On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good

We are coached, above all, to prioritize our likability as the surest path to safety and survival.

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

There is no greater lever for keeping women in poverty, in subservience, than to deny them the ability to determine their procreative future.

How many of us are spending our good anger on what everyone else is doing wrong—the blaming and shaming—rather than figuring out how to bring peace and change, first to ourselves, then to the world?

Women who have succeeded too well at becoming visible have always been penalized vigilantly and forcefully, and turned into spectacles.

We are not pawns in a battle between the dark and the light. We are human, a bridge between matter and spirit; we can find the middle and hold the line. We can sense that we are on a seesaw that’s bending out of control and that unless each of us comes into balance we will struggle to survive.

I was trying to be good. I had always been trying to be good. I ran myself ragged; cared dutifully for my family, friends, and colleagues; punished my body so that it stayed a certain size; kept my temper in check. What would happen if I just…stopped?

We are so used to functioning in this structure that it’s only when we attempt to break free that we can feel just how tightly we’ve been restrained.

We can denounce religion and reject its beliefs at a literal level, but its traditions, these tenets of “good” and “bad,” are woven into the fabric of society. They don’t need our approval or subscription to hold us captive. They operate in us on a subconscious level.

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.

How many of us are compelled in our daily lives by what we think we should do? By what we have to do? In all this caretaking, we backburner our own needs, never lending them any heat, hoping, perhaps, that someone will notice our selflessness and reciprocate by taking care of us. This is often futile: It’s impossible not to feel resentful, to take that anger and turn it toward ourselves.

One study confirmed that women’s influence is so pegged to warmth and appearing caring and prosocial that the “performance plus confidence equals power and influence” formula that’s so effective for men blows up in women’s faces. The study’s author concludes: “Self-confidence is gender-neutral, the consequences of appearing self-confident are not.” Portraying confidence does not work for women, so telling women to simply be more confident is twisted.

Women are always deemed less essential, less important than men, even when these men are abusers.

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.

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.

One of Samantha’s best lines: “If I worried what every bitch in New York was saying about me, I’d never leave the house.” Too many of us continue to abide in that opinion prison.

They acknowledge that they know they’re better prepared and more competent than most of the men with whom they work; they just know better than to show it.

Its famous—and wildly wealthy—televangelists promise that “Wealth and Health” are God’s rewards to good people. If you don’t have either, it’s because of your own moral failing

In worrying about everything we do not want to be, in suppressing our instincts and impulses out of fear or shame, in attempting to be “good,” we’ve forgotten who we are—all special, all “divine” in our own individual ways. We’ve gone unconscious and, oddly, unnatural. We are so consumed with the doing—and the not doing—that we have forgotten how to be. 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.

Misogyny should not be understood as a monolithic, deep-seated psychological hatred of girls and women. Instead, it’s best conceptualized as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of patriarchy—a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately or distinctively hostile treatment because of their gender, among other factors.

anger stems from our overlooked needs; instead of determining which needs are going unmet, we immediately begin analyzing and judging.

We live on a globe of abundance, though we are spending down its resources fast, racking up ecological debt. If we were to halt the excess, the frenzy, and bring it into balance, there would be plenty for us all. We are laboring under the misapprehension that we will run dry—that if we do not shore up a year’s supply of toilet paper, we will be left foraging for leaves, and that if we don’t have pantries lined with canned food we’ll never crack open, we’ll starve. These are lies, a function of a market that mediates between us and supply. We need to stop wasting one of the only nonreplenishable sources—our time—trying to control the future and steer our attention back to this moment. We’re here, what do we need?

Speaking our truth, honoring our stories, saying what we feel and want, is a relatively new experience, and we’re still learning how to share and receive other women’s stories without judgment.

We are at the mercy of other people—obligated to prove our value and worth to them, while simultaneously perceiving everyone beside and behind us as a threat.

I would be lying if I didn’t say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’ At the time, that seemed like a fine idea, until I saw the payroll on the Internet and realized every man I was working with definitely didn’t worry about being ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.

She’s not concerned with fitting in or staying one with the group, a group defined by its reliance on not being all that. Her power doesn’t come from indirect sources: It’s based on herself, not the approval of others.

When you don't stop, you don't have to feel.

himpathy,” a term coined by philosophy professor Kate Manne to describe the ways in which we prioritize the emotions, health, and happiness of men over their female victims.

patriarchy’s dominance depends on the complicity and compliance of women and on the way we enforce these rules with each other, training our children to be obedient to this system as well. As they point out, children come to insert the word don’t before critical words: For boys, it becomes I don’t care; for girls, it is I don’t know.

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic…but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.