On Our Best Behavior

Informationen zum Autor Elise Loehnen Klappentext "We congratulate ourselves when we resist the donut in the office breakroom. We celebrate our restraint when we hold back from sending an email in anger. We feel virtuous when we wake up at dawn to get a jump on the day. We put others' needs ahead of our own and believe this makes us exemplary. In On Our Best Behavior, journalist Elise Loehnen explains that these impulses - often lauded as unselfish, distinctly feminine instincts - are actually ingrained in us by a culture that reaps the benefits, via an extraordinarily effective collection of mores known as the Seven Deadly Sins. Since being codified by the Christian church in the fourth century, the Seven Deadly Sins-pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth-have exerted insidious power. Even today, in our largely secular, patriarchal society, they continue to circumscribe women's behavior. For example, seeing sloth as sinful leads women to deny themselves rest; a fear of gluttony drives them to ignore their appetites; and an aversion to greed prevents them from negotiating for themselves and contributes to the 55 percent gender wealth gap"-- Leseprobe 1 A Brief History of the Patriarchy in Twenty-one Pages To understand how the Seven Deadly Sins influence our lives, even to this day (even if we don't consider ourselves religious), we must understand the system that produced them: the patriarchy, which has defined Western culture for millennia. Its forefathers adopted and shaped early Christianity to enforce behavior in ways that continue to affect us. I struggled to understand how someone like me, even with all my privilegeswhite, cis, heterosexual, upper middle class, agnostic/spiritualstill feels prisoner to these Judeo-Christian ideas of goodness. Why do I feel bound to keep from committing these sins? To answer that question, I'd need to examine the story about who we are, a story we've been telling each other through history. A warning: This chapter is the book's densest and most academicskip it if you're inclinedbut to imagine something new, it's important to understand where we've been. Originally Partners While we tend to think of the patriarchy as an inevitable reality, this conception is wrong. For most of human existencefrom 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 b.c.we were nomads, ranging across the planet in small collectives that were partnership societies, dependent on what many disparate bands thought of as the Great Mother, the creative force behind all life. In these partnership societies, women were revered for their generative powersafter all, birth is a miracle. This is not to say early tribes were matriarchiesthat would have still insisted on an arbitrary hierarchy, where women were perceived as superior to men. Paleolithic societies were primarily affiliation based, rather than predicated on continual oppression. In these first millions of years of our existence, there was no private property in the way we'd define it todayno resources to hoard, no generational wealth to sock away under the mattress, no land or titles to pass to biological children. Our ancestors were focused on the collectivea we rather than an I, where all would have been dependent on the group, and nature, for survival. Throughout the Stone Age, our ancestors planted small gardens and foraged for fruit, vegetables, and small animals like snails and frogs, with only the occasional big game prize; anthropologists assert we were gatherer/hunters, not the opposite. As much as 80 percent of our food supply was generated, and processed, by women. And though hunting has been significantly overstated as the way of life, where it did occur, some women participated. In settlements like central Turkey's Çatalhöyük (75006400 b.c.), men and women were the same size, received equivalent calories, and spent an equal amount of time insid...

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Elise Loehnen

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking exploration of the ancient rules women unwittingly follow in order to be considered “good,” revealing how the Seven Deadly Sins still control and distort our lives and illuminating a path toward a more balanced, spiritually complete way to live

Why do women equate self-denial with being good?

We congratulate ourselves when we resist the donut in the office breakroom. We celebrate our restraint when we hold back from sending an email in anger. We feel virtuous when we wake up at dawn to get a jump on the day. We put others’ needs ahead of our own and believe this makes us exemplary. In On Our Best Behavior, journalist Elise Loehnen explains that these impulses—often lauded as unselfish, distinctly feminine instincts—are actually ingrained in us by a culture that reaps the benefits, via an extraordinarily effective collection of mores known as the Seven Deadly Sins.

Since being codified by the Christian church in the fourth century, the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth—have exerted insidious power. Even today, in our largely secular, patriarchal society, they continue to circumscribe women’s behavior. For example, seeing sloth as sinful leads women to deny themselves rest; a fear of gluttony drives them to ignore their appetites; and an aversion to greed prevents them from negotiating for themselves and contributes to the 55 percent gender wealth gap.

In On Our Best Behavior, Loehnen reveals how we’ve been programmed to obey the rules represented by these sins and how doing so qualifies us as “good.” This probing analysis of contemporary culture and thoroughly researched history explains how women have internalized the patriarchy, and how they unwittingly reinforce it. By sharing her own story and the spiritual wisdom of other traditions, Loehnen shows how we can break free and discover the integrity and wholeness we seek.

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A Brief History of the Patriarchy in Twenty-one Pages

To understand how the Seven Deadly Sins influence our lives, even to this day (even if we don’t consider ourselves religious), we must understand the system that produced them: the patriarchy, which has defined Western culture for millennia. Its forefathers adopted and shaped early Christianity to enforce behavior in ways that continue to affect us. I struggled to understand how someone like me, even with all my privileges—white, cis, heterosexual, upper middle class, agnostic/spiritual—still feels prisoner to these Judeo-Christian ideas of “goodness.” Why do I feel bound to keep from committing these “sins”? To answer that question, I’d need to examine the story about who we are, a story we’ve been telling each other through history. A warning: This chapter is the book’s densest and most academic—skip it if you’re inclined—but to imagine something new, it’s important to understand where we’ve been.

Originally Partners

While we tend to think of the patriarchy as an inevitable reality, this conception is wrong. For most of human existence—from 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 b.c.—we were nomads, ranging across the planet in small collectives that were partnership societies, dependent on what many disparate bands thought of as the “Great Mother,” the creative force behind all life. In these partnership societies, women were revered for their generative powers—after all, birth is a miracle.

This is not to say early tribes were matriarchies—that would have still insisted on an arbitrary hierarchy, where women were perceived as superior to men. Paleolithic societies were primarily affiliation based, rather than predicated on continual oppression. In these first millions of years of our existence, there was no private property…