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

by Elise Loehnen

Montagu again: “Our biology does not decree that one sex shall rule over the other. What determines that sort of thing is tradition, culture.” Well, our tradition and culture have decreed that women are inferior in all ways: physically, spiritually, and morally.

emergence of monotheism; its demonization of the goddess and a maternal, nature-oriented worldview; and the rise of Christianity.

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.

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

power is something women are currently being coached to assume and then sanitize with our femininity—we

the word sin in Hebrew (chatta’ah) and Greek (hamartia) translates to “missing the mark.”

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

With the advent of monotheism, we also see the creation of an all-powerful, male deity: For the first time, there was no goddess, either as primary divinity or a consort.

The Bible is the product of a centuries-long game of Telephone, edited by men according to their preferences. This might sound silly and obvious, but when I realized that, I felt a door had been wrenched open in my mind. What has been lost? And what did we get wrong?

(The Magdalene wore her reputation as a whore until 1996, when the Catholic Church acknowledged Pope Gregory had made a mistake; in 2016, Pope Francis made Mary the “Apostle to the Apostles.” But the damage was done.)

Those who were deemed “other” were blamed for the outbreak, along with additional social ills like overpopulation, inflation, and food scarcity, which were escalating in Europe in the mid-sixteenth century:

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.

a balanced version of the world, masculine and feminine energy would be present in equal parts within each of us—and

subscribed to the now-outdated idea that criticism was the antidote to failure, that excellence could only be prompted by admonishment.

Women are more likely to do laundry (58 percent to 13 percent), prepare meals (51 percent to 17 percent), clean house (51 percent to 9 percent), grocery shop (45 percent to 18 percent), and wash dishes (42 percent to 19 percent). Both sexes are equally likely to pay routine bills. And then men take over when it comes to decisions about money (31 percent to 18 percent), keeping the car in good condition (69 percent to 12 percent), and performing yardwork (59 percent to 10 percent).

“For many women, the idea of coming home from work and being greeted at the door by a smiling, apron-clad husband actually feels disconcerting—even though the idea of a husband who makes dinner is very appealing. However, with a subtle shift—coming home to a husband who directs you to have a glass of wine while he finishes up dinner prep suddenly sounds quite sexy…. The direction—the assumption of the masculine aspect—is a subtle but essential necessity,”

We’re all well aware that there are more CEOs named John (and David) in the Fortune 500 than women with that title.

We must drop the ball and force others—men—to pick it up.

many years of work and research as a biological and social anthropologist have made it abundantly clear to me that from an evolutionary and biological standpoint, the female is more advanced and constitutionally more richly endowed than the male. It seemed to me important to make facts clear. Those are the provable facts. Women, as biological organisms, are superior to men. If anyone has any evidence to the contrary, let them state it. The scientific attitude of mind is not one of either belief or disbelief, but of a desire to discover what is and to state it, no matter what traditional beliefs may be challenged or outraged in the process.”

Jealousy is about fear and threat of loss, and there’s typically a reasonable target. It’s a word that gets a lot of use—jealousy feels natural and understandable, even respectable.

love will make you do crazy things!—we can barely tolerate the wash of shame that comes from envy. “I’m so envious” doesn’t really roll off the tongue. It sounds malevolent.

Because it requires us to own our wanting, envy is the fulcrum, or hinge, for all the other Deadly Sins: To voice desire, to want something, is the first expression of agency.

“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

“Is this envy coming out sideways? Is this envy that I’m too embarrassed to acknowledge?”

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.”

It’s an impossible balancing act to parent any young girl to be both strong and universally adored.

we never modify our descriptions of men by appending adjectives like strong or smart.)

“Self-confidence is gender-neutral, the consequences of appearing self-confident are not.”

fact, numerous studies have found that people who see themselves as better than average are happier, more sociable, and often more physically healthy than their humbler peers.

instinct to barricade oneself against reality is learned in childhood, typically planted by parents who are also narcissists and not capable of holding a mirror for their kids to behold themselves accurately.

What if instead of “Am I worthy?” we learned, “I give, and in turn, I receive”?

I believe the antidote to fear is faith.

In his 2021 book, Us, therapist Terry Real caveats against this as a blanket assessment, writing, “Research shows that about half of all people classed as narcissistic are driven by inward shame.

Despite the stats that suggest the reverse, in Jessica Nordell’s book The End of Bias, she reports that parents google “Is my daughter overweight?” at twice the rate that they search “Is my son overweight?” Chillingly, she also reports that parents search “Is my son gifted?” at two and a half times the rate that they search “Is my daughter gifted?”

We have fifty thousand storage facilities in America; as Twist pointed out in a conversation we had in 2019, we have hundreds of thousands of homeless people, yet we pay rent to put a roof over stuff we no longer want to live with.