, delusional, barking, insane.

It’s interesting that women’s rage is so threatening when we theoretically have so little power.

Nyx, feared by Zeus himself, was the goddess of night. She had many children, including Lyssa, the spirit of madness and rage, and the Maniae, who appropriately represented mania and insanity. And of course, there were the Furies, a.k.a. the Erinyes, possibly children of Nyx, who took vengeance on men. In the Aeneid, they were called Alecto (“endless anger”), Megaera (“jealous rage”), and Tisiphone (“vengeful destruction’). And let’s not forget the Gorgon, Medusa.

struggle to exist in discomfort without rushing to paper it over, to make everything OK. We are so eager for reassurance that we are worthy of love, that we are good. And for many of us, goodness has required obedience, compliance, softness, “femininity.” We are taught that we are nurturers, limited to the domain of caring; we are taught that our first instinct when stressed is “tend and befriend,” rather than “fight or flight.”

“You may think that anger is no longer there, but that’s not true; you are simply too tired to be angry.” We think we’re getting it out of our systems, but instead we are just breaking it down so that, like a muscle, it can build back stronger, still unresolved.

want our needs to be anticipated, even if unspoken, and our boundaries to be respected, even when not visible.

“superautonomous self-sufficiency,” or an unwillingness to ask anything of anyone else, as well as “niceness” and its correlation with cancer, ALS, and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. This “niceness” can be understood as an avoidance of conflict and suppression of anger.

unprocessed and sublimated anger is killing us.

By continuing to prioritize and empower a system that depends on the secondary status of women, by prioritizing our whiteness over our gender, we perpetuate our own submission. Women of color are much more clear-eyed about the ways the patriarchy holds white women in its thrall, in part by the continued promise of power.

We must prioritize the needs of those who are most marginalized, as a bottom-up movement and not top down.

Anger points us to what we care about deeply—our own dignity and autonomy;

requires opening ourselves to all of life. Absent its undertow, one could argue that we are only partially alive, trying to cherry-pick the parts of existence that appeal.

trinity of the Virgin (Creator), Mother (Preserver), and Crone (Destroyer)—is

top of that, grief is something for which we have little cultural tolerance. We want people to show action, to “move on,” to medicate, treat, or work through it—to put it away, not to wallow or get stuck. The underlying message seems to be that it’s best to prioritize the comfort of those who would rather not bear witness to your pain—people

Instead, grief for me continues to come as waves—out of nowhere, I’ll find myself plowed over with sadness. At other times, I startle, shocked at what feels like a still-fresh realization that Peter is dead and I’ll never speak to him again.

“There was a version of me that thought loving another person would somehow diminish the love I still felt for Aaron. A version of me that thought that if I was happy, I must not be sad anymore, and if I wasn’t sad anymore, then I guess I didn’t love Aaron as much as I said I did.”

science suggests that atrophy and underdevelopment are the right words, as boys are more sensitive, needy, attached than their sisters, not less.

“Little boys and little girls start off with similar psychological profiles. They are equally emotional, expressive, and dependent, equally desirous of physical affection. At the youngest ages, both boys and girls are more like a stereotypical girl. If any differences exist, little boys are, in fact, slightly more sensitive and expressive. They cry more easily, seem more easily frustrated, appear more upset when a caregiver leaves the room. Until the age of four or five, both boys and girls rest comfortably in what one researcher has called ‘the expressive-affiliative mode.’ Soon thereafter, studies indicate that girls are permitted to remain in that mode while boys are subtly—or forcibly—pushed out

While women officially overindexed on depression, men made up significant ground in substance abuse and personality disorders. This makes sense, as men are four times as likely to die of suicide and other deaths of despair.

We are in a crisis of toxic masculinity, and we must address what’s happening to drive boys and men to murder children. It’s clear that men have a problem, and it puts us all at risk.