In this special encore episode, we revisit a doozy of a conversation between Jen and Elise Loehnen, author of On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. In this episode, Elise discusses how deeply ingrained patriarchal narratives create a policing effect on women’s behavior, historically using concepts like the seven deadly sins to restrict women and enforce an idealized “goodness.” She unpacks the insidious ways women are conditioned from a young age to suppress normal human drives like anger, ambition, and sexuality.
This conversation, which absolutely blew our minds, explores how patriarchy not only shapes our systems but also gets inside us, training women for “goodness” while men are trained for power. We talk about everything from motherhood to anger to unlearning patterns that have kept us small, and imagining a freer, truer way of being for ourselves and future generations.
Whether you caught it the first time or you’re hearing it fresh, this is one of the most insightful and hopeful conversations we’ve had on the show.
In this episode of the Matriarchy series, we explore how deeply ingrained patriarchal narratives can create a policing effect on the behavior of women.
Author, Elise Loehnen, discusses her book “On Our Best Behavior” which examines how concepts like the seven deadly sins have historically been used to restrict women’s behavior and police their adherence to an idealized form of “goodness.” Loehnen unpacks the insidious ways women are culturally conditioned from a young age to suppress normal human drives like anger, ambition, and sexuality. And how disrupting rigid gender stereotypes is important when raising the next generation in order to build a more compassionate world.
Jen and Elise discuss:
How women are culturally conditioned and expected to embody “goodness” while men are oriented toward power
How concepts like the “seven deadly sins” have historically been used as a patriarchal “punch card” to police women’s behavior
Why raising boys to have an emotional inner life nurtures positive identity development
The current era of politics that calls for women to challenge the patriarchal system while also having compassionate dialogue to build a new, care-centered world where everyone can flourish
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