On Our Best Behavior — Top 25 Takeaways

On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen is a must-read. Period. And not just for women.

My mind is still reeling from the “brief history of the patriarchy” and all of the many insidious ways that the seven deadly sins are weaponized to oppress and suppress women, even for those of us who are not at all religious. (Yes, I know that all people suffer under the patriarchy, but my focus right now is on women)

After much procrastination, last week while sitting under a palapa on the beach in Mexico, I finished this book. I knew from reading the first 10 pages that it was going to be life altering and I wasn’t ready to do the work. It was just as powerful as I expected and I’m now questionning everything.

As a result, I’ve struggled with the best approach to summarize and share my top takeaways based on everything I highlighted while I was reading. At the same time, I’m attempting to internalize ways to effectively deprogram myself to live a better and more fulfilling life of my own choosing, not based on what is expected,or demanded, of me.

This isn’t perfect, and that’s ok. It’s a start.

1. “Perfect goodness, as an absolute state, is not achievable.” “Goodness — virtue, belonging — cannot be claimed. It must be granted by some authority.” “We (women) have been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile have been trained for power.” “We are compelled to prove our virtue, our moral perfection.” I am so sick and tired of the arbitrary and oppressing good girl / bad girl cliché. Human nature is complex and cannot be simply classified as good or bad. More importantly there’s no being, or group of beings, with the power and authority to grant this. This conjures up images of Glinda the ‘good’ witch in a pink, sparkly gown, smiling benevolently as she waves her magic wand. Glinda isn’t real, nor is this so-called authority.
2. “Our tradition and culture have decreed that women are inferior in all ways: physically, spiritually, and morally. The social mythology has kept us desparate to prove our goodness and basic worthiness.” What would happen if we stopped believing in the ‘social mythology” just as we one day we stopped believing in the various pagan gods and goddesses? There is a fictional reboot of the Percy Jackson series on Disney+, which is where fantastical fiction belongs.
3. “The patriarchal training shows up when we enforce different standards for ourselves (women) than we do for men.” The author talks about ways in which we women subconsciously perpetuate patriarchy along with our own oppression, by enforcing the standards on other women. We have become our own oppressors. When we judge rather than celebrate women and their success, we reinforce the patriarchy. When we penalize women for expressing anger, we reinforce the patriarchy. When we insist that women must be thin and adhere to a specific societal body image, disguising our judgement as being concerned about ‘health’, ’we reinforce the patriarchy.
4. “We must be likable and unthreatening enough to ensure everyone else feels comfortable.” “We are coached, above all, to prioritize our likability as the surest path to safety and survival.” This prevents women from fully expressing and acting on their desires. For example, research has shown that if a woman attempts to negotiate for a better compensation package or asks for a raise/promotion, she is often perceived negatively and unlikable. At the same time, if she doesn’t negotiate or ask for the raise/promotion, she will most likely be paid less or won’t get the position. Women also tend to expend energy ensuring everyone is comfortable and heard, energy and time that could be spent pursuing her own wants and desires. Men are not expected to do the same work.
5. “I’m driven by an ever-present fear: If I don’t do enough, I won’t be enough.” “I feel compelled to demonstrate my value, well, compulsively.” “Girls are conditioned to see their morality as being in service to the world.” While the first two statements show up in the chapter on sloth, the third appears in the chapter on envy, our value to the world as women, as our society is currently structured, is measured in a way that we will always come up short; the target is intentinally vague, arbitrary, keeps moving, and there’s no end to what is expected of us. We will never measure up until we throw off these external expectations and begin to rely on our own internal compasses.
6. “We are conditioned to believe that selfishness is bad, immoral, wrong; that we must step back, serve through compliance.” This is a mandate for girls/women and not for boys. As the author says, “Wanting things for ourselves is a essential act of individuation. We must learn how to express our desires truthfully, prioritize their expression, and normalize the action for girls in the way we do for boys.” I am so tired of and disgusted by the double standards and the societal conditioning that prevents women from fully living their lives and enjoying a full and robust human experience.
7. “While the specter of Icarus hasn’t prevented men from taking literal moonshots, women seem to have gotten the message to keep their heads down, to lie low.” “Act big, and you will be put back in your place.” “While women are damned for an inflated sense of self, there’s no penalty for men.” These double standards financially constrain women and limit opportunities. This also influences how our society is governed, who governs it, and what products or services are available because of who controls what gets funded (92% of VC funding goes to startups run by men). “As she tries to shine and share her gifts, she continually told not to.” We have to stop doing this to each other. And to any man reading this, stop telling her to calm down, stop telling her to be less exuberant, stop telling her to be more practical or realistic. Actively support her dreams, encourage her to dream bigger, and promote her and her ideas!
8. “The idea that in the meritocracy of America talent naturally rises trained us into passivity. If you build it, they will come; if you’ve got it, you’ll be found. To push for attention or approval is unseemly at best.” “We hope to be recognized for our value, rather than needing to state it on the record.” This has manifested for me in so many different (and not positive) ways including promoting my book, Piloting Your Life. A friend recently suggested that I reframe the so-called ‘self-promotion’ and focus on the impact that the stories, research, and messages could have on the people who could be reading it, and that by not promoting it I am doing them a disservice. This may be a more comfortable way to operate in the current patriarchal paradigm, but what’s wrong with promoting it because I think it’s good? I’ve been waiting for it to be recognized and picked up, but that’s not likely to happen on its own. I’ve been conditioned to think that if it was good enough, someone would find it. It’s a myth.
9. “If we don’t look the way society would prefer, it’s our fault: We’ve failed at some essential mandate, to please and conform, to express our goodness through obedience to expectations of our size.” “We equate goodness and purity with beauty: This is how health and vanity become intertwined.” What a way to keep women distracted and prevent women from fully stepping into their power!
10. “When it comes to bodies, and food, we are never done…The onus is on us for failing, for not having enough discpline.”“Fixating on our diets, our thinness…takes up a huge amount of our finite, creative energy. It takes us out of life, focuses us on the wrong thing.” This is what I am exploring in my latest research project on midlife women, aging, social expectations, body image, self-esteem, and the patriarchy. If we don’t buy into these expectations, and if we focus on our own personalized health and well-being, what could we do with that extra time and energy, not to mention eliminating the negativity? Imagine the possibilities.
11. “No man will ever experience anything as insidious as the way women’s bodies and appearances are rated and judged. Our beauty is our social currency, a ticket to adoration and acceptance, along with fidelity from our partners and better pay and career opportunities. Maintaining our physical desirability is one of our jobs.” Ditto to what I said in the previous point.
12. “Religion has acculturated us to believe sex is immoral and sinful.” “The church succeeded in making sex a dirty thing and marked women as the instigators of this filth.” “When Pope Gregory preached about the Seven Deadly Sins for the first time, he assigned these vices (pride, vainglory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, lust) to Mary Magdalene and branded her a whore, conflating Mary Magdalene with the ‘sinful woman’.” So women bad, men good. Got it. And the whole apple, snake, Eve seduction plot? Twisted ‘history’ to serve the church, men, and the patriarchy, and oppress/suppress women. It’s no wonder I don’t believe in congregational religion.
13. “Society’s dominant cultural construction of femininity encourages girls and women to be desirable but not desiring.” “What is it to want instead of merely responding to being wanted?” For many of us women who bought into this in our youth, as we age and are no longer as ‘desirable’ based on the patriarchal rules of desirability, this is both a really difficult shift and a fantastic opportunity to claim what it is ours, to claim the right to choose what we want.
14. As the author discusses, “so many heterosexual women [are] still stuck in the space of objectification, intent on doing the pleasing with little regard for their own pleasure.” See my previous point.
15. “The presence of your body is not safe, and it’s your duty [as a woman] to figure out how to make it so. It’s a brilliant trick, this foisting of over-responsibility onto girls and women.” This is another way we women have been kept distracted and in a no-win situation. We are told to make ourselves desirable but if we are harmed because of that (rape, sexual assault, harassment), it’s our fault because we were wearing the wrong thing, we’d been drinking, we put ourselves into the wrong place, etc. If we don’t make ourselves desirable, we’re also not morally good (see point 1). What a conundrum!
16. “We were being compelled to notice; the ways in which we were still conditioned to worry for the men, but somehow not to afford the same compassion for women.” “This is the perfect description of himpathy…the ways in which we prioritize the emotions, health, and happiness of men over their female victims.” Two words: Brock Turner. This is bullshit but the our current reality. How do we change it? Start to recognize it, then start calling it out.
17. “The public perception of anger is that it’s only ever righteous and proper for men to be visibly enraged.” “The direct expression of anger, especially at men, makes us unladylike, unfeminine, unmaternal, sexually unattractive, or, more recently, strident.” The author goes on to say that if we are angry, we become “unlovable” and “devoid of femininity.” Keep in mind that to keep women oppressed, we are meant to believe that “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.” Imagine, if like the ants in Bug’s Life, we overcame our fear and came together to rise up against our oppressors. Unfortunately, many women, especially white women, don’t recognize the oppression and believe that they truly benefit from the current structure.
18. “Good girls don’t fight, good girls don’t yell.” “For too many women, anger feels both unsavory and unsafe.” “There is no realm, private or public, where women and girls get to work with their anger. We’ve been trained to make other people comfortable.” I’m pretty sure that I no longer ever want to be considered a ‘good girl’ and I may have to rename my dog; his name is Good Boy George. Even in naming my dog, I’ve reinforced the patriarchy. Ugh. Or have I?
19. “The 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 the system as well.” All the examples in the book on how we do this to each other made me want to scream. It’s everywhere. But if we internalize and focus on the next 6 points, there might be hope in smashing the patriarchy to create a more balanced and just society, for all of us.
20. “It’s actually not a woman’s job to make everyone else happy. It’s not our job to serve the needs of others at the expense of our own.”
21. “Caring for others and meeting our own needs should not be mutually exclusive.”
22. “When we limit ourselves, we become complicit in denying ourselves a full existence. We force ourselves to lead narrow lives.” “ We deny ourselves joy.”
23. “We must own our own sovereignty and not look to any exterior authority for a road map to tell us how to behave (or not), or what to do (or not) — we must look inside for directions, and we already have everything we need.”
24. “Letting go of old structures and ideas, and choosing reliance on our sovereignty, on self posession, is hard. It requires a tremendous amount of faith to rely on this inner knowing, to distill what’s right for us and what’s wrong.”
25. “The power structure we are addicted to is toxic for everyone.” “Everyone’s part is critical: We cannot afford for women to stand back. We need their leadership, their wisdom, their understanding of the whole.”

I know this is a lot and for that I do not apologize. Read the book…there’s so much more than what I covered here.

Did any of these resonate with you? Are you inspired to change how your think, what you pursue, or how you operate as a result? If so, let me know in the comments or drop me a line at pilotingyourlife@gmail.com.

Note: all bolded, italicized quotes are from the book.

Next up: On Our Best Behavior. author Elise Loehnen references the book Why Does Patriarchy Persist? by Carol Gilligan.

This is not an endorsement for Bird scooters, especially since they just filed for bankruptcy. Such a waste of good VC money!

About the Author

Terri Hanson Mead is the multi-award winning author of Piloting Your Life, Managing Partner of Solutions2Projects, LLC, travel journalist, and an advocate for women through all of her platforms including YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and this blog. Terri, the mother of a college sophomore and recent college graduate, is based in Redwood City, CA and in her spare time, loves to travel, cook, play tennis, and fly helicopters around the San Francisco Bay Area, especially under the Golden Gate Bridge. Oh, and she loves a good craft cocktail!