This is the fourth part of a four part series:
1. Ending the Manel
2. The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity
3. Who Gets to be an Expert?
Meanwhile, save the date: I’m hosting a Zoom workshop for paid subscribers with Mark Horn: He’s going to teach us about Tarot and Kabbalah, specifically how to work with the imagery of the Rider-Waite deck. I’ll send the link to register for the Zoom in the next few weeks, in the interim, please hold Sunday, April 14th at 10amPT/1pmET. You can listen to our podcast convo here. (I highly recommend a reading with him, which you can book here.)
These are the most underlined sentences in my book, according to Kindle: “We [women] have been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.”
In many ways, this is the thesis of my book, an exploration of how this simple idea shows up throughout our lives.
Now first, I’m not talking about the absolute or spiritual qualities of “goodness” and “power.” I’m talking about how those values are mediated by external authorities and social norms, the way we perform “goodness,” or wield “power.”
When it comes to the ineffable quality of goodness, I think we are all essentially good—it’s our birthright and baked into who we are. I think some of us are contending with more shadow than others, and the goal of life is to integrate that shadow, to hold the “bad” parts of ourselves that we’d rather not see and recognize that they also belong to us. A synonym for the “goodness” that I write about in On Our Best Behavior is perfection, and its relentless pursuit. Perfection is the expectation many of us hold for ourselves, and that we culturally hold for all women. On the other hand, I think the actual, spiritual value of goodness can best be understood as wholeness, which is an entirely different adventure, one of integration rather than abstention.
Meanwhile, as Father Richard Rohr explains in What the Mystics Know, our understanding of cultural power is really a synonym for control. He writes, “When I need to see that actions are done my way, I might have control over passing events, but that is not power in any full sense. Real persons of power can act, succeed, thrive—even when they do not have control. Power is the ability to act from the fullness of who I am, the capacity to establish and maintain a relationship with people and things, and the freedom to give myself away.” In Rohr’s estimation, the people with real power in our culture are saints, religious or secular.
In the public sphere, though, we evaluate goodness as performed perfection and power as maximum control. That sentence—that women are conditioned for goodness, while men are programmed for power—illustrates the Achilles Heel for both genders, and underlines why women are so susceptible and vulnerable to reputational harm, whereas men are largely immune.
There’s nothing more destructive in our culture than to be publicly derided as a “bad” woman—a bad mother, a bad friend, a toxic co-worker, an unfeeling boss. Of course, this is an entirely subjective measure, making it all the more terrifying to operate in the world: Who is to decide where that line of censure begins and ends? The crime of being vaguely “bad” is not codified by specific actions—it’s just a vibe. (You know, she’s a bitch, she’s unfeeling, she’s cold, she demands too much, she’s selfish, she puts herself first.) Meanwhile, the idea of goodness, you’ll note, is indelibly wrapped up with the qualities of femininity: Care. A woman who doesn’t care (enough, appropriately) is deviant, an aberration.
Meanwhile, men can do truly terrible things—things that our courts deem reprehensible. Assault, kill, embezzle, abuse. But these men are Teflon when it comes to reputational harm: We don’t really care when they misbehave, we certainly don’t send them off-stage or light their careers and legacies on fire. We only lose interest and consign them to the dung heap when we perceive them as not having any power—of being weak. You know, soft or womanly. Give me an example of a male cultural figure who we’ve truly canceled because we thought they were bad? Most of the men who went through a #MeToo reckoning who have any cultural power are fully back or well on their way, no problem. (This is not to say that I’m not for rehabilitation, remorse, and reintegration…just pointing out the extreme double standard.) I promise you that if Harvey Weinstein weren’t in prison, he’d still be making movies. Trump endures because he is literally a strongman.
Readers of my book will know that I’m a mega-fan of psychologist Carol Gilligan, who wrote the classic In a Different Voice in the 1980s about the moral development of boys and girls, how boys come to see themselves as in the world, while girls come to see themselves as being in service to the world. In her recent book Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, which Gilligan co-wrote with Naomi Snider, they have a line that took my breath away. In her research, Gilligan marked that a certain point, the word “don’t” enters the vocabulary of children. For girls, it’s “I don’t know.” For boys, it’s “I don’t care.” Let that settle for a minute.
Because, here’s the thing: girls do know—but as my newsletter last week explores, we’re conditioned to believe that someone else must know better. And of course, boys do care, but we sever them from their feelings when they’re young, and to quote visionary therapy Terry Real, turn these boys into men. (There’s no corollary for turning “girls into women.”) Then, as a culture, we continue to reaffirm to these boys that we don’t care that they don’t care. They’ll never be punished for lacking this quality. (And caring is not equated with power in our culture.)
It’s a vicious cycle, one that to quote Real, “turns wounded boys into wounding boys” by dislocating them from their feelings. Meanwhile, this “not-knowing” leaves girls disempowered and disconnected from faith in their own wisdom.
It also leaves girls and women in a precarious position, where they cannot be perceived as uncaring without risking censure or cancellation. (I like Africa Brooke’s rebranded of cancellation as “collective sabotage,” as it so frequently works against our goals, i.e., we routinely find ourselves in circular firing squads attacking our own for not being perfect in their advocacy.) This is true in small community certainly, but also in the public sphere, or on social media, or in any space where women have a lot to lose (esteem, but also jobs, cultural approbation, etc.). We are quick to destroy each other for anything we perceive as “bad.”
In the first essay in this series, I explained the shockingly low number of female experts platformed as guests on the shows of huge male podcasters, podcasters who dominate the top of the charts (see also: “The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity”). I mentioned that I only looked at gender—in part, because at first glance other diversity measures were far more dire.
In response, a few readers reached out (kindly) to remind me that I’m falling short on being perfectly representational on Pulling the Thread. And candidly, I am, which I realized at the turn of the year, in part because I haven’t been actively auditing myself. I over-index in women, Indigenous guests, and LGBTQA+—though I am falling short in platforming Black guests as well as Latinas and Latinos.
And I should have been auditing, which became a standard for many female hosts and business owners in the summer of 2020: There was the 15% pledge created by Aurora James (15% of shelf space devoted to Black businesses), and a general reckoning around under-representation. A lot of women were called to the mat. (Presumably men were called to the mat too though I think they largely let the call go to voicemail.) In response, many of the women I know over-index to compensate. If you look through guest slates on podcasts hosted by women, book club picks, etc., you’ll see a lot of attention and care being paid to be highly representational. My friend Jessi Hempel, who hosts LinkedIn’s podcast Hello Monday, publicly audits her show every quarter because she admits that they fall short without accountability—the show’s goals are to “insure that 50% of our guests or more are women or gender nonbinary people, and that 50% of our guests or more are people of color.” She commits to being overly representational, in part because business spaces are so white and male, and ultimately classist.
Without accountability, we fall back to status quo. This should not be work solely shouldered by women. We should all care about being representational.
The way women take this on—and this acute attention to identity—has a shadow side that we also need to address.
It starts with disclaimering—both conversationally and certainly in print. This is where we state our privilege (as we’re all privileged in some ways), along with all of our identity factors. I do think this is important in many cases—to understand the various lenses through which someone sees the world before they begin to explain how they see the world—but disclaimering is largely the provenance of women. (In fact, I had a lengthy discussion about this with Kate Kennedy on the podcast, because she includes a lengthy disclaimer…about her disclaimer. She writes: “There are so many way I wish to preface this book; when you have an internet career and become aware of all the eyes and ears, you slowly develop a superpower called The Disclaimer. Even if it’s at the expense of the work speaking for itself, you start to prioritize preventative qualifiers that get lengthier and lengthier, usually as a result of the painful experience of people misunderstanding your intentions or requiring your work to cater to their individual needs to be allowed to exist.”) As someone who reads a lot, I can promise you that this is a de facto process for women. I’m always shocked to see one written about a man—it happens maybe if they’re talking about race, gender, or class, but largely not. There’s no expectation that they assert how they relate—or do not relate—to every other person.
A woman emailed me recently to tell me that while she had bought my book, she was contemplating returning it, because she looked up my extended bio on my site, where I describe my whole educational journey, including the fact that I left my hippie, highly alternative school in Montana for a boarding school populated by the children of elites. She wanted to know why I disclosed this, and whether I had been hired to do so as a PR stunt by the school, or whether it was because I felt the need to puff my chest and flex. She closed her email by saying that she didn’t know if she could read my book, as she is middle class and went to a high school with no notable alums. She found my disclosure distasteful, but more importantly, didn’t think she could “relate” to me.
This email is fascinating to me on many levels, but it gets at the core issue of our identity exploration: That the boxes that we check are more important than our shared humanity—that our differences are more significant than everything that makes us more or less the same. We are speaking to each other from silos that are becoming more and more extreme—and working against our very purposes. The point is to bring more voices into the conversation, to make the conversation a representation of the whole rather than its parts, to change the status quo where white and male is the dominant script and everyone else is a supporting actor. We can only begin to do that by letting people who are not that speak as representatives of the whole. I promise, this is actually a subtle shift that will have massive implications for what we perceive as “normal.”
Case in point, I almost exclusively interview authors—I do this because I love books, yes, but also because books are excellent forcing mechanisms for thinkers, therapists, scientists, leaders to crystallize and synthesize their own message and understand both what they think and what they’re trying to say. Well, we’re still in the phase of integrating voices where identity—assuming you’re not part of the dominant or majority group—becomes the hurdle that must be cleared for whatever wisdom this person wants to impart.
What do I mean by this? We frequently see this in books and on panels—that you don’t get to be a woman in tech sitting on an integrated panel about tech. As one woman in the comments remarked, no, you’re on the panel to speak to the experience of “women in tech” specifically, what it is to be a woman, relating to the field of technology. You’re the deviant factor, relating as an outsider. You’re always a few clicks away from just…being a person in tech, speaking to the experience of being in tech. In books you see this as a book marketed as a LGBTQ+ love story, rather than just a great love story…where the main character happens to be trans. Or you see it everywhere in expert-led non-fiction, where too often, Black therapists are pigeon-holed into solely addressing racial trauma, or POC in business are relegated to discussing DEI. I’m not saying that these are not worthy, substantial, and essential topics that justify many, many books—but that that’s where the collective imagination of editors often ends. You only get to write about your own experience, for people who share your exact identity factors. Meanwhile, men, particularly white men, get to write about everyone and for everyone, and no one bats an eye. And let me say: We shouldn’t bat an eye. But rather than making everyone else an exception to this rule, we need to let everyone access this collective voice as easily, without insisting that they explain all the reasons why they do not know what it is like to be every other person on the planet. This is why I love reading and interviewing Nedra Tawwab, for example—yes, she’s a Black woman, but she does not specifically write about race. She’s an exceptional therapist who can take complex topics like boundaries and boil them down into actionable insights. She is a genius at this. She’s hugely successful too with two million followers on Instagram and two New York Times bestselling books. She writes about our collective experience of struggling to assert our needs and to determine where we end and others begin. We can all relate.
By pointing to identity as the most exceptional factor (unless you’re white and male), we continue to make these ideas not representative of the whole. I promise, it’s a subtle shift to normalize lots of different people speaking to our collective experience, no ongoing disclaimering required. The other massive downside to the way we tokenize everyone who is not white and male is that we are then making a “woman in tech” or a “Black executive” represent the experiences of a massive group of people, which is actually totally odd and way too much pressure. We then short list people who qualify as representational and give the same people most of the opportunities, rinse and repeat, which again, kind of works against our primary goal: Expanding opportunity for everyone, rather than making people exceptional to the rule. It hurts my head.
Before I wrap, here I go with another disclaimer: I think, as much as we must redesign a collective story that’s representational when it professes to be for everyone, it’s important for identity groups to continue to preserve and promote their own culture. Everything is not for everyone, all the time.
Meanwhile, let’s watch the way we police women around morality, goodness, and caring, specifically in the public sphere. Let’s watch the for the “collective sabotage” that Africa describes, when destroying a woman for not saying things perfectly, or getting too much attention, or stoke our envy, becomes so easily justified. Women care. And that is a beautiful quality, but not when it’s weaponized against us.
Thanks for sticking with me through this series—it’s been exciting to see it take off and make some things more obvious that weren’t catching our attention. And thank you to all of you who sent me scripts for the “Gentle No,” which I talked about on this week’s podcast. Thank you, many of the insights were stunning.
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
2/29: Five Things I’ve Been Thinking About (Solo Episode)
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/22: The Basics of Spiral Dynamics with Nicole Churchill
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/15: On being “Basic” with Kate Kennedy
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/8: On maintaining sexual desire with Emily Nagoski PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
2/1: On the essential nature of relational conflict with John & Julie Gottman, PhDs
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
1/25: On our fat-phobic culture with Kate Manne
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
1/18: On growing ourselves up with Aliza Pressman, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
THE LATEST POSTS:
Who Gets to Be an Expert?: Part Three
The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity: Part Two
Ending the “Manel”: Doing this Requires Understanding Ourselves
My Baby-Thin Skin: The Shame of “Disappointing” People and Our Doubled Selves
What Size Are Your Shoes? And More Pointedly, is Your Life Governed by Fear?
If You Build It, They Will Come: Maybe?
Entering the Wilderness: Embracing All that’s Not Human
Accepting Responsibility: Growing Up is Hard
What Motivates Change? Hint: Not Harshness, and Likely Not Fear
“I’d Rather Be Whole Than Good.”: Welcome to my Carl Jung Era
Contemplating the I-Ching: A Q&A With Jungian Therapist Satya Doyle Byock
I’ve Given Up Hope for a Better Past: A Conversation with Rabbi Steve Leder
Self-Help Needs a Rebrand: We Should Call it Personal Responsibility
Full archive HERE
My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
Thank you for writing this series. It's been really thought-provoking to read. These two parts really stood out to me:
"Because, here’s the thing: girls do know—but as my newsletter last week explores, we’re conditioned to believe that someone else must know better. And of course, boys do care, but we sever them from their feelings when they’re young, and to quote visionary therapy Terry Real, turn these boys into men. (There’s no corollary for turning “girls into women.”)"
Then in the next paragraph you say: "It’s a vicious cycle, one that to quote Real, “turns wounded boys into wounding boys” by dislocating them from their feelings. Meanwhile, this “not-knowing” leaves girls disempowered and disconnected from faith in their own wisdom."
Though not a true corollary, girls "turn into women" at menarche and this is exactly the moment when they get the opportunity to learn about themselves and their own inner wisdom. But as a society we sever girls from their feelings too. We're taught to ignore menstruation, suppress it, and we view it as the biggest pain in the ass inconvenience there is. In other words, we're taught to ignore, suppress, and view as the biggest pain in the ass inconvenience our own body, feelings, and wisdom. We're told our feelings make us "hysterical" and it's best we just go on birth control to "manage" all of those hormonal fluctuations. (Which is not to discount the very real need for this medicine in certain cases). All of our power is lost right there. All of our opportunity to tune into intuitive knowing, into our natural cycles and rhythms, into our emotions and feelings is lost and buried under centuries of disgust, fear, and suppression.
Our Achilles heel is also our biggest strength, our deepest power. If only we could tune into ourselves, trust ourselves, and act in the world from our truth without fear of retribution, shame, ridicule, cancellation. Then we would be living in this world from a deeply spiritual, feminine place full of caring, nurturance, love, and compassion that is not viewed as weak or gendered, expected or assumed, but strong, bold, and fresh. And that is an interesting, powerful game with rules I'd love to play 🙂.
So true about men never doing the disclaimer thing. The line about them letting the call go to voicemail made me chuckle.