“On Our Best Behavior” with Elise Loehnen

What does it really mean to be a good person? Have you ever wondered why you consider one public figure to be “good” and another “bad”? Where those frameworks for so-called goodness came from?

urns out they date all the way back to the fourth century, as journalist Elise Loehnen found out while researching her new book “On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good.”

Contrary to popular belief, the seven deadly sins — lust, greed, envy, sloth and the rest of the crew — weren’t actually a Biblical decree from on high. Regardless of their proximity to God, the expectations set by the infamous sins have been holding women back ever since. So where do we draw the line between “good” and “good enough?” Elise and Nora discuss the origin of sins, why women bear the brunt of these expectations and how to reframe your view of “goodness.”

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The episode transcript can be found here.

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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Nora: What does it mean to be good? To be a good person out in the world. At the office as a friend or a partner or a parent. It's something. I think we all think about all the time, not in just how we act in our day-to-day lives, but in how we're perceived by the people around us. 

Oh, she's a good person. We'll say if someone we admire. But being good is basically a pressure cooker. For many women, especially, being good means taking on another task at work. When you truly don't have the time just to make your boss or your colleagues happy or eating a salad instead of the pasta you really wanted a dinner or doing more emotional labor at home... or at work. And those good behaviors have basically been ingrained in us since the Dawn of time, or, you know, I guess since the fourth century anyway.

In her new book on our best behavior at the seven deadly sins and the price women pay to be good, journalists, Elise Lunan examines how the infamous seven deadly sins have been used as a double-edged sword against women appear virtuous and good but pay the price. Where do we draw the line between good and good enough. And how can we break free from the expectations set by those deadly rules of right and wrong. 

This is the terrible reading club. And this is my conversation with Elise Lunan. 

Elise Loehnen, what's your relationship to being good?

Elise: This is the standard to which I hold myself to on the daily and fear of badness, fear of being perceived either as a bad person, a bad coworker, a bad author, whatever it is is I think one of the worst things that you can specifically say about a woman.

Nora: That is very true. What's your earliest memory of wanting to be good? 

Elise: I think I'm not alone in having been a highly performative child and. My parents are, they did a great job, truly. I do remember being spanked. This was, I'm in my forties, so different time because I drew on Rolodex and just the shame of earning my parents' censure, and it stands out in my mind because I think I was so incredibly well behaved that to be punished was actually shocking. I was not a rebellious child. I spoke my mind, but that's what my parents expected of me. But I did everything else that they wanted. And so I remember that incident specifically, not as traumatic, but as, oh my God, I'm, I've fallen out of favor.

Nora: Oh, I'm, there's nothing also like being a mom and trying to correct or guide behavior in a child while now in this day and age, understanding that children are people. Yeah. Which in the eighties,

Elise: No

Nora: we were not.

Elise: I don't think that we had that core guiding tenant, which we know now, which is to talk about behavior rather than people. So I think that the message was, you're bad. You're deviant, you're problematic. Not, it's not nice to destroy phone tree. This is not a good, it's not a good thing to do. It's not a good thing to do.

Nora: It's not a good thing to do. And you can still be good. I felt really similarly when I was punished or corrected, corrected. My dad would explode on us as kids. I spilled nail polish remover on a chair as a child, I knocked it over and it took the finish off, which it does. The chair was a chair, a very nice, very solid wooden chair. That went with a very solid wooden table that my parents had gotten for free when a library closed in Minneapolis 

 you would've thought that I took the nail polish remover, poured it on the chair, and gleefully rubbed it in. And every time I looked at that chair as a child, I felt bad. I felt bad. I felt bad.

Elise: Shame.

Nora: Shame. I am a person who definitely equates what I do, what I can do, what I have done as shoring up my goodness in the world as a way of paying my dues, Like proving that I. Deserve to exist. Small picture in the spaces that I'm in. But big picture, just no, it's okay. I'm alive. 

How much do you think your goodness drove you to accomplishment?

Elise: Actually this is a key distinction because I think historically or typically we associate this as the driver of what we achieve in the world, and we assume that it's this cattle prod in us that absent that sort of programming, we would never do or achieve anything.

We would be terrible people, right? That's one of the ideas particularly of America in our culture and I theoretically ascribe or have ascribed a lot of my success in life and what have I achieved to this external drive to be good? And as you said, to achieve an all avenues of my life to be a good quote unquote good mom.

Although that's, Debatable, in our culture where I'm not with my kids all the time, to have a big career to really push myself. And the reality, the reason that I wrote this book is that I recognized, I opened the book, hyperventilating in my car after a therapy appointment because I've been hyperventilating for a month, chronic over breathing, feeling like I was going to die.

Truly, and I know you've run the gamut for all of us in your life in terms of experiencing these states, but just had this dawning awareness of, it doesn't matter how hard I try, how hard I work, I am still plagued by these feelings of inadequacy and that it's not enough. And the result is that I feel like I'm gonna die. I feel like I'm gonna asphyxiate in my car And 

Nora: it's gonna also be my fault. And you can put that on my tombstone.

Elise: Yeah. And that there was no way out. I saw no way to achieve my way out of it or to perform my way out of it, or to prove to the world

am good enough that I shouldn't feel bad.

Nora: How does that, what's the connection between that moment where you are trying not to die in your car?

And this book, where do you start to identify or pull that thread between your need to do, your need to achieve, your need to be good and the seven deadly sins, especially as a not religious person?

Elise: not religious person, it's funny, I really wanted to understand what this driving impulse was, and I've done enough therapy. I've looked at my childhood. I can understand the ways in which my parents. Inspired me to work really hard. I write about my childhood primarily in the chapter on sloth. I, that was the legacy of my parents, was like a workaholism, but it wasn't, it didn't explain a lot of it.

I'm, as you said, I didn't grow up in a religious household. I went to a progressive alternative school where we didn't get grades. My parents had done a lot to try to protect me from. Those parts of culture, and yet it was in me and I had this desire to understand it.

I had maxed out in my own inquiry, into my own personal life where it came from, and I also witnessed it all around me and in other women. And so I knew it was gendered because my husband is not plagued by the same things, and I saw evidence of it in. Parts of culture. You can, there's you think about the seven deadly sins, which is the structure of the book, and there are books about each one of them, but I'd never really understood it as a system and I wanted to see the system.

I wanted to understand internalized misogyny in the same way that I think think with George Floyd in conversations in the last five, 10 years, we're starting to understand systemic racism and how it acts on us without our intent or sometimes our awareness. We don't choose to be complicit in this system, and yet we're enacting it in our daily lives, right?

So I recognize that there had to be something similar for women, and that's what I wanted. That was coding us for a certain type of behavior. And that's what I wanted to understand. And so this core question of what is it, what is this idea of goodness was in my head And I was looking, I was just searching the culture for it.

Searching for trails, for threads to pull. And I started with envy, not really understanding where it was connected, but. It started with a conversation with Lori Gottlieb, who's a psychotherapist. I'm sure and she has a small aside in her book that envy shows us what we want.

And that was a revelation to me. And I had never examined my own envy or my own wanting because I don't think there's a model for that for women. And I had always thought of it as such a bad emotion or bad instinct. That in that conversation, when I asked her if it was gendered, she said that she didn't know for sure and she didn't have data, but that she, women are much more uncomfortable with things that feel bad or much more repressive and.

So in her mind, men have a lot easier time experiencing envy and even knowing what that is. And that was a huge unlock for me. I drove around for weeks looking for undiagnosed envy and myself and in other people. And and what I saw me out because it's exactly what we were. It's, I don't like her. And no ability to identify the behavior. It was a lot of attention on certain women, public and private in a way that was completely acceptable in conversation. I would have these conversations with friends and it was like, I don't like her. I was like, really? But do you know why? And as sort of you've stopped to think about it and actually plummet. There's this awareness of all of the things that this woman is doing that are so irritating, but we repress it so quickly that we can't identify it. And most typically, and I think anyone listening can identify this in their own lives, the women that bother us, yes, there are some like women that should bother us in the culture.

So I don't, I am not personally envious of marjorie Taylor Green, but there are women in my life that are pushing on a dream for me, that I have for myself. And in pushing on that dream that I have for myself, my instinct is to swat them down or censure them and set of taking that information for what it is, information for me.

Nora: Mm-hmm. And saying, maybe she has something that I want.

Elise: She didn't take it from me cuz this is another grand myth in our culture that's also validated, and this is where it gets very complicated because to unwind all of this programming requires awareness so that we can see it and stop it.

But this idea of scarcity, if that woman has this job or if that woman has. A best selling book, or if that woman has two really lovely children who are high achieving and incredibly athletic, then I can't have that too. That myth of scarcity is deep in women

Nora: I noticed it in myself. I noticed that Envy when I was younger and everyone was getting married. And I lived in the Midwest. I am Midwestern to my core. I'm 25 years old. I'm going to a lot of weddings. Yeah. I look at a 25 year old and I think you, should you even be attending this many weddings? This feels like a young age to be doing that. At the time everyone was getting married. I was not getting married. I was not in danger of becoming married anytime soon.

And I remember saying out loud to myself, like she didn't take my husband. I don't wanna be married to that guy. she just has a part of life that I wanna have someday, or when I wanted to have babies and it was going to be harder for me because my husband was sick than it would be, my friends who are getting just literally spontaneously pregnant out of nowhere thinking that's not my baby.

Elise: But yet, yeah, there's, that lives in all of us. And then what's compounding listening to you talk about that? I was single until I met my husband when I was 29 and which at the time was old. I think it's gotten maybe slightly better, but I spent most of my twenties single and yes, the envy and the shame because it's not even so much that I was desperate to be. Coupled up or married. It's not that I desired that state necessarily. I just was tired of feeling deviant and there must be, I knew there was nothing wrong with me, but culturally, that is what follows women. What's wrong with her? She's not. I. Good. She's not chosen. Nobody wants to be with her defective.

Nora: Yeah. Even though I proposed to Aaron, so I actually never got picked in many ways, but I do think, yeah, we don't think a men the same way. Envy is difficult to identify because like many of the other seven deadly sins, it does feel like it could kill us. Yeah, it's ugly.

Elise: could say with gluttony or lust or greed, you're getting something good, but with envy, you get nothing.

Nora: You get nothing.

Elise: But it is in some ways, Envy was the gateway for me to this book, and it's the gateway to the other sins because.

It requires to find that envy and to use it productively in your life requires connecting to your wanting. And that is to want is such an essential and primary verb. And I think so many women have been schooled away from it in a way that is deadening. So many of us can't actually connect with what we want at all and.

And what's interesting too, just hearing you say, I was never chosen. This is another insidious part of the way that we're raised, and this connects deeply with lust and with pride with many of them. It's that girls are conditioned, programmed to be desirable, but never desiring. That's the work of Deborah Tollman and it's a stunningly simple proclamation that.

For me at least when I read that line, it was like, oh my God. Desirable but never desiring.

Nora: You quote Anne Lamont, who is one of my favorite writers and teachers along with PEMA Children, and what I like about both of these women is their ability to point out their own inner ugliness and name it.

Elise: it. Yes.

Nora: And envy is, as we both agree, as I think all of us can agree, it's an ugly feeling and it also to reveal it to somebody else to say, I'm actually just so envious. Reveals an ugliness about this, but I'm quoting Anne Lamont. I'm quoting you, quoting Anne Lamont. Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic.

It truly feels so pathetic, but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than do spend a lifetime being silently poisoned. When you talk through it, what does it do to that feeling of envy?

Elise: I think it transforms it, and I think that when we can speak openly about it with each other and actually create a framework for it to come up and for it to be okay, then.

It becomes really useful information because again, if you think about the women in your immediate circle or in the wider world who annoy you for maybe no decipherable reason, maybe. Maybe you can identify it and that's okay. But when you use them and you actually break it apart, you will find out what it is that you want for yourself.

And this woman, Lacy Phillips calls, She has reframed this entire concept into that of expanders, which is beautiful, and you then can take these women and use them as expanders in your life. You don't have to necessarily want everything that they're doing, but maybe there's some part of their life that the dream you have for yourself and the minute that you can actually say it, It becomes closer to reality, and then you can study this woman, you can figure out her path trajectory.

Not that you have to walk the exact same one, but it becomes it. It enters into your realm of what's possible, what's attainable, what feels a bit like your dharma. And instead of repressing that in the shadow, that's essential. It's the logs for the fire. It is. It is. It's a call to you to move into your dream.

Nora: Oh, it does not feel good to the language around. Envy on the other side too,

Should be the object of envy is often positioned.

In marketing, in culture. Be the envy of the neighborhood. Be the envy of all your friends. Nobody actually wants to be envied. No,

Elise: No. Very dangerous.

Nora: yeah, it feels horrible to be envied. 

You open your chapter with envy about this.

We minimize or categorize each other's experience of this is they're just jealous. And jealousy and envy are, you point out different things when people use them interchangeably and so shall we, so

Elise: shall we.

Nora: I can't have a one-on-one workshop with every person who wants to start a podcast, but. If somebody emails me, I say, yep, you can do it. And you don't need anyone's permission. You don't need really anything other than a few pieces of equipment that you could Google and find. And yeah, go do it. Go do it.

Absolutely go do it. Almost as a way to. Avoid that envy. It doesn't feel good to be envied 

Elise: and it's very dangerous. And you mentioned, the thing about the sins is they are a system and they might seem disconnected, lust from envy or sloth from envy, but they all start crashing into each other.

And the thing about envy is it's very closely aligned with pride. And when you become an objective envy, what also can follow is the instinct, the backlash pride. Who does she think she is? I am gonna put her in her place. She's getting a little too big for her britches. How dare she be seen? It's time to school her, to humble her.

And she belongs. I don't want her to die, but she should just be like slightly lower in position than me. And

Nora: The schaudenfreude of it all, which is

Almost like the bow of envy at the end, right?

Elise: bow and something that's culturally celebrated, completely acceptable. And the word is harm plus joy. It's German and it's that sort of little bit of glee that we feel when someone gets what they deserve. And

again, it's not necessarily. We don't want people to die. It's not necessarily dark.

It lives in this, it is dark, but it's not malevolent. It's more oh, Martha Stewart's going to jail, or it's those moments often with public figures we watch and delight. And the problem with that is not that you can't have your sort of like tabloid e fun. It's that. This becomes part of the cultural programming.

And for women it's strong and intense. And so around us, when we see

famous visible women be venerated, celebrated until they reach a certain point of fame and then they tumble outta the ground typically because they've been shot out of the sky and we celebrate, it's, we're just. Enforcing a story about what happens when we dare to be seen, and it affects us all, whether we're, this is a book about how culture acts on us in insidious and invisible ways, and that unfortunately is part of it.

You might not think that you have anything to do with Taylor Swift or. Amy Winehouse, or 

Nora: Kardashian

Elise: Kardashian, or Harris Hilton, Hillary Clinton, whatever it is

the 

Nora: five or six female CEOs of various startups who. Were on magazine covers and unicorns who then had to step down because they

Elise: people said that they were bad often.

A lot of it was like a moral censure in business.

Nora: , I think there's a way to not excuse people's, imperfections. But also back to where we started, say, I think that they have behaved in ways that I don't like, maybe they're not fully a bad Person.

Elise: No, but if you look at women, famous women you want the ones who have endured without. Being destroyed have really dialed in their flight plan where they are not seeking too much relevance, they're not seeking too much attention, they're not disrupting the status quo.

They're coming out. I use Meryl Streep as an example of a woman who is beautiful but not like classically pretty, not threateningly pretty. And she wears, like now she wears like glasses with her gowns. And. She's an incredible actress. Seems very kind, smart. Does a movie, does the press circuit, accepts her in, invariably accepts an Academy award and then goes away.

We don't see her for years. That's how you endure.

Meryl Streep. So Meryl Streep, she invariably collects her Oscar and then she goes away not to reemerge for several years. And that's how you endure by not drawing attention to yourself outside of what's essential for the promotion of a project. That's what we expect, particularly of women and. Yeah, I mean, you can say it's hard to feel sympathy for celebrities and famous and powerful people.

I understand It's more that it's the template that then we all watch and vibe and inherit. It's the programming that's in us that shows up in our lives, in our own offices or within our own communities.

COMMERCIAL BREAK HERE?

Nora: I had a moment I wrote in a journal and I think I put it up somewhere online. Who knows? It was a note to myself that said, rethink every story you've heard about another woman.

Elise: Yeah.

Nora: and I was in an office and I was doing well at a job

Elise: and

Nora: I was in a meeting and a man said to me, make sure you don't end up like. Insert name of woman who had left before, and I said, oh no, why? And he said she really thought she was something

Elise: I just vomited in my mouth.

Nora: here's the thing, she is something.

She's astonishing and respected and knows who she is and brings immense value to that industry. That world and did not ever call more attention to herself or her work than any other man who was doing the same thing. Yeah. And left that company with less than men had left with, um, and much less because she left in that building without any reputation.

And I was looking back. I thought to myself, okay, I won't be like her. Right? That was my first reaction. Okay. I won't be like her. I won't be like her. And three years later, when that same language was being used about me, I thought, oh, okay. Like that's what you have to rethink it, right? Because you will be the next person.

you will be the next person. And I really do try to be more aware. Of myself in those situations and in those conversations, and I am deeply imperfect with it. 

Elise: And you of all people are one of our exemplars in culture of the nuance and complexity of every situation.

The good and the bad and the nuance and complexity within each of us. That is what it is to be human. And I think that what happens with women, men are conditioned and programmed for power. Women are programmed and conditioned for goodness and are disavow of badness. Not only causes so much repression in us and limits us from our full humanity, but then it sort of, Ricochets around culture and, 

it creates this like, High stakes anxiety in us of like, well, how do I just stay good?

 Am I esteemed in everyone's eyes? How do I ensure that everyone thinks well of me? And the only way to ensure that is to do nothing at all. It's to literally not leave your house. Um, it's a great trick of the patriarchy and it's such a terrible legacy because we are all of these things.

Sometimes we are good, sometimes we are bad. We are inherently good. I believe everyone's inherently good and some of us have a lot more shadow than others. But to deny. Someone, their humanity. It's to deny women their humanity to this idea of perfection that she needed to manage her career impeccably with every single person so that no one could ever say anything bad about her.

Nora: When you look back at a lot of those stories from throughout your life, you will see that who you were interacting with or who you were talking about, or the person that whose judgment you were participating in or leading or complicit in, was just a person.

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I grew up Catholic, so the seven deadly sins were a part of my early education.

 It took me being 40 years old in reading your book to learn their made up.

Elise: Yes.

Nora: This is

Elise: the, this is an amazing revelation,

Nora: This isn't a pull quote from God. 

Elise: When I was starting there and then I was looking at his etymology and I was like, what is it? And of course as I'm googling around, I'm like, oh yeah, it's one of those seven sins. And I look at them, that's when my.

Just really, I really had a sinking feeling because as I read them, sloth pride and the greed, gluttony, lust, anger, or wrath, and I, um, was like, holy shit, this is a punch card. This is a punch card for women that we police ourselves about all of these. And so naturally I was like, well, where are they in the Bible? I'm not as familiar with the Bible. They're not in the Bible. They're not actually in the Bible. They first emerged out of the fourth out of the Egyptian desert in the fourth century by the hand of a monk named Vagus Pagus, who had become a monk because he was having an affair with a married woman. And this was within decades of when the new Can, the New Testament was canonized.

So we're talking three sixty, three hundred and sixty years after Jesus supposedly lived and died. And IVAs was also credited with sort of being one of the early fathers of the Enneagram, which is fascinating. And he, um,

Nora: made

Elise: of this chap book for other monks. They were called eight Demonic Thoughts.

Nora: He made a zine,

Elise: he made a zine, and he picked pieces of scripture. And the idea of demonn, not me, meaning what it means today, but being distracting thoughts that pull you out of prayer. And there was an eighth sadness. 

But this group of eight thoughts made their way through the desert. And it wasn't until five 90 that Pope Gregory the first turned them into the cardinal vices in a homily. And he, in that same moment, assigned them all to Mary Magdalene. Who is described in the New Testament as being the one from whom?

D. Um, Jesus cast seven demons, which would also make her the most sanctified person in the Bible, I'm just saying. But he turned her into the woman who anointed Jesus' hair. Not the same woman. And then he also turned that woman into a prostitute. So Mary Magdalene became the one from whom, who carried the seven demons and was a penitent prostitute.

That's where she earned that reputation.

Nora: Fanfic,

Elise: and then Thomas Aquinas. In Summa Thealogica, like they sort of became mainstreamed. Then we're given to Mary Magdalene. She became a whore until couple, couple decades ago. 

But for people who have read the Bible, they will recognize that Mary Magdalene is the one who saw him when he resurrected again, going into depends on your belief system.

And then she came and told the other apostles, and so theoretically she was the first. That's the story of the seven deadly sins assigned to women. Erroneously

Nora: and

Elise: still our legacy today. But we can write a better story.

COMMERCIAL BREAK SUGGESTION HERE

Nora: It's all this noticing of it, which is also like write the work that you do in, I think every kind of therapy, right?

Yeah. Like first notice it, Then name it. And then tame it. Do something to it. 

Elise: I think that the sins, they're contagious. They've just, they're in our bodies, they're in our minds. They are whispered into our ears. And all of those instincts then have become repressed in us. They've become shadow that we refuse to let up and integrate and address in a way that men are completely.

Liberated to do so and do so liberally. And so it's funny, it's not that, it's like these are all great, let's all go be greedy and lustful. It's not the point. It's just, this is our heritage. This is who we are, this is half of what we are. And to deny these

Nora: these

Elise: very essential human instincts means that we are denying ourselves.

Nora: And do you categorize them as, you know, bad, as bad, when? Really, they are just a part of us. I try to do this with my kids too. Kindergarten especially is a very binary time of life, right?

Like so and so is not my friend and he is bad and he did a bad thing. And I say to my kindergartner or to my fourth grader, or, and this is even more difficult to the girl who is a junior in high school, right? Well,

Elise: don't

Nora: all, don't we all sometimes, you know, kick a friend down the slide? Doesn't that, doesn't that happen?

Aren't we all, aren't we all sometimes like that? 

Elise: You brought up the playground and you brought up sort of aggression and I think it's worth also saying that the conditioning around aggression, which is.

Normal and essential in all of us. The way that girls and boys are programmed around it is very different that your daughter would need to, um, express her distress to you or to her friends. 

With boys aggression is perceived as completely natural and normal because it is, and they are not necessarily encouraged to, but allowed to express their aggression directly, pushing, fighting, yelling. Girls on the other hand, Are held to a different standard, but have the same amount of natural aggression and it's instead of overt aggression, girls are taught covert aggression and conflict avoidance and covert aggression is,

Nora: um, gossip

Elise: alliance building, backstabbing,

Nora: exclusion.

Elise: I wanna be very careful here as I am throughout the book, that it is our tendency to equate nature and culture because we will never be able to fully, we don't know what a natural person outside of cultural norms.

Nora: looks.

Elise: and

Nora: What would you do if

Elise: So we have this idea, and, and this is so pernicious. Like girls are girls, they're just naturally more loving, caring, mature, nurturing. Boys are boys, they're just more violent, aggressive, you know, women, um, stay in caves and, uh, take care of babies and men hunt and again and again, as our science becomes more evolved.

The story becomes infinitely more complex. Even this idea that like women are small and men are large, is thought of as a natural fact and a genetic destiny.

Going back to this idea of aggression and that girls are not inclined towards aggression, it's just wrong. Yeah. It's just not true. Yeah. And we need to teach all of our kids how to experience their aggression and healthy functioning direct ways. We need to teach them how to have conflict. Healthy conflict.

 I think as girls, when the group turns on you and you're excluded, it's a physical pain. It feels life threatening because we're built also to sort of be part of a band, be in a collective or in a communion. To be cast out is death. And, but with girls, you're not. Ever taught that your anger is appropriate? We don't like angry women.

This is a story as old as stories, and it puts women in a terrible double mind, double bind. Where to express anger means that you will cause you will lose your relationships. To establish needs, to establish boundaries to say, don't tread on me, or This is not okay with me, or This hurts me, or this bothers me, is to open a door to change in a relationship, a friendship or a romantic partnership where someone can say, um, well, that's, that need doesn't work with my schedule, so bye.

Nora: And professionally though, can you afford to be labeled difficult?

Elise: Mm, no.

You can't be afford to be labeled difficult, demanding, or uncaring. As much as I think we hear patriarchy and we wanna out at men, and I'm not letting men off the hook by any means.

They have a sweet ride in this situation. But in the social study, women are often just as hard on other women, if not harder. Our expectations of how women should code their behavior towards likability. Softness and care is deeply entrenched. So when you encounter a woman who quote unquote, behaves more like a man, um, and I will, I'll make a distinction that I'm not talking like behaving like a toxically masculine man, but just more direct, assertive. We don't like those women. 

Nora: We are allowed to be sad, right?

We're allowed to be sad.

Elise: men are not. And that's why I think we have toxic masculinity. I

Nora: Women are allowed to be sad. I can be a sad person, but also like, oh God, it's all connected, you know? Um, I can be sad about something, but also how sad are you allowed to be?

It can also be like a huge judgment point. Who's this person crying at the funeral and why?

Elise: Well, and in the eight thoughts, interestingly, sadness, the way that a Vaus Pontic is described, sadness is, is having a female soul. And he primarily talks about it in the context of home sickness and then it gets dropped. 

Think women are allowed to be sad and men are not.

I believe when we cut men off from their feelings, they become wounded boys who then become wounding men. And I think the primary symptom of this is toxic masculinity and a culture that is off. Off the rails in ways that I think terrify most of us. 

And I think women, because we cycle with the moon, we create life. I'm not saying that we don't have fear of death and endings, but I think that we are intimately more connected to life and the recognition that it ends.

I think we're far more identified with our planet, who we've anthropomorphized as female for good reason, and men. I think believe that life is to the right and up to the right and up. Growth, growth, growth. We can outrun this, we can use longevity meds. We can biohack our way out of death, and that's another driver in our cultural myth.

Nora: And we both have boys. I have three. You have two. I can tell you boys have just as many feelings. they feel and feel them so deeply and watching even. As they get a little bit older, them identifying sadness, embarrassment, it immediately turning too shame. In their mouths is really alarming to me.

And something that I've said to all of them and will say to the point where they're like, mom, we know, we know. I say everyone has this many feelings. Everyone, you know. Has this many feelings. Everyone feels this way. You are allowing yourself to feel this way. You are allowing yourself to express it.

Everyone feels that sad sometimes. Yes. Everyone feels that upset sometimes. Like, no, not everybody cries at school in public. They all want to. 

Elise: For men, I think feelings of despair and sadness, we really struggle to identify them because we're missing, the trails are closed. And so the more we can actually identify what we're feeling and let it come up so we can process it the safer and more secure our future will be.

OUTRO

Nora: Being good. It turns out is about more than just adhering to ancient and outdated rules written by a monk in the fourth century. Again, they weren't even in the Bible, this is biblical fan fiction. Goodness. Goodness comes from confronting these very normal feelings of greed and envy and wrath and pride and recognizing them for what they are. 

Normal parts of us, not sins. Not trespasses, not a restrictive framework, meant to keep us from being. Human. 

 I'm Nora McInerney. And this has been the terrible reading club. 

Every episode, we will bring you a conversation with an author who we feel brought us a great book about something terrible or a great book for terrible times. 

We're here to read. We're here to discuss we're here because we love books. 

Terrible reading club is a production of feelings in co you can find all of the books that we have ever read on this podcast and the books that we are reading next on our website, feelings and.co. We will also link to them in our show description. 

To get emails and have conversations about the books that we are reading, you can also click a link to our sub stack, which is also in you guessed it, the show description. Our team here at the terrible reading club is myself. Nora McInerney, Karen as vague. Claire McInerney and Megan Palmer.