For too long, women have been constrained by a set of ancient biblical rules that define what it means to be "good", says writer Elise Loehnen.
She lived with the constant pressure to meet impossible standards of productivity for decades before realising she could "untether" herself.
"All that sitting on the couch next to my husband for no more than 20 minutes watching Netflix before I can feel an invisible cattle prod, lasering me to get up and do something productive, do something, do the dishes, start a load of laundry, get out my computer... I can recognise now that that's bigger than me," Loehnen tells Jesse Mulligan.
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Elise Loehnen hosts the podcast Pulling the Thread and is the author of Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good.
Women are conditioned to present themselves as "never tired" with no desires, no appetite and no need for affirmation, attention or praise, Loehnen says.
Recognising that she was holding herself to these standards, she wanted to understand where they came from.
"I traced them back to these toxic ancient stories, the seven deadly sins ... I wasn't raised in a religious household, I don't subscribe to these, I couldn't even list them before I started working on this book.”
The perils of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger and sloth are "whispered" into the ears of women, she says, who then "police" them in themselves and each other.
“[This programming] is not coming from my husband, it's not from my parents. It is in me, baked into me as an edict of 'you're being slothful, lazy, get up and do something, you need to do something, there's always more doing that needs to be done'.”
The wellness industry, which Loehnen was once immersed in as Chief Content Officer at Gwyneth Paltrow’s company Goop, perpetuates values which have biblical foundations, she says.
Malignant ideas about the role of women are "so entrenched in our culture", Loehnen says, but she now acknowledges her own role in reinforcing these during seven years at Goop.
"I certainly was participating and perpetuating in a part of our culture that I'm really trying actively to move away from.”
“I started juice cleansing in my 20s in New York, and it's funny, if you even think about this as a concept, it's religious. It goes back to sort of purification rituals, and detoxification, and clean and dirty and all these binaries that I think we have been engaging with for millennia, that we're inherently dirty, and we need to be cleansed, that are so deeply baked into us that I never recognised that as what I was participating in.”
In Our Best Behaviour, Loehnen exposes the “insidious web” that governs women's behaviour so it can be dismantled.
“There's so much frustration amongst my fellow women about where we are culturally, and we always want to look to place the blame outside of us.
“We can start to interrupt [this messaging] and recognise it in ourselves and then collectively change the script and push against these ideas."
In Loehnen's own case, the pushback is mostly against her own programming.
“This isn't to let men entirely off the hook - there are certainly misogynistic, malevolent men in the world, I'm not saying that there aren't - but at least in my life, I couldn't find the men to put the locus of blame on, I recognised it was in me that I was holding myself back and in turn holding back other women.”
Our Best Behaviour is for both women and men, she says.
“It unlocks, I think, some parts of the psychology of women in a way that I think is very revelatory, and also it's not an anti-man book.
“It's an anti-patriarchal book but the patriarchy is very cruel to men, I'm honestly most concerned about men.”
